How to Eradicate Fear and PTSD Fast with Fred Gallo

A Personal Note from Orion

Have you ever wished that you could press a button and *poof* all your problems would disappear? Well, in today’s episode, you’re going to learn the closest way to do just that. Whether it’s overcoming your fear of heights like my husband did, or letting go of past traumas that are causing your depression, there is a unique method that literally deletes your trauma and fears and allows you to move forward at peace with your life.

Fred Gallo is “the man”, as Tony Robbins called him, for Energy Tapping. He’s a famous psychotherapist who’d published eight books and is known for his tapping method This method literally involves pressing or tapping on different areas of your body, in alignment with acupuncture zones, to eliminate emotional blocks. You’ve got to tune in to start living in peace.

In this Episode

[03:50] – Fred talks about who he is and describes his background. He also introduces the concept of tapping.
[06:01] – We hear a specific example of how tapping helped one of Fred’s clients.
[09:13] – Was Fred surprised by how quickly and powerfully tapping worked for this client? He answers, then discusses another, even more powerful instance in which tapping helped the same client.
[12:58] – Fred had worked with this client for many months using different techniques before she achieved the breakthroughs that she achieved through tapping, he explains.
[14:57] – Orion points out that Fred started working with a relatively small issue with this client, which built the trust necessary to face the bigger, deeper issue.
[16:33] – We hear that Fred has helped Orion’s husband, Stephan, with two deep fears he held: heights and water. Fred goes into depth about how completely Stephan overcame these fears with the help of tapping.
[19:10] – Did Fred do another tapping treatment on Stephan before the next canoe ride, or were the effects from the previous session still effective?
[21:51] – What are Fred’s spiritual beliefs, and how are they involved in the ways he treats people? As he answers, he shares some incredible things that have happened throughout his life journey, including how he ended up treating Tony Robbins.
[27:17] – Fred explains why Tony Robbins thought that he was “the man” before they had met for the first time.
[29:03] – Does tapping work (and offer benefits) for everybody? It’s very effective for most people, Fred answers, but a few don’t like it.
[31:00] – Fred gives an example of a case in which tapping was a permanent cure for a young woman’s emotional trauma.
[38:25] – Orion points out that Fred’s tapping is unique because of his background in other therapies. Fred then explains that while people can do tapping on themselves to some extent, they likely won’t need to.
[41:29] – Does Fred feel that some people are attached to their memories and are afraid to let go, perhaps because they are attached to their victim mentality? In his answer, he digs into a case in which a man who was sabotaging his life didn’t believe that he would ever be happy.
[48:26] – Visualization isn’t necessary, Fred explains, but explains how it can be helpful. He also offers a strategy for getting around it for people who struggle with visualizing things.
[50:55] – Fred talks about his strategies for treating ADHD.
[54:45] – Where can people find Fred and learn more about what he does?

About Today’s Show

‏‏Have you noticed that people will say I’m stressed, I’m overwhelmed, but not too many people are willing to admit that maybe they have post traumatic stress or some trauma from the past because it’s not cool? It sounds okay to say oh my god, I’m so busy, I’m so overwhelmed, it’s too hard, it’s too difficult. Really confronting or admitting to other people that you’ve been through hell and back is not always easy. The truth is that everyone has some kind of trauma to a certain degree. If your dog died when you were five, if teacher looked at you weird and said something that influenced you for the rest of your life, if your parents didn’t do the right thing at the right time, or even if they did and you perceived it wrong. We all have traumas, stuff from our past. Sometimes, it’s even stuff that happened just last week or last month or maybe in your childhood that is holding us back. That’s why I have Fred Gallo who’s a complete expert with human psychology. He studied so many therapy modalities. He studied cognitive behavioral therapy, Ericksonian Hypnosis, psychotherapy, NLP, EMDR, TFT, the list goes on and on and on. Honestly, I had to shorten his bio and it was very hard because there are so many awards and achievements and things that he has done in his field. To mention a few, he developed energy consciousness therapy and identity method which involves focus mindfulness and he published eight books. He also worked with amazing people, helping them with their struggles, their issues, people like Tony Robbins and many other masters. In this episode, we’re going to focus on a system that is called tapping. It really helps to rewire your brain. Sometimes, it helps people break through and release the trauma faster than any other modality. I have talked to Fred about it, we shared some things about how he healed my husband from fear of heights and fear of water in a very exotic destination. Other ways and other modalities that really help heal past pains so you can move on with your life without carrying old baggage. Now, onto the show. Hey Fred and welcome to Stellar Life Podcast. It’s so nice to have you here.

‏‏Good to see you, good to talk to you also, Orion.

‏‏That’s wonderful. Before we start, why don’t you just share a bit about yourself, what you do, and we’re going to talk about different modalities for healing trauma today. You started as a clinical psychologist, right?

