About me: I graduated with a Master’s degree in clinical mental health counseling from the University of New Orleans in 2012. I was recognized by my program with the Outstanding Master’s Student Award in my graduating cohort.

I got my start in the addictions counseling field, and I quickly began to understand that my clients were not hurting themselves and others “on purpose,” they just couldn’t imagine another way to live. I have a deep compassion for how baffling and painful it is when we sabotage ourselves even when we “know” better. When I went into private practice for myself, I continued to treat addictions and codependency. I think I was a pretty good talk therapist. I knew about somatic therapies, but I didn’t think they were “legitimate.” However I would often run into clients who could intellectually comprehend the concept of self-compassion, but they couldn’t translate that information into transformation on the body level to improve their self esteem and their quality of life. I’d hear things like “Beth, I get what you’re saying, I know it’s ‘illogical’ that I’m the worst person in the world, but you can’t change how I feel in my body, and in my body I know that’s true.” Clearly there were places that talk therapy couldn’t reach.

I got interested in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) after reading Dr. Bessel Van Der Kolk’s book “The Body Keeps the Score.” I appreciate so much that he encouraged therapists to go out and receive the modalities that they train in as clients, so they can know what it’s meant to do, and what it’s supposed to feel like. So I got my own EMDR therapist to try it out before I spent my money on a clinical training.

EMDR works. And for some people it works really well and quickly. For some others, EMDR feels a lot like packing explosives into the basement of their unconscious mind to “see what comes up” and that’s not gentle enough. I moved on to a new EMDR therapist and she asked me: “would you be willing to try a therapeutic modality that is gentler, more thorough, and goes deeper more quickly than EMDR?” That’s a killer sales pitch, and I said yes.

She was talking about Advanced Integrative Therapy (AIT), which is a combined somatic and cognitive therapy that uses physical touch to help desensitize and reprocess the nervous system’s response to stress and trauma. It’s similar in many ways to Emotional Freedom Techniques (‘tapping’). AIT is considered to be an Energy Psychology modality, and it’s also considered by lots of talk therapists to be “weird.” But weird isn’t bad if trying to be normal is what got us all sick in the first place! I describe AIT to my clients as “EMDR’s weird cousin.” She’s living out of a Winnebago, bathing her crystals, and dancing naked in the moonlight. But you know what I care about? Results. And in my experience, AIT works.

I also began to work on showing that AIT works because as soon as I fell in love with the modality and got trained in it, I found out that there wasn’t any clinical research on AIT’s effectiveness in any peer reviewed journals. So I and my colleagues on the AIT Institute’s Research Committee went about the business of facilitating the collection of clinical research on the potential effectiveness of AIT. And you know what? The data shows that it works.

One of the reasons AIT is so special is because it uses kinesiology style manual muscle testing (kMMT) as a screening, diagnostic, and confirmation tool. Muscle testing is like a GPS for the client’s deepest knowing. Your body both keeps the score, and it has all of the information you need to find what needs healing. Our job is to figure out how to ask the right questions.

If the thought of reading the research makes your eyes glaze over, that’s no problem. Here’s a really short intro video that I did about AIT for psychology Master’s students at Bond University in Australia: