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Jed Diamond, Ph.D. has been a health-care professional for the last 45 years.
He is the author of 9 books, including Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places,
Male Menopause, The Irritable Male Syndrome, and Mr. Mean: Saving Your
Relationship from the Irritable Male Syndrome . He offers counseling to men,
women, and couples in his office in California or by phone with people throughout
the U.S. and around the world. To receive a Free E-book on Men’s Health and a
free subscription to Jed’s e-newsletter go to http://facebook.com/menalivenow. If
you enjoy my articles, please subscribe. I write to everyone who joins my Scribd
team. My new book, my 10th, Tapping Power: A Man’s Guide to Eliminating
Pain, Stress, Anger, Depression and Other Ills Using the Revolutionary
Tools of Energy Psychology, is due for publication in the fall, 2011 or spring
2012.
I grew up in a family that relied on things that you could see, touch, and
construct. My mother was the office manager for a company called “Tubular
Structures” that made very solid scaffolding out of pipe--the kind you see big
burly men climbing up and down as they paint houses and fix upper story
could build anything and made me a fabulous tree house when I was nine years
old.
But there was another side to our family history that we rarely talked about.
My biological father was a writer, poet, and stage actor. When I was five years
old, he tried to commit suicide and was hospitalized at Camarillo State Mental
Hospital, north of Los Angeles. I tried to understand what happened to him. But
my five year old mind couldn’t grasp the idea that he had been taken down by a
mysterious “nervous breakdown” that I certainly couldn’t see and no one seemed
to be able to explain. I never saw him again until the day I graduated college.
Looking back I realize that my life has been shaped by these two competing
forces:
(1) The world of things we can engage and manipulate with our five senses,
(2) The world of energy and spirit that can cause “nervous breakdowns,” as
My mother always had a fear that I would turn out like my father and “lose my
would lead me to safety and a good solid profession (“I wouldn’t mind,” she told
I got the message and went on to college with a pre-med course of study. I
and got a four year, full-tuition fellowship to U.C. San Francisco Medical School.
My future was assured. There was only one glitch. My long lost father showed
I learned that he had escaped from the mental hospital after being locked up
for more than seven years (escape was not an easy feat in those days), and had
become a street puppeteer. I was drawn to his world of feelings, emotions, and
“crazy ideas”--on the spur of the moment we jumped on a bus in Los Angeles
and went to San Diego to see a Shakespeare play. At the same time, he also
scared me to death. I knew enough psychology to be aware that he had more
I did, indeed, start medical school in the fall, but dropped out after three
weeks. It must have seemed an irrational thing to do, because they required me
to see a psychiatrist before they would allow me to leave. Most people would do
most anything to get in to one of the top medical schools in the country, and get a
free ride the whole way. Here I was giving the money back and leaving for points
unknown. Pretty crazy, I’ll admit, but it was one of the best decisions I ever
made.
Social Work in 1968. I got married, landed a great job as a counselor at a local
hospital, and rented a wonderful house in Pinole, a rural suburb in the East-bay,
across the bridge from San Francisco. Our neighbors had horses that they let us
The first summer we were there, we invited our closest friends from college
for a visit. They had a four year old son who was cute as a bug and
wandered off and climbed under a fence into the corral where the horses were.
By the time the boy’s father reached him he was screaming in anguish with a
red welt rising on his forehead. His mother immediately reached out for the boy.
She comforted him with her words and held one hand up about three inches from
his head and passed her hand back and forth over the wound, while the Dad
called for an ambulance. The boy seemed to relax and eventually stopped
crying.
I asked her what she was doing. I wondered how waving her hand over the
boy could be helpful. She kept her hand moving slowly and told me, “Its ‘energy
medicine.’ I’m healing his ‘energy body.’” I nodded like I understood what she
was saying. She turned her attention back to her son and I gave my wife a look
that said, “We love her, but what she’s doing is nuts. You can’t heal your son by
waving at him.”
Well, things turned out O.K. The boy was checked out at the local hospital
concluded that he must not have really been hurt. I relegated “energy medicine”
to some new age mumbo jumbo and forgot all about it.
on “healing at a distance” and wanted me to participate. I told him over and over
again that I wasn’t interested and didn’t believe in distance healing, whatever that
meditations and visualizations. I couldn’t see how they could be helpful, but they
were relaxing.
Then he had us work in pairs. He had a deck of index cards and we each
were asked to pick one. One person closed their eyes and did the relaxation
exercise and got into a meditative state. The other person read what was on the
card. Each card had a number, the sex, and age of a patient. We were asked to
visualize what the problem might be and to send healing energy to the person.
I couldn’t believe I was really doing this. It seemed ridiculous to me. But I
45 year old female subject might look like and imagined myself “scanning” down
her body with my hands to “see” what was wrong with her. I truly wanted to get
this over with so I could go home. Nothing unusual happened as I went down the
front of the body and I proceeded to scan the back of her head on my way down
her body.