‏‏That’s right, yeah. I see people for a variety of issues that they have. I’ve approached therapy from different approaches over the years. A number of years ago, I got very interested in hypnosis long ago actually when I was about 15. I started playing around with that back then. In school, I studied Gestalt therapy, client centered therapy, cognitive therapy, all those kinds of things and practiced that. But then I got interested in the approach of Dr. [00:04:23] who’s a hypnotherapist psychiatrist. I found his approach very intriguing. And then there were a couple of guys who capitalized on some of what he was doing and some other people, it was called Neurolinguistic Programming, Richard Bandler and John Grinder. I studied with them also and some of their colleagues. But then working with that and other things I would find interesting along the way. At one point, I discovered what we would call tapping. I’m not talking about tap dancing, although that’s really nice too, that could be a very good approach. Basically, what it involves is having a person tune in an issue, whatever it is, an emotionally charged issue. It could be a trauma, a phobia, feelings of depression, anxiety, guilt, irrational guilt, shame, whatever it is. Tap on specific locations on their body that correlate with the acupuncture meridian system, their acupoints that I had them tap on. What it does is it dissipates, or you could say transmute the disruptive emotion that they’re experiencing at the time. These so called negative emotions have a very incoherence to them. By doing this tapping, it smooths things out. The person goes into a relaxed state, maybe a bit of an altered state, but they’re not really in hypnosis. I can give you an example of something like that if you’d like.

‏‏Sure.

‏‏One of the first times I ever did this. First of all, I did treat myself when I found out about this approach and I’ll give you some of the background on that. I had treated myself for different traumas that I had. I found it was working. A lot of times, I thought maybe I was just fooling myself. When the issue didn’t bother me anymore after a while, it was pretty hard to just say I fooled myself, or maybe I did a damn good job of fooling myself, I don’t know how you see it. There was this woman and I say her name as Barbara, just to protect her identity. Barbara had come to see me before I knew about tapping. She had been raped when she was 13 years of age. When she came to see me, she was at her maybe early 30s, maybe 32, something like that. I tried to help her through traditional ways of treating trauma which was basically talk about it, try to help them think about it differently, that sort of thing. None of that worked for her. Any time we brought up the issue, she just became extremely distressed. I felt that that issue had to be dealt with because it seemed to be the launch pin that led to a lot of other problems in her life which included addiction, she returned to drugs to feel better, she was depressed, she would become suicidal. None of the traditional stuff I was doing was helping so I stopped doing that. I felt that every time we tried to do something, all I was doing was hurting her. I backed off from that and I found ways to help her cope. We had a good relationship. I think a lot of having a good relationship with the clients is a very important part anyway. She was doing better but still there was that trauma that I felt should be resolved. We had a break in therapy. It seemed like maybe it was a couple months or so. During that time, I find out about this tapping which was developed by Dr. Roger Callahan, the psychologist from California. She comes in and I felt like it was one of these synchronicity issues, God sent her back to me, now you can help her. She came in and she was very distressed about something about her mother. I told her, I said, “Barbara, since I haven’t seen you for a while, I’ve been playing around with something that I find to be very effective. I wonder if you’d like to try it.” She was always game for anything that I came up with. I had her tapping. What I mean by that is I’d have her tap under her eyes, under her arms, under her collar bones, different locations like that. Within a matter of a couple minutes of that, what she was upset about didn’t bother her anymore. She said something like, “I don’t know why I let that bother me. I know that’s just the way my mother is, she means well.” It was a big shift automatically, something that you might come to after a few days but it happened right on the spot.

A lot of having a good relationship with the clients is a very important part anyway. Share on X

‏‏Were you surprised?

‏‏Yeah. It always surprised me how quickly it worked, it was just enthralling. But here was the big one. Then I said to her, “Remember when you came to see me before and we talked about something that happened when you were 13?” As soon as I said that, she got very upset, she’s crying, she’s shaking. I settle her down because that was the trigger to reminding her of what had happened. Then I asked her if we could try the tapping for that and she agreed. I had her think about it again and I took her through this tapping routine. The routine I used was something like I had her tap the beginning of her eyebrow above the bridge of her nose, under her eye on the bony orbit, under her arm about six inches under her armpit, under her collarbones, and then I would just keep repeating that. It took about 8 to 10 minutes and she was totally calm. I looked at her and she reached over and grabbed a Kleenex and dried her eyes. She’s just looking like she was very serene, and I thought at first maybe she was a bit disassociated. I said are you okay? She goes oh yeah, I’m fine. She was obviously not disassociating when she talked, she was very much present. I said, “I mean about what happened to you?” She said, “Oh yeah, that was a long time ago.”

‏‏No way.

‏‏Yeah, just like that. I said, “Wait a second…” I thought I really want to touch this. I said, “I mean the fact that you were raped.” She goes, “Yeah, that doesn’t bother me now. That was a long time ago.”

‏‏Wow.

‏‏As if she was unaware of what she had just talked about recently. Then, I thought I would really push the envelope some. This hurt me to say this, this was hard to do. I just thought can this be real? One of the things she said when she would bring up this issue about the trauma is she would blame herself, which is not unusual. People often have a trauma, “Oh, I should have done this, it was my fault…” I said, and I said it in an accusing tone because I’m really looking for is this real? I said, “Don’t you think you were to blame?” Didn’t shake her a bit. She goes, “No, I wasn’t to blame. I guess if anything, you could say he was the blame. It’s in the past.” Anyway, she comes back to see me the following week. I can’t wait to see her because I’m thinking does this last, quick change but is it going to last? She comes in and she’s in this chipper mood, feeling fine, and I’m wondering how you’re feeling about the rape that happened when you were 13? She goes, and it’s really interesting, “The times, the memory comes to my mind, but it just doesn’t bother me anymore.”

‏‏Wow.

