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Deactivating the Buttons: Integrating Radical Exposure Tapping with a Family Therapy Framework
Author(s) -
MacKin Laurie
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
australian and new zealand journal of family therapy
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.297
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8438
pISSN - 0814-723X
DOI - 10.1002/anzf.1070
Subject(s) - context (archaeology) , intervention (counseling) , psychotherapist , reactivity (psychology) , family therapy , desensitization (medicine) , psychology , exposure therapy , tapping , session (web analytics) , eye movement desensitization and reprocessing , clinical psychology , posttraumatic stress , medicine , computer science , psychiatry , anxiety , engineering , paleontology , mechanical engineering , alternative medicine , receptor , pathology , world wide web , biology
The purpose of this paper is to describe and illustrate with case examples a brief intervention termed Radical Exposure Tapping ( RET ). RET can be integrated with family therapy to address stuck points where the therapy is hindered by a family member's affective block , an intense and unchangeable emotional reactivity to a specific trigger. RET draws from the methodology of Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing ( EMDR ) and combines it with the tapping sequence of the Emotional Freedom Technique ( EFT ) to produce an intervention that is more flexible than EMDR , provides greater rigor than using the EFT technique alone and can be effective in a single session within the context of family therapy. The paper puts this work into context by first over viewing definitions of trauma and Post‐Traumatic Stress Disorder, arguing that family members' emotional reactivity may be a symptom of PTSD even when they would not qualify for the diagnosis because they had not experienced a life threatening event.