The Taproot Podcast - The Science Behind the Light: Dr. Steven Vazquez on Inventing Emotional Transformation Therapy

Episode Date: August 19, 2025

Join Joel Blackstock for an extraordinary conversation with Dr. Steven Vazquez, the inventor of Emotional Transformation Therapy (ETT), as he reveals the 25-year scientific journey that led to one of ...the most innovative breakthroughs in trauma treatment. From skeptical experimentation to treating cancer with eye movements, discover how specific wavelengths of light directly impact the brain's emotional centers. In this illuminating episode, Dr. Vazquez shares the fascinating evolution of ETT's four core technologies, the neuroscience behind why colors disappear during dissociation, and remarkable case studies including elimination of Parkinson's symptoms, instant resolution of 15-year chronic pain, and complete remission of colorectal cancer through targeted eye movement protocols. Key Topics Covered: The accidental discovery: From syntonic optometry to emotional transformation Building and testing 7 different light devices over 25 years Why the optic nerve's path through the brain stem changes everything The substantia nigra connection: Treating movement disorders without surgery Temporal-parietal junction: Why trauma survivors are 4x more likely to be re-traumatized Real-time dissociation detection through visual distortion Converting EMDR practitioners: Why they switch and never go back Breakthrough Cases Discussed: Arthritic pain eliminated instantly with orange light Colorectal cancer remission confirmed by oncologist next day Father's visual trauma from discovering son's suicide - resolved in 10 minutes Sciatica eliminated in 20 minutes (physician patient, still gone 1 year later) Birth trauma causing adult osteoporosis - complete resolution Resources: ETT Training Programs (7 levels): www.etttraining.com Research and publications on wavelength-specific brain activation International training locations and certification pathways Perfect for neuroscience enthusiasts, trauma therapists, EMDR/Brainspotting practitioners, and anyone seeking to understand the cutting-edge intersection of light, brain science, and emotional healing. #EmotionalTransformationTherapy #ETT #DrStevenVazquez #Neuroscience #TraumaTherapy #LightTherapy #BrainScience #EMDR #Brainspotting #Innovation #PTSD #ChronicPain #Dissociation #TherapyResearch

Transcript
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Starting point is 00:00:00 With all my favorite colors, yes, man, I've got all my favorite colors in lots. My sisters and my brother, see him like no mother. Hi, I'm here with Dr. Stephen Vasquez, the inventor of emotional transformation therapy, which you can get to Taproot in lots of other places. And we're going to talk today about just kind of science and innovation and the way that he came up that and how it works and i'll be honest you know when i came um to et t it was because i had all these people that had called me that connected with the stuff that i put out through the blog and podcast and i'm always looking for new models that are kind of the next thing and i was very
Starting point is 00:00:45 credulous but they sounded very smart and i flew to texas and dr vascus was talking about you know paid all this money and dr vascus was talking about how color and light can heal trauma and have these effects and i was just like this is nonsense you know i i don't i don't think this will work and I volunteered, and I could not talk myself out of it. No, the effects of it are immediate. And there's kind of a, you know, with things like the spectral chart, there's a real immediate way that it's demonstrated. So I think having read a lot more of your work now and looked at your thought process,
Starting point is 00:01:16 the thing that is interesting to me about you that I think good science does is that you have big outside-the-box ideas, you know, that are new and different. But at the same time, you have a credulousness to say, okay, you know, I thought this was perfectly good guess, but that was bullshit. It didn't work and have enough skepticism to make sure that your big ideas are still like objectivity is replied to them, that they're reproducible. And I think that's really interesting. So a lot of your work came from reading other people's research and then noticing these brain pathways. And I was wondering if you could tell us about some of those devices because you built a couple of you talk about in the book.
Starting point is 00:01:54 And some of them like shining light through skin, you discovered it was kind of a dead end. Like, it wasn't really the way to go. Right. But you did end up with three or four, you know, kind of really interesting devices and techniques I'd like to talk about. Yes. Originally, I was exposed to visual stimulation through syntonics optometry. It's a renegade group of optometrists that use colored light to correct vision problems. And I noticed that when people were using that, that emotional changes would take place.
Starting point is 00:02:27 And I got intrigued with how the color affected emotional states more so than correcting the vision. And these were optometrists that didn't really do interpersonal work. They just had you look at light silently, 20 minutes per session. And, of course, as a therapist, I know that the bond between therapists and clients is a critical factor. And so I wanted to add that into the process. And I literally experimented people. I invited them to go through a counseling process while they looked at certain colors.
Starting point is 00:03:04 And I didn't know for sure what would happen. And then I would have cases where dramatic changes would take place right away. In other cases where nothing happened. Well, it took me a while to figure out which thing could make it happen that well. One of the first ones was the woman and it had arthritic hands that were gnarled and she could she's been in pain for 15 years and
Starting point is 00:03:31 nothing i tried looking at different colors nothing mattered until i got to orange and then all the pain went away i mean that and quickly so i'm thinking whoa there's a connection here i want to understand that so it took me a couple of years to actually get clear on which colors did what and under what circumstances but i was there are there is technology out there for all kinds of things with light stimulation, but they don't include the interpersonal part. In therapy, we know the research says no matter what the mental health approach is, the single factor that shows up to be the most significant is the bond between the therapist and
Starting point is 00:04:15 the client. So I needed to include that in the process, which is very different than just looking at a color. You just look at a color, it may or may not be helpful. But if the person is in a state of mind that that color responds to, big changes can happen pretty quickly. It's just a little history. So it was experimental for me. I had a strong sense it would work because I would get these dramatic changes here and there.
Starting point is 00:04:43 And I just had to figure out how to do that more accurately. And it's evolved over 25 years. And I've gone through, I think, maybe seven different. light devices in those 25 years, each one of them being more technologically advanced than the previous ones. And so that's a little bit about how that got started. Do you have a specific question? There's more I can say about this. Well, there's a couple devices that go along with ETT.
Starting point is 00:05:14 You know, there's a spectral resonance chart, which is just a chart with extremely expensive and accurate representations of the color spectrum. And then there's the light device, which, well, I'll save that for the end. There's the goggles which allow, you know, light in at a different angle against the pupil. And then there's the wands, which are an eye movement therapy that is, you know, similar to EMDR, brain spotting, but uses color. And then there's the light device, which kind of does all of the things, because you can add in a flicker rate, you can add in a color hue, you can add, so it mixes sort of all of them together. Yeah. Let me share you, share with you how that evolved. I actually started with the light device. It's a primitive light device had 11 colors. That was it. Now we have over 16 million, but that's how it started. And then I noticed that some people got overstimulated with the light device. It was too much for them. So I needed something else. And I had a personal experience where I was teaching in Germany. And I had one day off. And I was took on to train to go visit this famous castle there in Germany, you know Hswanstein. On the train, on the way over there, there were about five stops. And I was, at the time, I was pretty upset about a relationship I was in. And in Germany, each train station, the walls were painted a different color. One train station would be blue. The next one would be yellow. Third one would be orange. And as I came to look through my window at each train station, I worked on this issue that was disturbing me, and it worked.
Starting point is 00:06:55 By the time I arrived to the destination, I was exhilarated because I had released all that distress. And so I saw that looking at a colored wall could do that much. And then I came across that particular chart that we use that was produced in France. And I began to work with that chart because I needed something that was not as stimulating as light into the eye. for people that got overstimulated rather easy. And so that's where I went to next. That's how the chart developed through my own personal experience with that
Starting point is 00:07:29 and discovering this chart that was produced in France. Since then, we've had trouble. The company, we bought 1,000 of those charts. We bought them out. The company is no longer in action, and we've been struggling to find a way to replicate it because the chart was pretty unique. The colors are extremely bright.