‏‏She said, “First, I thought when we did this last week that maybe I didn’t know if it was for real, it was hard to believe. Maybe I just felt better for the moment. But now I know it doesn’t bother me at all.” It even got better. As a result of resolving that, I was able to do other things with here. These depression states that she would go into if she was feeling depressed, I would have her tap on it. Next thing you know within a reasonable period of time, sometimes within a few minutes, sometimes within the quartz of a session, she would feel a lot better. Not feeling depressed at all.

‏‏How many sessions did you work with her before that?

‏‏I have worked with her for months, many months before. I was helping her cope, kind of like I was doing a certain amount of coaching with her. I got her involved in the 12 Step Program and stuff like that, which I think was all good, but nothing as miraculous as this one.

‏‏Right.

‏‏I’ve had one after another. For the longest time, I used to think this can’t be for real. Come on, how can this possibly be? Somebody’s had a trauma, the typical thing in the field is to believe that that can’t really be healed, not totally. It’s like you can maybe help a person cope or whatever, but it creates this change in your neurology. I’ve come to, now, just if somebody comes in with a trauma, I know I’m going to help them right then. I have no doubts anymore, but I used to feel like—I would almost laugh inside. I’d do this and I’d feel better and I’d think ah, I tricked him again. Wow, I was thinking I was just fooling him but I was thinking that’s fine if I fool him, but it isn’t that. People really do change. You can do this with so many issues. It isn’t that other aspects of therapy aren’t useful, you still got to talk to people, you still have to have a relationship with them. I find I used to go a little too fast sometimes, somebody would come in…

It isn’t that other aspects of therapy aren’t useful, you still got to talk to people, you still have to have a relationship with them.

‏‏Let’s tap!

‏‏I want to jump on it right away, before I’ve really taken the time to really get to know them, or for us to develop some level of rapport. That’s not a good thing to do.

‏‏It’s also essential because also what you did with her, you started her on something that was relatively small, her issue with her mom. You gained rapport and she, on her side, had the faith in that system. Then, you went on to the very deep issue.

‏‏That’s a good analysis. I think that’s a good protocol. You can say start off with something small, give a person an experience at that level first, and then go to something bigger. I think that’s a useful thing to do, although I can tell you that isn’t always necessary.

‏‏Especially not when you had a session with my husband, maybe you can share a bit about that.

‏‏I got to know him briefly, but there were a lot of people there. We were just standing outside of Victoria Falls.

‏‏You were at the Tony Robbins event, Platinum Partners event, and they had to go and canoe the Zambezi river or something like that?

‏‏Yeah, there was that, canoeing the river, flying over Victoria Falls. We went down to South Africa off the cape there. We went out and did shark diving.

‏‏That’s crazy.

‏‏Your husband shark dived. I was really wondering how. We were standing outside of Victoria Falls and I take him through using muscle testing, which is one of the techniques I use to determine…

‏‏Before we start, I just want to give people the context to why it’s so surprising. Stephan has a big fear of heights and of water. You helped him with both.

‏‏Yeah. What I did was standing out there, I did this thing called muscle testing which really some people prefer to call it muscle checking or energy checking. Essentially, all that is is I had him extend his arm out parallel to the ground off the side and I pressed on the muscle. It’s strong. I had him think about going up there and flying around Victoria Falls in one of those little helicopters. His muscle went really weak. Then, I checked, I have a way of checking to see where should we tap. By doing that, I’m doing tapping, I remember those several people around watching what the heck is going on here. Until he’s not feeling distressed about it and his muscle’s testing very strong now, that’s what happened. Next thing I know, he’s flying around Victoria Falls not in a regular helicopter but one of these silly little things that’s almost like a…

‏‏A microlight.

‏‏Yeah, lawn chair kind of thing. He’s doing that. I’m like oh my god, I can’t believe it, I wouldn’t even want to do that.

‏‏I wouldn’t even tap myself and do it.

‏‏He’s flying around on that. Then, when we went down to Cape Town, we went on this boat, very fast boat going over the water and the waves. I went down shark diving and I put on this wet suit that didn’t keep you so dry, by the way. We got in this cage, it’s really cold water. Watching these big, white sharks circling around. Very cool. Anyway, I’m wondering, is Stephan going to do this? He has a fear of water, we had treated that. I see him and he has his wet suit on. I bet you he’s going to chicken out. But he doesn’t. He goes down the thing too, it’s like wow, okay. I didn’t think we would take care of so many things in a half an hour session that we had done.

‏‏And there was another canoe ride in the Zambezi river.

‏‏Oh yeah.

‏‏Did you do something with him before that?

‏‏No, I don’t think we did any tapping. We had just done one treatment outside of Victoria Falls where we had done this half an hour or so treatment. It carried over into all those things. In fact, I remember it was a few days after that, I think while we were still in Zambia. It had to be before we went down to Cape Town. We’re walking along, there’s this amazing resort, there’s zebras walking around, monkeys running around.

‏‏So jealous.

‏‏It was beautiful, you got to have him take you there sometime. Anyway, walking along and he says, “Fred, I wasn’t afraid of heights, I’m not afraid of heights, I don’t think I’m afraid of water. I don’t think I’m afraid of death anymore.” He said, “I guess I’m going to have to change my belief about myself.” I said, “Well, that sounds like a pretty good belief.” He was just shaking his head. This was crazy.

‏‏That’s amazing.

‏‏We really went to the belief level. It was very cool. It was using a combination of tapping, or connection, and doing muscle testing.

‏‏Wow.

‏‏That’s what’s involved in this treatment.

