NOTES ON LANGUAGE IN ENERGY PSYCHOLOGY
“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” So begins the Gospel of John, emphasising the divine power of language.
Vibrational sound – specific phonons of cosmic music – may be indeed a fundamental organising force in the universe, creating crucial geometries in matter and life (Jerman & Meijer, 2020; Meijer, 2021)
Human beings are creatures of language. We are born into a world of sounds produced by human vocal cords. In the womb, we are bathed in the sounds within the mother’s body, but also her voice. We later learn that these sounds have meanings and have effects. One particular sound is assigned to us as a name. We begin to identify with this sound. Whilst essential features of human life, thought, and communication, we can easily become lost in a web of words, like a viral code that takes over the software of our mind (Mollon, 2020).
Words can be used with skill – to communicate, to dominate and deceive, and to heal. For these purposes words are chosen with care and intention. By contrast, many common uses of words are relatively scattered, incoherent, chitter-chatter.
In various modalities of energy psychology, we use words with care as they influence and direct the subtle energy system of the body. In the 1980s psychiatrist John Diamond demonstrated how certain forms of words can have an effect on particular energy meridians. For example, in a patient with cardiac problems the heart meridian may test as weak (when using kinesiology muscle testing) but if the person states “my heart is full of love”, the meridian will then test strong. This indicates important connections between different levels of the human system: the condition of the heart, the meridians, muscle tone, and words. The choice of words has an effect – regardless of whether the person believes those words.
Words can enable us to identify and access the particular emotions that we are experiencing. Part of the work of psychotherapy is often to do with helping the client find the relevant words for what they are feeling – and some clients are initially quite limited in their emotional vocabulary.
Psychologist Roger Callahan was the first to develop methods of acupoint tapping to disrupt troublesome patterns of thought and emotion. His procedure would be first to ask the client to utter a word or phrase that captures the problem whilst applying gentle pressure to an outstretched arm (kinesiology). The muscle tone would go weak since the client is accessing distress. Callahan would then find the meridian, or sequences of meridians, that would cause the muscle tone to be strong.
Initially, he would simply ask the client to think of the problem issue whilst guiding them to tap on a particular sequence of meridians. However, he noticed that some people would be unconsciously opposed to their stated goal of overcoming the target problem – their energy would be reversed in relation to this. If applying kinesiology, the muscle tone would go weak if the person were asked to state “I want to be over this problem”, and strong if asked to state “I want to keep this problem”. He called this a “psychological reversal” – or, as some others have termed it, a “psycho-energetic reversal” since it is both psychological and energetic.
A crucial distinction here is the two ways of using kinesiology muscle testing. One is to ascertain whether a statement registers as true (strong muscle tone) or false (weak muscle tone). The other common use is to test whether the person’s system registers distress (or toxicity) regarding an idea or phenomenon (weak muscle tone), or pleasure or lack of distress (strong muscle tone). In either case, we use words as signifiers of what we are presenting to the subtle energy system.
This distinction can be subtle. For example, if we energy test the phrase "When I failed all my A level exams", the muscle tone will be weak (for that person) because these words access the distress of that event - but if we test "When I failed all my A level exams is the best phrase for us to use in treating this issue", the muscle tone may be strong because the person's system is agreeing with that statement.
When Callahan found a person’s system registered a psychological reversal, his acupoint tapping would not work at all. However, his explorations revealed a couple of ways of reducing this resistance. One was to tap the side of hand small-intestine acupoint. For some unclear reason, this seemed to help. The other was to have the person make a statement of self-acceptance: “Even though I have this problem, I completely accept myself”. Interestingly, it does not seem to matter whether or not the person consciously believes the statement of self-acceptance – it still has an effect, just as John Diamond found with his meridian-specific affirmations.
When Gary Craig later developed Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), as a simplified and modified form of Callahan’s Thought Field Therapy (TFT), he used Callahan’s combination of side of hand tapping and the statement of self-acceptance but called it the “setup statement”. For Craig, this procedure was a way of setting up the target for the acupoint tapping, whereas for Callahan it was a treatment technique for psychological reversals as a prelude to treatment of the target problem. This has led to considerable confusion for some students of energy psychology.