Starting point is 00:07:50 as bright as you can get as clear as you can get but there's only seven colors and anyway so that's how that came about and then experimenting with it with different people uh i i noticed certain things and one of the big discoveries was sometimes the color would just distort completely they couldn't even see the color or else the whole chart turned gray or something like that would happen and i finally figured out that that had that was a visual distortion that indicated dissociated dissociation. If you can't see the color in front of you, but basically, you're not here psychologically. And so this is one of the most incredible tools for identifying dissociation. Most of the clients I get who have seen other therapists have been dissociative,
Starting point is 00:08:38 but the other therapists didn't know it. They couldn't recognize it. Yeah, it's hard to catch dissociation. It's hard. It's about that one. This comes up in seconds. And it's clear. So once we know, know that, then there's ways to treat that. Anyway, so the chart was powerful for a number of things. It could access information that was not conscious to the person, and it could show up dissociation. So it was a different way to work than light stimulation.
Starting point is 00:09:07 And so what happened next was the goggles. A Harvard psychiatrist named Schiffer developed what he called lateralized glasses. And he would just block off where you would see light coming in the left side of the eyes and then light coming in the right side. And they were a neuroscientist. He was a psychiatrist. And they understood that because they thought, oh, the right side of the brain,
Starting point is 00:09:35 the left brain hemisphere, the right brain hemisphere, and they were making a therapeutic difference. He wrote a book called Of Two Minds. And so I was crazy enough to think, well, I wonder if the light came in at 12 o'clock, o'clock if that would be it came in six o'clock and if it came in all the and I noticed that each one of them brought forth a different response and we even had a person that went to his office to tell them about it but they wouldn't accept it because they couldn't understand it any other way than right left brain hemisphere and so what
Starting point is 00:10:10 we discovered was a whole way to identify internal parts internal psychological parts and physiological parts by peripheral eye stimulation. So I got somebody to make these goggles for me, which only allow light to come in specific angles. And this was particularly good for people who got overstimulated because you're just barely letting in a little bit of light, particularly valuable with people with migraine headaches, particularly they had a sensitivity to light.
Starting point is 00:10:41 And so it was a breakthrough in that way, and we kept discovering more and more peripheral. angles that did more and more and brought forth information that were completely not conscious to the client so that's how that came about and now we've got more sophisticated goggles that can do much more but it's all about the angles of light coming into the eyes and it's generally gentler that's why it's so good for people to get overstimulated so we had that procedure and then the the Wands, how that happened with eye movement, in 1990, I was going to a training that I was
Starting point is 00:11:23 to kind of do on a form of energy work I do. And on the way, I was reading the very first article that Shapiro wrote about EMDR. It was published in 1989. I didn't quite know what it was. I was seeing you hold your hands and move your, the person's eyes follow it in a certain way and that's all i mean didn't even finish the article and i got there and during this training serendipitously a gentleman had a birth trauma that was evoked i mean this was in front of 30 people and i'd never done this before and he had a birth trauma evoked right in front of everybody and i started doing this eye movement process with my fingers holding him up and moving them side to side And I didn't know what I was doing.
Starting point is 00:12:13 Like I said, I read about two-thirds of the first article. That was it. And he calmed down. The trauma seemed to settle down completely. Well, I still didn't think that much of it. And then five years later, I was in San Francisco again. And this gentleman signed up for a session with me. And I didn't know why.
Starting point is 00:12:32 And he told me that he had osteoporosis so bad. He'd tried Chinese medicine. He'd tried everything. Nothing worked. And that session, it all stopped when I did that with him. And so what we pieced together over time is that when the mother's giving birth, her bones soften during the time of the birth, and when the baby's bones soften also during the birth experience, if you have a trauma during the birth experiences, it gets fixated.
Starting point is 00:13:04 And then later in life, when he was like 40 years old, stressors in his life evoked that birth trauma. And we corrected it in one session. And so then I began, by 1995, I began to think, okay, maybe there's something to this EMDR. Okay, so I began to exploring eye movements. And there are now three other forms of eye movement. One of them is eye movement integration developed by a psychologist in Canada.
Starting point is 00:13:37 Then there's brain spotting. Then there's EMDR. But what happened to me is during the 1990s, I didn't even know they taught EMDR. I didn't know that much about it. So I began to explore what kind of eye movement affected people psychologically. And I developed a whole system. By the time I really knew about EMBR and went to an EMDR training, I had already to develop this method.