‏‏That’s amazing. The crossing the Zambezi river is very dangerous, it’s infested with crocodiles and hippos and people died.

‏‏Oh, yeah.

‏‏Yeah, I think that was insanity to do but it’s a good story to tell.

‏‏There was another thing. It was on a canoe in the river too. There was this other participant there. I’m recalling what his name was. He had some issue about alcohol dependence. We’re rowing along there and we’re having this therapy session where I’m taking him through tapping and talking about things. At one point, he says, “Look at this, this is amazing. Here we are, this is a beautiful place, and we’re having a therapy session. What a place to have a therapy session!”

‏‏Yeah, right.

‏‏I mean really, why sit in an office?

‏‏Yeah, it’s a whole paradigm shift. Let’s go to nature and use her energy as well to help us.

‏‏Sure, sure. Absolutely.

‏‏What is your spiritual beliefs and how did they involve in the way you treat people?

‏‏My spiritual beliefs?

‏‏Yeah, do you believe in a higher force, do you believe that something is guiding you when you treat someone?

‏‏I believe in God, what I call God. I believe God is personal. I have a lot of experience with that in my life. There’s this synchronicity that happens, I don’t know. Example, when I stumbled on this approach to treatment, there was a point at which where I was doing this and I thought okay, I thought I would write a book before but now I’m ready to write a book. I think I should write a book about this. It wasn’t very long after I thought that that a publisher reached out to me. I never went and looked for the publisher. They called me and said, “Would you like to write a book?” Then, I write this book and the day we set stuff, these are the days when you actually—you could do it on the internet now—paper stuff. We sent it to the publisher, which was CRC Press. The very day that was sent, I got a call from W. W. Norton asking me if I would like to write a book. Then, I met with those people and I wrote my second book. Then, somebody that I had trained reached out to me and said would you like to write a book, could we write a book together? It was for the general public, the book was called Energy Tapping. My first book was called Energy Psychology. I coined that term and eventually, an agency, a non-profit organization developed called ACEP, Association For Comprehensive Energy Psychology. They had used the term that I came up with. Other things happened. I take the thing with Tony Robbins, I remember one day I come back from Germany. What happened there is that was a whole synchronicity thing, which I think this is spiritual, there’s this movement, spiritual energy that connects with things. I was at my home and a publisher from Germany had been at Stanford University going through the bookstore and he finds my book Energy Psychology. He went back to his room, read the book, called my office, wanted to know about translating the book into German. He and I talked, I said oh by the way, I have two other books. He says, “I’d like to translate them all.” He translates them. Next, a psychiatrist psychotherapist by the name of [00:24:21] gets a copy of the book. He calls me and says, “I’ve been using some of the stuff you talk about in here and it works. I don’t know what I’m doing.” How much can you tell from a book? You can tell a certain amount. He said, “I want you to come here and start training.” I started doing that. One day, I come back from Germany, my wife had the television on. Tony Robbins is on there selling some product or something. She says, “What do you think of him?” Or I said to her, “What do you think of him?” She said, “He’s a good salesman.” I said, “I used to think that he was really an opportunist and stuff, but I think there’s something spiritual about him too. There’s something about him. I used to think differently. I think it would be nice to connect with him.” I just said that.

‏‏Wow.

‏‏Within a couple of weeks, I got a call and this woman on the phone, she says, “Dr. Gallo, you don’t know me. My name is [00:25:29], I work for Tony Robbins, do you know who that is?” I said, “Oh yeah, I know who he is.” She says, “Tony would like you to come to Fiji and present your approach to treatment, Energy Psychology.” I said, “Why is he reaching out to me? There’s a lot of people that do that.” She goes, “He says you’re the man.” I said, “Well, I’m one… but I’m not the only one. There’s other people.” She goes, “No, no, no, he says you’re the man. You’re the one who knows.” I said, “That’s a very nice compliment. I don’t think of myself that way.” To make a long story short, they wanted me to fly to Fiji, they set this whole thing up, I flew to Fiji and I presented there, I met Tony for the first time, met his wife Sage, and we had a nice time there. He asked me also to treat him. They invited me over to their house, he even announced it to everybody later. He said something like, “It’s been a long time since I’ve had anybody do any therapy on me, but I have utmost confidence with Fred Gallo. I just had him do some therapy with me.” I thought wow, he put that out there to them. It was very, very nice. It was a nice experience. And then he invited me to Las Vegas. I went there and I presented with him at one of those events there. We did something on the radio, it was a broadcast thing of some sort. They came to my office and set it up, did an interview there. Then he asked me to go to Africa. We’ve connected at times over the years.

‏‏Why did he think that you’re the man before he even met you?

‏‏Here’s what he told me. He said he and his wife were going through a lot of stress and they were in a book store. They’re face to face and he looks at her and he says, “The answer to our problem is…” and he reaches past her and grabs a book off the shelf, pulls it out, and says, “This book.” It was a book I wrote. Then, what they did is they went back and they used some of the stuff from the book. At one point, they did invite some other people to come to present on tapping, this is before I came. As a matter of fact, Jana called me and she said something, “Do you know who they are?” I said yeah, I trained them. Because I was going around all over the United States and Canada training people in how to do this sort of thing. A lot of the people in the field that are noted in the field came to me at one point.

‏‏Because you’re the man.

‏‏Because I’m the man.

‏‏Let’s talk a little bit about tapping. I wanted to know, does it work with everybody? Can everybody benefit from it?