The ill-concealed resentment between Callahan and Craig played out in two opposite directions. Craig stated he did not believe in the concept of psychological reversal – and thus used Callahan’s technique for this but called it the “setup”. In response, Callahan stopped using the statement of self-acceptance and would simply ask the client to tap the side of hand to neutralize the reversal. Moreover, he would not use any particular words during the sequence of acupoint taps but would merely ask the client to think about the problem. He said he wished to “get rid of the verbiage”. By contrast, language plays a key role in Craig’s EFT, which includes words and phrases from the client’s own discourse at each tapping point, and also clever reframings (often used during the “setup” to bring about shifts in cognition and perspective. All this drew upon Craig’s prior learning in the field of NLP and its focus on language patterns.
Another key difference between Callahan’s TFT and Craig’s EFT is that the former places importance on the specificity of the meridian sequence (which may be determined by kinesiology) whereas the latter applies a general sequence but emphasizes the specificity of language and the target issue. We might say that Callahan worked with the specific energetic information (meridian sequence) within the “thought field” of the problem, whilst Craig worked with specific emotional, cognitive and memory information accessed via language.
Acupoint tapping methods tend to move quite quickly from point to point, and the use of words tends to have a relatively free-form and shifting quality. By contrast, methods that work via the chakra system tend to use carefully formulated phrases and statements to capture the target problem succinctly and these are often repeated at each chakra.
Over the several decades since energy psychology first appeared (late 1970s), there has been a significant evolution in the role of language. A number of practitioners who were schooled originally in acupoint tapping modalities have developed ways of working that no longer relay upon manual stimulation of the subtle energy system. Examples of these include Logosynthesis, Ask and Receive, Be Set Free Fast, Gary Craig’s own ‘Optimal EFT with the Unseen Therapist’, and a number of others. These are based on a slightly meditative state, connecting with higher realms, and a series of coherent and succinct statements of intention – sometimes rather akin to a prayer. An interesting hybrid approach is that of Tapas Acupressure Technique (TAT), developed originally in the 1990s, which combines the TAT pose of holding particular meridian and chakra points and the occipital lobe of the brain, with a series of elegantly formulated statements that cover a wide range of factors that might be maintaining the problem. All these approaches work very well – and depend crucially upon language to direct the flow of subtle energy and transformations in mind, brain, and body.
Words and the sounds associated with them can be either coherent and order-creating (entropy reducing, or neg-entropic) or destructive, breaking up existing patterns (entropy increasing) and allowing new order to emerge. The sounds of ancient mantras often have the latter property. In psychotherapeutic work, it can be desirable to break up existing energy fields and patterns that are too ordered and rigid (persisting states of depression, obsessions, addictions, etc) – to increase entropy – whilst also enabling new and more life-supporting patterns to emerge, a process sometimes called syntropy (Mollon, 2025).
A classic method for unravelling dense concentrations of meaning is the psychoanalytic procedure of free-association (Barratt, 2016). The client is invited to speak of whatever comes to mind, without regard for what might appear sensible, rational, or acceptable. This allows meaning to untangle along associative paths of metaphor and metonymy. In my own work of Psychoanalytic Energy Psychotherapy, I guide the client to tap on selected acupoints and speak freely of whatever emerges. Thus, this combines acupoint tapping with free-association, two modalities that disrupt rigid patterns or knots of signifiers, allowing new perspectives to emerge. Again, words and speech are fundamental.
References
Barratt, B. (2016). Radical Psychoanalysis. An Essay on Free-Associative Praxis. London. Routledge.
Jerman, I. & Meijer, D.K.F. (2020). Consciousness in the Universe is Tuned by a Musical Master Code. Part 1: A Conformal Mental Attribute of Reality.
Meijer, D.K. F. (2021). Scale-invariant Symmetry Breaking of a Musical Master-code from a 5-D Superfluid Sub-Quantum Space Is Instrumental in the Fabric of Reality, Life Conditions and Cosmic Consciousness, 2021
Mollon, P. (2008). Psychoanalytic Energy Psychotherapy. London. Karnac/Routledge.
Mollon, P. (2020). The Problem of Words – It’s Why We are all Mad! Chapter 14 in R. Carroll & J. Ryan (Eds.) What is Normal? Psychotherapists Explore the Question. London. Confer.
Mollon, P. (2025). The Physics of the Mind: New Perspectives for Psychotherapists, Healers, and Seekers. London, Karnac.