Starting point is 00:14:04 And so I go through the EMDR training, and it didn't seem to be nearly as impactful. And so unfortunately, I just didn't get trained in it or anything until maybe 10 years after I discovered that first article. And so I had all that time to explore. And that's why I came up with the different method of eye movement that we call multidimensional eye movement, simply discovering it on my own,
Starting point is 00:14:29 watching people's eyes during emotional process, And so I found a very efficient way to use eye movements. It's, I mean, it changes people severe trauma in five to ten minutes. And one session I did that I just spoke about in our annual conferences, a woman had colorectal cancer. Okay, she had had it for some time. I was working with her. And she, as I did this eye movement process, she said she felt it.
Starting point is 00:15:01 go away and fortunately she had an appointment with a colorectal doctor and oncologist the next day and he said that if he didn't know her history he saw no sign that she even had colorectal cancer at all and so we eliminated that in that session with the eye movement so it's i mainly use it for we talk about PTSD but this is particularly good for acute trauma things that people are they're clearly emotional that's unresolved it's not like it's buried or something it's particularly good for acute trauma it's particularly good for visually initiated trauma something that they've seen that was scary or frightening and they can't get out of their mind an example is one gentleman i used it with um he came home one day and looked out his window and he saw his
Starting point is 00:15:59 16-year-old son hanging dead from a tree. Well, he couldn't get that picture out of his mind, of course. And we did that in 10 minutes. It was completely neutralized. Yes, he had some grief to deal with after that, but the actual visual image that was fixated was gone. And so it's particularly good for fixated visual images that just can't get out of your mind. That's my experience, too, is that the flashback re-experiencing is best treated with the ones. Whereas I feel like the goggles, the light direction goggles, or peripheral light stimulation goggles, have a, like, it's chronic pain, a lot of, like, things that have a somatic cause, but the emotion about the somatic pain that is a real pain, you know, is what you're kind of treating,
Starting point is 00:16:45 whereas the board is excellent for assessment. I just want to say a couple of things for people that may be kind of credulous, you know, and wondering about this stuff, you know, a lot of times somatic medicine or EMDR or any of that, you know, the more cognitive and behavioral people are kind of skeptical. I mean, one of the things that brought me into ETT was that when you're assessing on the board, which was the first thing that was demonstrated at the training, I mean, you get an immediate reaction that you can't explain because you lose the ability to see the color if you're dissociative. So for me, it was yellow. Like when I was at the training, I volunteered to go up and I kind of like, you know, EMDR, I'd seen work as a provider on patients, some patients that had real strong
Starting point is 00:17:24 visual reexperiencing. But I, it never did anything for me as a provider. I just, or as a patient. It never did anything for me. And I was just kind of expecting to pick up a couple tips from ETT, but I didn't expect it to be as dramatic as it was in the neurology that you kind of discovered to be so profound. And so I went up and you did the screener on the board and based on what I was talking about said, you know, you need to look here. And it was like by yellow, yellow immediately turned black for me. Like I could not see it at all. And if I looked to yellow long enough, the entire board would turn black. And I mean, I even in the training, I touched it and you were like, no, no, don't touch the board. You know, they're $500.
Starting point is 00:17:57 dollars, please don't do that. Because I was like, you know, this is just printing on paper. I thought it was a screen or a trick. Like I couldn't explain why this was happening. And, you know, having done more processing myself and, like, gone through those things, I know what was at the root of a lot of, you know, feeling trapped and controlled and manipulated and boxed in that was making me dissociate around yellow, but that had gone on my whole life, you know, and when I was able to get the treatment with ETT and do some
Starting point is 00:18:23 of the, but so when you're assessing this, I mean, there's a, there's a fast reaction. that if you're a credulous person that thinks that what we're talking about is BS, I would just sit down with somebody and see something that you can't explain. You know, similar to me with the goggles. I had an ear infection when I was at the training and like my eardrum had ruptured. Like there was like, I was like wiping up blood that morning. And MJ, one of the trainers was like, well, this will be great because Joel had this ear thing. And I'm like, you know, guys, I didn't mom issues my way into this.