‏‏I treat a lot of people. Most people seem to benefit from it at some level. Some people don’t like it, very few don’t like it. I pursue other ways of treating. But it seems to be very good for a variety of problems, emotionally charged issues. But you can’t just simply—you got to know some things. There’s certain ways of doing adjustments and so on to make sure that whenever it doesn’t seem to be working, what you can do to adjust it, to help it work. It seems to be a pretty powerful approach across the board. There’s some very severe conditions that I don’t think it can help very much like people that have what are called psychotic disorders, doesn’t cure psychosis or anything like that. But actually, it treats and in some conditions it actually helps to cure the problem, traumas, post traumatic stress disorder, seems to cure them.

There’s certain ways of doing adjustments and so on to make sure that whenever it doesn’t seem to be working, what you can do to adjust it, to help it work. Share on X

‏‏Wow, does it cure it for good?

‏‏Yes, for good.

‏‏Oh, wow.

‏‏With certain conditions. Let’s say somebody said a traumatic event happened to them, or a series of traumatic events, and I had them tune into it briefly doing tapping and going back and forth on that. It isn’t like one time you tap and everything is better, you often have layers that you have to treat different aspects of a problem. But usually within one to a few sessions, you have it cured and it never comes back to bother the person again. I have a lot of cases where it just blows my mind within a matter of a few minutes of tapping, the issue never bothers the person again, never.

‏‏Like what for example?

‏‏I’ll give an example. One, I was treating a lady who was driving in her car and these people came across the median strip. They were apparently intoxicated. There was the driver and two other people and they had a head on collision with her.

‏‏Wow, that’s scary.

‏‏All the people in the other car were killed. She was pinned under the dashboard, her car was just crushed. She was alive and it took them about three, three and a half hours to get her out of the car because they have to use something they called the jaws of life, I don’t know if they still call it that. It pulls the car apart and they got her out. She had to go to the hospital because she had some injuries and so on. After that, she continued to have the effects of trauma. She would have flashbacks, nightmares, and so on. She was brought in to see me by her mother that had heard something about tapping. The woman, she was like 19 years old at the time she came to see me. The accident happened when she was 18, she was a college student at that time. When I do therapy to find out what’s going on, it isn’t like you come in and say okay let’s start tapping. It was toward the end of the session and I got the information that I needed about what was going on. Then, I said to her there’s this little method I use that might be helpful to you. I don’t think it will really do the trick right now but it will at least give you an idea of what we can do, one of the things we can do. I asked her, I said of all those things that happened, talking about a series of scenes and that trauma, which one would you like to treat that still bothers you a lot? She said when I was pinned under the dashboard. I said okay, when you think about that, how much does that bother you on a scale of 0 to 10, if 10 being the worst and 0 being nothing. She thought it was about a 9, as I’m recalling, this is several years ago. I said how about you just do this, I just did it in a little different way. I said take that memory and just put it in a container somewhere in your mind, it could be anything, any kind of container, it could be a Tupperware container, whatever, just put it in there. I don’t want you to think about it right now, I’d like you to just do this tapping. I took her through a tapping routine that I call the midline technique. There’s many different routines that have been used. I just find this one a general one that’s very often very effective. I took her through it, I just had her tap. We’re talking about it taking maybe somewhere between 15 to 30 seconds to do this. I said I don’t want you to go into the memory right now, but if you were to go into the memory, how much do you think it would bother you? She said, “I think it would be the same.” I said, “That’s fair. Let’s do that again.” We do it again, and then I asked her again, I said, “Don’t go into the memory, I don’t want you to really wallow in it or anything. But if you were to think of it, how much do you think it would bother you?” She said, “I think it would be less.” I said, “Like what?” I don’t remember the number but it probably came down a few points. Then, I did more of that. Probably, all together, the treatment was about three minutes worth of treatment. I tell her after, I said, “Okay if you were to think about it, how much do you think it would bother you? She says, “I don’t think it would bother me at all.”

‏‏Wow.

‏‏I said, “Why do you say that?” She hasn’t really gone in. She says, “I don’t know, I just feel really relaxed. I feel very relaxed right now.” I said, “Okay, go ahead and think about it.” She brings up the mind and she busts up laughing. I said, “Why are you laughing?” She goes, “How does it work?” I said, “Well, wait a second, I’m not sure it’s worked yet. You only thought about it for a couple of seconds. Look, I’d like you to think about it more. Really go in there, really, really think about it.” She does that. After about ten seconds this time, she laughs again, she looks at me and she says, “How does it work?”

‏‏That’s amazing.

‏‏I said, “I got to tell you, I’m still not sure it’s worked yet. I want you to really, really go into it. Here’s what I’m going to do…” I had a little timer and I set the timer for a minute. I said, “I’d like you to really, really, really think about it. I’m going to even coach you in some things to see if you can really be distressed about it.” I set the timer and she’s thinking and I’m sitting there, “Really imagine you’re pinned under the dashboard, maybe you feel cramped there, you feel some pain because you’re stuck there, maybe you smelled the smell of being close to the floor there, I don’t know, maybe there’s some dust, maybe there’s some blood coming out of your mouth, I don’t know.”

‏‏Oh my god Fred, I’m not even… I’m just listening to you, I’m already getting a little bit anxious.

‏‏I’m doing all this with her. Then, the alarm goes off and I said okay, and she laughs again. She goes, “How does it work?”

‏‏No way.

