I believe the answer to that is to be found by the individual going through the therapy. However I also believe in empowering people to make a well founded choice in the matter. I always say that the therapist or counsellor is the "hired help". The expert on the trauma is the victim him or herself.

In the next couple of days I'll review a few therapies that are said to be effective in healing childhood trauma. Depending upon who you are and what your experiences were like, they may fit for you or be all wrong.

Whenever I do an intake with someone, I attempt to find out whether they want to be healed and leave the childhood sexual abuse behind, or do they mainly want to get rid of the symptoms that make it difficult to lead their life. Both approaches are valuable and quite often, after one has been achieved the other goal is also reached, or becomes reachable.

So rather than make a blanket statement about what kind of therapy is right for Childhood sexual abuse, I'll explain a few types of therapy and what they do, what they hope to accomplish. Today we'll start with EFT and EMDR. Both are relative newcomers in the therapy world and they seem well suited to today's philosophy of having therapy be short, fix the problem and get on with it. A no nonsense approach to therapy.

I believe that EFT or EMDR can be very useful in the first stages of healing from childhood sexual abuse. It takes the sting out of some of the emotions that resurface when the victim focusses on their childhood. In that sense it can be very effective and in particular on the symptoms of Post Traumatic Stress this can be very useful. I do believe that in addition a more comprehensive therapy is in most cases necessary as childhood sexual abuse can cause certain irrational thoughts to be woven into the very fabric of a personality.

The principle of EFT is the principle of dissociation. But rather than having dissociation come unexpectedly and as a debilitating condition, you use the process of EFT to desensitize memories and make them less emotionally taxing. It works by tapping certain places on the body, said to have a connection to the body's subtle energies in much the same way as acupuncture does.

Acupuncture has been tried and tested at least in the eastern world for centuries, and lately in the western world as well and has been found effective. The claims EFT makes are largely untested, but the charm of the therapy is that it barely needs a therapist anymore. Anyone can do the it, preferably on themselves.

The idea of EFT is that by tapping the body with the fingers in a specific order and specific places while thinking of the trauma, you desensitize the trauma. This means that you learn to recall the memory without the emotional content of it, making it much easier to bear. While doing the tapping sequence you repeat a specific formula, geared towards fully accepting the reality of what happened. "I accept myself completely, even though I have...." (insert specific problem on the dots)

The good part of EFT is that it's like a do-it-yourself-therapy. For survivors of Childhood Sexual Abuse trusting even a therapist can be a very difficult thing (not to mention that in some cases therapists have proved untrustworthy). EFT eliminates the need for a therapist, allthough in order to learn it, you could hire one to train you in the EFT-process.

On the downside:

• Some survivors of childhood sexual abuse don't remember the abuse except for the emotional content. If you can't recall what happened, how can you undo it from it's emotion.
• Sometimes the memories are all there, but the emotional content isn't... untill triggered in which case it comes out at inappropriate moments.
• It may be unethical to rob an experience of it's emotional content.
• The therapy has not been fully tested and is highly controversial, meaning it's unlikely to be covered by insurance.

The therapeutic community is quite sceptical of the so called "powertherapy" of which EFT is an example. They speak of "magicking things away" and "voodoo-therapy". Of course, if it does work, their livelihood is at stake.

EFT was developed by Cary Craig, someone outside the regular therapeutic community, with a background in Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP). The basic goal of the therapy is desensitization. The memories will be there but not hurt as much. I'm not sure that's a good thing, to be honest. Going through the pain and fear of my childhood memories helped me become more whole as a person. Helped me become the person that I am today. In facing the pain, I overcame it, overcame my fear of it, and became a stronger person.

In EMDR the therapist moves his finger in front of you asking you to follow it with your eyes, while thinking of your traumatic memories. The idea is a lot like the EFT-idea: by going back to the memories while something else if occupying at least part of your attention you become less emotional about it.

In the more common behavioral therapy, desensitization is an important part of the process. It works by recalling the events of your childhood vividly and repeatedly. The theory is that after repeating it often you become desensitized to it and it won't hold as much fear for you. A major drawback of the therapy is that many victims of childhood sexual abuse find the therapy too taxing and stop the treatment before it's time.

EMDR added the eye movements to desensitization. Francine Shapiro came up with the idea of employing rapid eye movements in therapy. Why the eye movements? When a person is dreaming, their eyes move very rapidly. Sleep deprivation experiments show that when a person is woke up consistently during this phase of sleep, the mental health of that person deteriorates at an alarming speed. We need dreams in order to maintain our sanity. Using the rapid eye movements on conscious memories seems like a logical step.

Critics of EMDR say that there is no evidence that the the eyemovements add anything new to the therapy, which is essentially another desensitization-therapy. Some evidence seems to suggest that it works just a little faster than classic behavioral therapy desensitization.

The problem with both EMDR and EFT is that they appear to hone in on a single trauma. If I would have had to do EMDR for each traumatic incident of my youth I would have needed years to reprocess my past. Most of my healing I did with PRI, combined with Inner Child work and writing. My road to healing led me past many types of therapy and I'd be leary of anyone promising a quick fix, as these powertherapies seem to do.