Starting point is 00:18:51 Like I was wiping up blood this morning. And, you know, when that light and the goggles was at a three o'clock position, my ear was a five-alarm fire. And when it was at the like nine o'clock position, I couldn't feel anything. And it took her alternating between those four or five times before it was just like, you know, I can't explain this.
Starting point is 00:19:08 I'm really sitting there, you know, not believing it, you know, we see as trauma therapists, a lot of people that are pretty sick. You know, a lot of researchers who are more credulous, act like, you know, we're looking for people who are suggestible or something.
Starting point is 00:19:22 But, you know, a lot of my patients are MDs and CEOs, and they're people who don't think that this work. anyway but are going to humor me and then it's transformative for them so I think the being open but also being credulous is like a good formula for kind of science and scientific innovation in the soft sciences like psychology and your work is a profound example of that yeah you're right a lot of people you know
Starting point is 00:19:45 come in thinking skeptical but when they they can't see the color in front of and they know it was there before sometimes it it gets their attention for sure something's happening, they can't explain. So it's very powerful. And it's a very common thing that happens that it does distort. So it's not, I'm going to say in most cases you're going to see that happen with the spectral chart. But that's how these things have evolved and now have discovered many more ways, applications for this to work. We have a whole protocol specifically for ADHD that eliminates it in three weeks for addictions,
Starting point is 00:20:23 that eliminates it in a matter of weeks. And, of course, depression, anxiety, although there's just protocols, ways to apply these things to very specific things. I should say some more about the goggles. Of course, IFS is very popular as an internal parts model. Well, this takes it to a whole new level. For example, I had a woman in a workshop where, you know, she had asthma.
Starting point is 00:20:52 Well, we found a position where she didn't have asthma. You can have pain in one position that can be not. Tonitis a lot of the time. I've had people that weren't even trying to treat it, have tinnitus spike and resolve with the gauze. But, I mean, whole conditions aren't there. We find parts where they don't have that condition, medical condition.
Starting point is 00:21:12 So it's pretty significant for the physical part, which goes much further than IFS would typically go. And it's quick. It's very quick when that takes. place is just abruptly not there anymore yeah sciatica pain as a physician that demonstrated in front of a class and she was she wanted to ride horses is what her hobby was but you can't do that if you have sciatica because and her pain was pretty significant had been there for a while we did this in 20 minutes in the
Starting point is 00:21:44 class I've checked with her a year later it's still gone and she is riding horses at this point and so forth. But, I mean, she was a physician. She had other ways to treat the sciatica. It didn't take it very far, and this eliminated. So, and probably one of the most exciting ones is one day, I had a person to come in that had cancer, and he had forgot to take his oxycodone that day.
Starting point is 00:22:11 So he came into the office in severe pain, and we eliminated it with the goggles in 10 minutes. And his quote, which I love, says, this is better than any oxy-cotton I've ever used. So, I mean, I can see a lot of medical applications as well as psychological for this. But to many people that can't handle certain kinds of medication. So this gives you another option. Well, I think a lot of dissociation around specific types of emotion where people are either
Starting point is 00:22:39 enmeshed with the emotion, I've got to feel it all the time or avoidant of it. No, I can't feel that again. If I feel that, it'll kill me. So they're doing these other things to try and feel in control or to kind of justify that impaired emotional response. I think that shows up as ADHD and gets given riddle in quite a bit, you know, because it'll check the same symptoms on the DSM and it will respond to the same medication. But, you know, not having to deal with Adderall is, is cheaper and, you know, less medically risky.
Starting point is 00:23:04 You know, a lot of this stuff clears that up. I'd like to talk a little bit about the dysneurobiology of these things because there are like, you know, a lot of people are just like, yeah, I mean, color maybe suggests, you know, memories that we have in the midbrain or, like, like associations from childhood and you're kind of playing with those somehow, but that's all you're observing. But what ETT is doing is not really stimulating the part of the brain that remembers, you know, the guy that picked me up from school one time had a red sweater on.
Starting point is 00:23:33 It really is a deeper kind of brainstem response. Like we, we think that the, again, and there's studies on this. Like we have some of them I've written about the psychology of color in our blog. Like there's fMRI and QEG studies that when people look at shades of really far red, it activates the same networks.