‏‏I said, “Well, we’re out of time. I’d be happy to tell you how I think it works but I’m really not absolutely convinced that it’s totally worked yet. How about you let me see you next week and we’ll see how it’s going, okay?” We set up an appointment for the following week and she comes in the following week. She’s just very polite. I said, “Can you think about that event again?” She says, “It just doesn’t bother me anymore. I’ve tried to think of it many, many times and I can see what happened, I can relate to it, but it…”

‏‏Almost like a movie.

‏‏Yeah, and it’s all far away.

‏‏Disconnected from it.

‏‏Yeah. Then, what we did is there were other things to consider. She felt guilt about the fact that the people in the other car died, even though it wasn’t her. She hadn’t done anything wrong, she was just driving along and they came across and hit… “Maybe I could’ve avoided it.” It’s very typical that people that have had a trauma, they may 20/20 hindsight wonder if I had done this, or that, if I had left a little later, a little earlier, maybe I could’ve gone off the road,” or something. They imagine that. They can feel guilty. We treated that very quickly, just about as fast. She was able to say after that, “I don’t really feel it was my fault. It’s just a sad thing that that happened.” Other things that—altogether, I think I had 10 sessions with her because it was about things like getting her life back together and all that sort of thing. But each time, I would treat her with some tapping. The cool thing is within that 3 minute little period of that first event, that thing never bothered her again. I could give you one after another after another, all kinds of cases like this that have worked that way, and others that maybe took a few sessions to get there.

‏‏Right. And your tapping is unique because of your background, because you do use neurolinguistic programming, you do use hypnotic techniques, you have a way of speaking to people while they’re tapping. It maybe a little bit different than when someone does it on their own, but there are still benefits to it, right?

‏‏Yeah. What I find is a lot of times, I’ll take a person through tapping and then I’ll show them how they can repeat the tapping themselves but I always caution them. I say you know, at first, usually people experience that they get better results when I’m taking them through it. But then over time, you’ll learn how to be able to use that yourself. Then, I point out that a lot of these issues that we target treat, if we really do it well enough, you’re not going to have to treat that issue, there’s no issue to treat anymore. Once we really—you can think of it as…

‏‏Rewiring.

‏‏Yeah, you’re rewiring. There’s a term in the field called memory reconsolidation, are you familiar with that term at all?

‏‏No.

‏‏Here’s the idea. More and more people have looked at this in the field. Whenever you have a memory, memory has many aspects to it. Long term memory is once a memory has been very consolidated into your brain and different areas of the brain, long term memory is in a sense, you could say normally you think of it as it’s harder to change. It’s almost they used to think of it as a DVD. Every time you put the DVD into the player, it’s the same. Maybe it would deteriorate over the course of centuries or something, but I mean it really doesn’t change just because you play it. Each time you play it, it’s the same. Long term memory is thought of in that way too. However, it’s also been found recently that every time you call up a long term memory, because you’re recalling it in the present moment, it changes a bit. Maybe sometimes it gets worse because of it. If a person calls up a traumatic memory and they’re having upset, each time they have upset, they can make it worse and worse and worse. But if you have a technique that every time you call it up, it neutralizes the memory, it neutralizes the emotional impact of it, then when you get done treating it and it goes back into storage, what goes back into storage is not the original because the original doesn’t exist anymore. You’ve just over written it. What they have now is what you just got done doing. When they call it up the next time, it’s that changed memory.

Long term memory is once a memory has been very consolidated into your brain and different areas of the brain, long term memory is in a sense, you could say normally you think of it as it’s harder to change.

‏‏Do you feel that some people are attached to their memories and they are afraid to let go because it’s almost like letting go of a part of their identity, their victim mentality or something that becomes so familiar that they don’t want to let go of?

‏‏Absolutely. There’s a term we used in the field, we call it psychological reversal. Sometimes, it’s a belief. Let’s say the person has this certain presenting issue, which is this trauma or this generalized anxiety, or this depression. Then, let’s say underneath that, there’s this belief about that. The belief might be something like it would be dangerous to let go of this, or I don’t deserve to get over this, or it’s impossible to get over this. There’s the one thing and then there’s this other thing. That deeper thing, which is another kind of thought process, can interfere with treating the presenting issue. What I have to do in that case is go to that deeper issue and treat that issue. Then, the other will be taken care of.

‏‏So you tap for the issue behind the issue?

‏‏Yeah. You tap for the issue that prevents you from resolving the issue.

‏‏Yeah.

‏‏Sometimes, there’s a few of those. It can be like I had a guy who was addicted to cocaine. His whole life, he was sabotaged. He was doing cocaine and he was losing jobs, he would get involved sexually in his job situations, and then he would end up losing the job because of it. He was living at home with his parents now because he wasn’t making it. He comes in to see me, I realize there was this issue of this cocaine thing and so on. I check him for this and there’s a way you asked earlier about muscle testing. I had him listening to his issue, I’m thinking this guy is really sabotaging his life across the board. It seems pretty massive because there’s so many things where he’s hurting his life. I do a muscle test with him. I have him hold his arm up, I do a few checks first of all, let’s say his name was Joe. I say, “Hold your arm there, hold it tight.” He holds it tight, he’s pretty strong. “Say my name is Joe.” His muscles test tight, arms hold strong. I say, “Keep saying my name is Mary.” He says, “My name is Mary.” Now, his muscles goes weak. I know there’s a distinction. I can tell whenever it’s true and when it’s false. There’s a few other things I do with that. Then, I had him say I want to be happy.

‏‏Was it weak?

‏‏Oh no, interestingly, usually that’s what I was expecting. I was expecting that when he said I want to be happy, it would test weak, and you’re right, in a lot of cases you would expect that. But he tested strong and I said how could he test strong to I want to be happy? Then I’d say I want to be miserable then he’d test weak. I said okay, oh, I said, “Say I will be happy,” and he tested weak.

‏‏Ah, there is no hope.

‏‏Yeah, it was different. It was like I want to be but I won’t. Then, I had him say I’ll never be happy and he tested strong. Then, I thought oh, does he feel he deserves to? I said, “Say I deserve to be happy.” He tested weak. “I don’t deserve to be happy.” He tested strong. Then, I treated those issues. It’s kind of simple, it was just figuring out where to tap. I had him tap essentially under his nose. It’s a point on the governing vessel, acupuncture. I had him say, even if I never become happy, I accept myself. I had him tap under his bottom lip which is on the central vessel. I had him say even though I don’t deserve to be happy, I accept myself. I had him do that a few times, then I tested him again. I muscle tested that, I want to be happy tested strong, I will be happy tested strong, I deserve to be happy tested strong. Now, he’s testing strong in all these, which means that we’ve corrected that, at least for right now. Then, I said to him I can’t be sure that that will last. What I would like you to do is regularly treat yourself for that. The tapping under your nose and your bottom lips technique and these statements. We jotted them down and then he left and I scheduled him for the next week. He comes back the next week and he says to me at first, “Can we keep this session short? I have a job interview I have to go to.” I said, “Sure, how have you been doing with the cocaine?” He says, “I haven’t used any cocaine this whole week.”

‏‏Oh wow, amazing.

‏‏I said, “Okay.” He says, “I really got to change some things. I need to get this job and I have to save up enough money, I want to get into my own apartment, I can’t be living at home with my parents.” I said, “What’s happened?” He says, “I had an argument with my dad. I just can’t see living there anymore. I’m really not living my life right.” I said, “Huh, let me check something.” I have him hold out his arm, say I want to be happy, will be happy, I deserve to be happy, strong on all of those. I said, “Did you do this tapping this week?” He said, “Oh, was I supposed to do that?” He didn’t even do the tapping.

‏‏Nice.

‏‏Now, you look at everything and he’s thinking the reason he has come to this thing of getting the job—and he got the job by the way—determined to move out of that house. He’s not using cocaine, it’s because he was pissed at his dad. But that wasn’t what it was. It was that he was no longer reversed. He was no longer self sabotaging himself.

‏‏That’s beautiful.

‏‏Yeah. If you can find those things that are underneath, people would call that the unconscious. It’s a driving idea, it’s a disruptive energy that interferes with the person moving in the direction of health. What they do is they move in the direction of illness and unhappiness rather than toward health, they move away from health. There’s that kind of an element too.

‏‏Right. You do a lot of work with visualizations. What if somebody cannot visualize?

‏‏You don’t have to use visualization. You have a background on NLP?

‏‏Yes.

‏‏Okay, so you know there’s different primary representational systems; some people are more visual, some people are more auditory, some people are more kinesthetic. If you can’t visualize, I figure this way. Everybody visualizes unless they’re—even blind people visualize in some sense. There are about, I think it’s about 30% of the brain is caught up in visual processing, even if the person isn’t conscious of the visualizing, some people are very good at seeing images and so on and others aren’t. If I could just have the person just think about it, just bring it to mind, and notice how you feel when you bring it to mind, however they bring it to mind. If you’re unspecified about what you’re asking the person to do, you have a better chance of connecting with them on that.

‏‏What do you mean unspecified?

‏‏Just by saying bring it to mind. If I say bring it to mind, I’m not saying bring it to mind with an image, I’m not saying bring it to mind with words…

‏‏Ah.

‏‏It’s unspecified. Matter of fact, hypnotic language works that way. If you think the person has to visualize and you’re suggesting it that way, if they’re not doing that very well, then you’re out of rapport with them, you’re out of connection with them. You don’t go out of connection with them if you’re unspecified.

‏‏Ah, that’s powerful.

‏‏Because what you’re doing is you’re just putting it out there and then they go to their normal way of doing that and that feels connected with you.

‏‏Nice.

‏‏There’s a lot of stuff like that.

‏‏There’s so much.

‏‏I’ve been in this business since—God, I started off as a counselor in 1970. I’m an old guy. I’ve been around for a while.

‏‏You’re the master of masters.

‏‏I studied the work of Milton Erickson, I studied NLP with the founders. I had a strong interest in hypnosis. You start to look at people and see how they function and you learn something about yourself like that.

‏‏Right. Do you think tapping can help with curing ADHD?

‏‏I do some other things with that. It can be a part of it. I like a lot of the—are you familiar with Brain Gym at all? It’s related to applied kinesiology which is one of the roots of tapping energy, psychology. There are certain things you can do to help a person create better focus. If somebody is all over the place, there’s exercises like the hook up. If you extend your legs and crush your left ankle over your right, and then you hold your arms out, hands are in front of you, with the thumbs point up and then point the thumbs down, then take your right hand, put it over top facing your left hand, so your palms are connecting. You hook your fingers together and then you curl it up so your fists are now resting on your chest. Then, you put your tongue to the roof of your mouth and you do some deep breathing with that. One of the ideas is that it connects your energy fields. It brings the left and right hemisphere coordinated together.