Starting point is 00:23:49 in the brain around bodily dissociation, what you see in phantom limb syndrome, what you see in gender dysphoria, what you see during dissociation around sexual assault. And it is a pretty implicit response that is kind of hardwired into the brainstem, not learned. And, you know, we think like most people think, or I thought, you know,
Starting point is 00:24:06 before I started digging into this stuff at ETT training, that your optic nerve just plugs into the occipital lobe where the image is resolved, like the blu-ray cable, you know, the HTML cable goes from the Blu-ray player to the TV. But that isn't really true. There's 90% of those inputs on that V1 pathway. They wrap around the brain stem and then they're past juoccipital.
Starting point is 00:24:25 So you feel what you see before you actually see it. And when certain conditions you're talking about, you know, when curiosity's peaked, when somebody is in a feeling of safety, you know, I would hypothesize maybe when there's more of like a theta state present in the brain. That's when this color stuff starts to work and have that effect. And, you know, there's debate in neurology about why it is. that the object nerve passes that signal through the brainstem and the brainstem processes it before it goes to occipital and we see it some people feel like it's helping us react to things quicker you know the body can just take action the emotional system can just take action you know some neurologists have said that it's an efficiency thing it's an energy saving thing where the signal's being cleaned up so the syphidal doesn't have to do as much work but those connections are there i mean this isn't kind of fringe stuff you know if you care to look at how the brain is wired like it's apparent that these things have an effect um can you say anything more about that or kind of the neurological basis of that you found as you started you found
Starting point is 00:25:22 because we figure out that this stuff works and then we have to figure out why it works a lot of the time right um there there are a lot of what called um involuntary i call involuntary movement disorders from ADHD you see people you know hyperactively moving to excoriation to uh to Tourette syndromes, ultimately to essential tremor and Parkinson's. There's a number of things that have involuntary movement. The part of the brain that we access through specific wavelengths of red is in the basal ganglia. I'm trying to remember the name of the part in there, but there's a specific part of the brain that's in charge of movement. And what they do with Parkinson's, for example, there's a surgery that's used where they actually implant an electrode in that particular part of the brain.
Starting point is 00:26:22 It's called a substantia nigra that's in charge of movement. And so they're using this by giving them surgery. They haven't figured out that you can get it through the eyes without a surgery. But you literally see people's involuntary movement stop. I have two cases of Restless Lig syndrome where we did spec brain scans before and after, and you could see that part of the brain is completely stopped. This thing, the whole syndrome stopped and didn't come back. We checked a year later, did another brain scan.
Starting point is 00:26:57 It was still normalized. So that's one, wavelengths of red over time, I figured out that that's what it's doing. It's affecting the part of the brain involved in movement, the substantia nigra which lies in the basal ganglia and then there's other things other discoveries that happen one of them is really common with trauma issues if a person is traumatized yes let's say they're raped you process the rape that's fine they're better mostly but the research says that for example women have been assaulted are four times more likely to be assaulted again. Now that's a peculiar phenomenon. Most therapists have seen this. You have people that
Starting point is 00:27:44 they have things over and over. But what happens is once you've disrupted a part of the brain that's called the temporal parietal juncture, that part of the brain is in charge of identifying separating self from others. And if it's affected by trauma, it doesn't work that way anymore and you're more susceptible to being affected by external stimuli. And we found that a specific wavelength of red or orange, not red, not orange, affects that particular part of the brain. And we can build boundaries to where, let's say, if a person's rape, they go through the trauma, but to also correct that, that loss of perceived boundaries,
Starting point is 00:28:30 then that protects them from it happening again, which is to me, I think that's what's missing in a lot of therapy. Fine, you do the trauma and that's helpful, but their brain has changed forever because of that because it's affected that part of the brain that can't differentiate self from other, and therefore you're more susceptible to being impacted by things, external stimuli, even stimuli like light and sound,
Starting point is 00:28:57 as well as other people. And so those two, there's other wavelengths of light that affect specific parts of the brain. Those are two of them that I think are really significant that we discovered. Would you say that that's why Orange is so important for like Dissociative Identity Disorder and Dissociative Disorders that kind of, it seems like it's sort of egoic coherence. Right.