‏‏I think I’ve seen it before.

‏‏Yeah. There’s a whole bunch of those kinds of things. Another thing is cross crawl. You sort of march in line at first, then you start doing where you take your right hand, tap on your left knee as you raise your left knee, and then your left hand on your right knee and you go back and forth like that. That’s coordinating left and right hemispheres of the brain. You start to coordinate that. There’s other exercises like that too but I could also do this if the person’s ADHD and they’re not focusing, I would have them do something like have a check like I want to get over this, I want to continue to have this, I would check for reversals first and then I would say okay, think about how—get in touch with not being able to attend very well. Get in touch with that when your mind’s jumping around. Then, I would have them tap until that dissipates that and then they find they’re creating better focus. But other things that can work for that too, I integrate. I’ll do what I call heart breathing, the heart breathing meditation. Research on meditation shows that if you practice it over time, and you don’t have to do large doses of it. A simple way is you focus on your breath and then your mind goes off into thoughts and then you come back to your breath and you do that regularly. Research shows that over time, it improves attention regulation, emotional regulation, people develop a deeper sense of well being. They’re learning to hone in that automatic mind that just takes them all over the place, I think of it as the autonomic mind. We have an autonomic nervous system, we have an autonomic mind. It just goes on its own, it has a mind of its own. You reel it in. Tapping can be very useful for that and practicing meditation in combination with tapping can be very useful for that. I use a term called mindful energy psychology which is an integration of mindfulness practices and tapping and other things in the field of energy psychology.

A simple way is you focus on your breath and then your mind goes off into thoughts and then you come back to your breath and you do that regularly. Share on X

‏‏I love it, I love everything that you do. I really appreciate you being here on the show. It’s been fantastic, thank you so much.

‏‏Thank you very much, Orion. It was good talking to you.

‏‏Yeah, where can people find you, where can people learn more about you and what you do?

‏‏Let me do a little advertising for a second. Go to my website, it’s www.energypsych.com and they can see there where I’m going. Different people I’ve trained that are authorized to teach my kind of approaches, they’re in different places. They list on the website too. I’m going to be, next month, October, in Vancouver. I’m teaching how to treat chronic pain.

‏‏There is so much.

‏‏Yeah, I treat a lot of people with chronic pain and tapping and various little techniques. I have one I called the Gallo Process and there’s something called the Waterfalls Technique. I teach those. In Manchester, I’m teaching a course called Mindful Energy Psychology. That’s a one day free conference thing and it’s through the AAMET which is the Association for Meridian Therapy, AAMET. If people look that up, I’d be happy if people came. I have a number of people coming to that and so anybody who wants to come, come on over and we’ll have a good talk.

‏‏Yes, that’s brilliant. Go and learn from the master that is helping the masters.

‏‏One of the masters, there’s others. I’m the man, right?

‏‏You’re the man. Thank you so much.

‏‏You have a great day, thanks a lot.

‏‏Thank you, Fred.

Your Checklist Actions to Take

✓ Ignore the stigma on seeking professional help when you or someone you know feels like they need help managing their mental health. Professionals can help you overcome trauma or PTSD.

✓ Don’t set aside your emotions in the hopes that they will disappear. Admitting that you’re struggling with anxiety or depression is the first step

✓ Try energy tapping to help you deal with your negative emotions and past trauma. This is a process that involves tapping certain points along the body’s energy meridians to influence psychological events.

✓ Go easy on yourself during your healing process. Take baby steps and keep progressing rather than dealing with everything all at once.

✓ Keep going and find what works best for you on your healing journey. You don’t need to continue working with a doctor if you’re not comfortable with them.

✓ Start from square one by stripping down the layers of your emotions. Find the core problem that keeps you from resolving your negative emotions.

✓ Regularly tell yourself that you deserve to be happy and have the best things in life. Let that reassurance be your determination to work hard on yourself.

✓ Practice heart breathing meditation to develop a deeper sense of being.Focus on your heart and breathe slowly and intentionally for a few minutes.

✓ Find a higher level of psychiatric healing if you feel like you’re suffering from a more serious condition because energy tapping isn’t the right solution in this case.

✓ Grab a copy of Fred Gallo’s books to have a deeper understanding and to improve your relationship with your emotions, cognition, behavior, and health.

Links and Resources:

About Fred Gallo

In addition to writing and training professionals, I maintain a clinical practice in Hermitage, PA–Gallo & Associates–which offers services to adults, adolescents, and children. I am also on staff at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center (UPMC) at Horizon, the Children’s Aid Society of Mercer County, and North Star Behavioral Health in Oil City, Pa. Click here for additional information about my clinical practice.

Disclaimer: The medical, fitness, psychological, mindset, lifestyle, and nutritional information provided on this website and through any materials, downloads, videos, webinars, podcasts, or emails are not intended to be a substitute for professional medical/fitness/nutritional advice, diagnoses, or treatment. Always seek the help of your physician, psychologist, psychiatrist, therapist, certified trainer, or dietitian with any questions regarding starting any new programs or treatments or stopping any current programs or treatments. This website is for information purposes only, and the creators and editors, including Orion Talmay, accept no liability for any injury or illness arising out of the use of the material contained herein, and make no warranty, express or implied, with respect to the contents of this website and affiliated materials.