Starting point is 00:29:20 You know, Indigo is like relationship between parts of self, but communication between internal parts of self. But Orange is more like just a coherent center and a cohesive narrative of. Yes. of the self, I think. Well, almost everybody who's been traumatized, they're not just traumatized, but their identity has been impacted by it.
Starting point is 00:29:42 They see themselves as a broken person or somehow deficient because of the trauma. Now, the truth of the matter is they're the same, but they perceive themselves as less than once the trauma has affected them. And so it impacts self-perception. And Orange is a key element for that. for working with self-perception that literally changes it to where with ETT, an essential part of it
Starting point is 00:30:11 is you have to be in touch with the emotion that you want to change in order for the light to have that kind of an impact. So that's because emotions become more susceptible to change when you're experiencing them. Yeah, memory reconsolidation theory can kind of explain a lot of how the board is working because what I tell patients that have done brain spotting with me is
Starting point is 00:30:37 you know brain spotting is going to suck you into that feeling like you're going to not be wanting to feel anything and I'm going to find this spot where I see a pupil dilation and you're not going to feel it for a minute and then you go into it and they're used to that happening where they almost kind of involuntarily or without participation get pulled into the emotion the board doesn't work like that I mean just looking at the color doesn't pull you into the response it takes you feeling the feeling to get that dissociation and so it's like like people are looking at the board and they're like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, just talk about the issue.
Starting point is 00:31:07 And they're like, yeah, yeah, my mom made me feel small. And then I, I see him kind of look because I know they saw something, but they still don't want to know that it worked. Like, all right, keep telling me, you know, she would always make me feel like I just didn't. And then they'll stop again and they'll look and I'm like, what are you seeing in green? What are you seeing?
Starting point is 00:31:21 I think my eyes are just doing something weird. And it takes, you know, kind of six or seven times of them feeling that thing. And then seeing the distortion form, then we can kind of see how it works, that it is this form of immediate biofeedback. for the emotions that you cannot handle and that you may feel intellectually like you're able to feel trapped or controlled or manipulated, whatever emotion you're working with. And these are implicit emotional states in the brainstem, not thinking, abstracted emotion,
Starting point is 00:31:46 but implicit early emotional states, you know, it takes them a minute to realize, like, my brainstem is out of the window of tolerance there. It can't feel this, even if I think I can feel it and I'm unaware of it, I can't feel this. And then the real work begins. And, you know, I get emails from people all over the country that, you know, say, like, I'm a crank because I do brain spotting, or I like some of the metaphors that Carl Jung drew or that I do, you know, ETT. And so, like, I shouldn't have a license because, you know, whatever. You know, they've just taken their first research 101 class. It's usually clinical psychology grad students that are real early on. But, like, you know, we both have seen patients that have done the more manualizable forms of therapy that randomized control. trials like that, you know, have a place and do provide some benefit like CBT and DBT and ACT and RABT for years. Some of these patients have been in that.
Starting point is 00:32:41 But the level of what this works on in the brain and how deep it goes, I mean, I think is a place that a lot of people just have a really hard time, even when they want to get better and they're trying to focus on these things in like a purely relational or cognitive therapy. And in ETT and brain spotting, I mean, suck you into a different part of the brain in a different way of being with an emotional experience that are under language, you know, that are under objective thought, that are more like an emotion as an energy that is just activating that now you can start
Starting point is 00:33:11 to have a relationship with. And I think that's why the parts-based languages like IFS and Lifespan and, you know, voice dialogue, why they kind of meld with this pretty well. And they naturally make those like a great extension of people that are already doing good work with parts-based and semantic therapy. Yeah, it's a repression, an avoidance defense, that over time becomes automatic and all these buried emotions pile up inside a person affect them, but the person themselves doesn't even know where they're coming from. So with ETT, almost every session, people have new awarenesses, the sources, the roots of their anxiety or their depression become clear. And without that, what happens is you're going to have to fix it over and over.
Starting point is 00:34:02 But if you can get the... Or just white knuckle it through life because you know what you're supposed to do, but the emotion is still disregulating your behavior. You feel powerless and helpless. And when it's not conscious, you don't have much of a shot at fixing it by yourself. So this brings these things to conscious awareness, and then we resolve them. That's why the depth of it affects longevity when we make a change.
Starting point is 00:34:27 and it's just exciting as a therapist is exciting in fact one of my interns she said there's no way you can have burnout on this it's too exciting yeah yeah you see a person make a major turnaround I mean you're not going to get burned out they're going to get excited then her question was what do I do with my excitement after this and so we share it with each other and that's one way to deal deal with it um so did you have a another issue or question you want us to well i'd like to be respectful of your time um you know this is a pretty good overview i think for people that are wanting to find out more about et t or to get trained because i really do feel similar to brain spotting that this is just a pretty natural extension of any other effective type of therapy that it really i mean like a lot of times with me like i'll have talked to a patient for a long time and they're using the word angry but you know that isn't really the emotion i can't really figure it out maybe they're not able to put
Starting point is 00:35:24 exactly, you know, the conceptualization around the emotion, but we get on the board and immediately the color that goes black is what we're working with. And a lot of times it makes sense. I mean, it really helps them understand how they're really feeling what is really coming up and they kind of immediately are like, oh, okay, yeah, you know, I wouldn't allow it to feel angry. So I was calling this, you know, I was calling this like something else, but really that's what it is. I don't feel like I can have a voice. And, you know, a lot of that is just so interesting and so helpful for therapists that are curious and really want to always be prepared to handle the next thing that they don't know how to handle.
Starting point is 00:35:56 You know, there's a lot of tools here. Do you have anything to kind of cap us out that is helpful that you kind of would like to say to providers that may have questions or be interested about how to find out about ETT? Oh, sure. I mean, we have a website that has all the trainings coming up. We've got about 10 people that are trained to be facilitators for ETT. And I only do them here in Austin, Texas. where I am, and we have people around the country that train this,
Starting point is 00:36:29 and even one of them in Europe, that will do trainings from there. So it's available on our website. Do you only need to give that address? I can put all that in the show notes. And so anybody can click the link. If they're on the YouTube or if they're on the podcast, you'll see that link to the ETT training beneath. So you can find out more about the model
Starting point is 00:36:52 and then also register for a training if you'd like. like to. Particularly brain spotting and EMDR providers. I mean, I think this kind of continues to enhance what you're doing and it would probably be a good extension of those. There's never been a study that actually compare them, but I get therapists all the time who have been doing EMDR particularly and then they no longer do that after we, they get EMDR. So that happens repeatedly. So that's their perspective on it but they haven't actually done an actual study on it but I'm open to that if and when that would ever take place so it's it's taught the seven courses let me explain the first course covers two two methods the multi-dimensional eye
Starting point is 00:37:42 movement and the use of the spectral chart the second course involves the light device as well and gosh I'm always going to blank here in the second course, the light device and the goggles, okay? The third course has specific applications to the most common psychological challenges, depression, anxiety, trauma, OCD. So it covers a variety of things, but it's mostly trauma focused, and you become certified as a ETT complex trauma therapist after that. The fourth one focuses on somatic issues like physical pain, stress-related illness, sleep disorders, things of that nature on the fourth course. The fifth course is the spiritual and religious issues, and a lot of people have
Starting point is 00:38:38 those kinds of issues. The six courses on addictions. So number six is addiction. The seventh course is on couple therapy, how you apply this to couple therapy. So those are the seven basic courses we teach applications for ETT. So anyway, that's some information I think people need to have. I do, I start in January with level one and we go through the whole year all seven by the time we get to the finish. But there's other people in other parts of the country that are teaching it at different points.
Starting point is 00:39:11 Well, thank you so much for your time. We'll link to all of that. And if you have any interest, please go to the website, find out some more about ETT. I do think it's a pretty natural extension of what a lot of good providers. are already doing and just gives you some more tools in your toolbox so thank you so much for talking with us and we look forward to talking with you again thank you

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