When I got to the small of her back, my hands turned icy cold. It was like they
had suddenly been plunged into freezing water. I must have gone pale because
my partner asked me what the matter was. I blurted out, “Something’s wrong
with her 4th lumbar vertebrae.” My partner seemed calm and replied, “Well, pray
for her healing,” which I did my best to do, even though I was still startled that my
After we were done, my friend who was leading the workshop told us what the
ailment was for each person we had prayed for. When he read the number on
my card and said, “this woman has undergone surgery for a ruptured disk at her
4th lumbar vertebrae,” I nearly fell out of my seat. My scientific mind began
working out how I could have known where the woman’s problem was located. It
didn’t make sense. All I had known was her age and her sex and a number on
the card. My partner didn’t know her ailment so couldn’t have inadvertently
tipped me off.
Not all those in the class had gotten the ailment correct, but a number of us
had. Later we would learn that those who were prayed for actually healed better
than those who had not. You might think this would have made a believer out of
me. It actually scared me to death. I wasn’t ready to expand my mind that far. I
quickly “forgot” the whole thing and my old friend and I drifted apart.
young guys in my neighborhood. After taking advantage of all the things modern
medicine had to offer (mostly drugs), I was referred for acupuncture treatment
since my shoulder was still stiff and painful. By now I was a bit more open to
I believed it might help with my shoulder pain, but the problem was that I was
afraid of needles—which may have been part of the reason I dropped out of
medical school. Telling me they were tiny and thin and wouldn’t hurt, didn’t make
“Actually, there is,” she told me. “It’s called Emotional Freedom Techniques.
I’ve never tried it myself, but I have a patient who swears that it helps.” She gave
was guided through some simple techniques and found my pain quickly began to
lesson. In a few sessions, the pain was gone and my full range of motion had
I’ve always loved walking. When I was young I couldn’t wait to get out of
school for the summer so I could take off my shoes and walk. The first week was
always tough, because my feet were so tender, but I would quickly build up
calluses and off I’d go. I was a happy kid, in spite of my father’s absence, and
only later did I come to recognize the healing power of walking on the earth.
I found out that walking could lift my moods when I would become depressed.
Walking in nature never failed to calm my mind and raise my spirits. Later I
found running was a great stress reliever. When I read the book, Earthing: The
most important health discovery ever? I learned about the science behind the
Heart Coherence
I was doing one of my short runs (3 miles) when my heart began to pound like
it was coming out of my chest. I slowed to a walk. But my heart kept pounding.
Suddenly my head felt like it was about to explode and the pain was so great I
was literally knocked off my feet. I was stunned. I didn’t know what was
happening, but I was scared. The pain eased and I walked home. I called my
doctor and after conducting a number of tests, I learned I had a rare adrenal
tumor.
I learned that feeling like my head was about to explode was literally true.
When the tumor pushes on the adrenal gland, a huge amount of adrenaline is
sent into the blood stream, blood pressure goes through the roof, and most
people die from a brain hemorrhage. I was lucky. I didn’t die, had the tumor
Although I was “cured,” I wanted to know why I had gotten this and what I
“just happened.” There was nothing I could have done to prevent it and nothing I
could do in the future. “You should just go back to your normal life,” they told me.
my inner wisdom telling me to slow down. My wife and I decided to move to the
country and I learned simple techniques for keeping my heart and brain in
balance.
Although life in the country was peaceful and we both were glad we got given
up big city life, there were still stresses in our relationship. I often became
irritable and my wife felt hurt and would withdraw. Her withdrawal would often
Over a period of months I learned about “irritable male syndrome” and “male-
type depression” which I’ll discuss in future chapters. And I also learned about
“emotionally focused couple work.” I had been attending a conference with many
of the luminaries in the field of psychology and healing. Though many were
good, the person who I most connected with was a slightly build woman from
blood pressure, “Does your wife show her love?” Those who answered “No”
suffered almost twice as many angina episodes during the next five years as did
those who replied, “Yes.” She went on to describe her own studies and the
program she had developed. She told us that emotional security was the key to
a lifetime of love.
Hearing her talk was like a light going on in my heart. Much of modern
immature about being attached to an adult lover. We have used terms like
codependent, needy, and wimpy to describe people who express those needs.
Like many, I grew up feeling that I didn’t get enough love and nurturing from
my parents. I vowed to be a different kind of father than my father had been for
me and I think I succeeded pretty well. But I believed that once we grew up we
didn’t need that same kind of nurturing. “I’m an adult now, I should be able to
take care of myself and stand on my own two feet,” I would think to myself. “If I
act ‘needy’ I’m not being a real man.” Emotionally Focused Couples Work
When the book was nearly finished a friend gave me a copy of The Healing
Code by Alexander Loyd, Ph.D and Ben Johnson, M.D. “I think you’ll like this,”
he told me. “It speaks to a lot of the issues you discuss in your book, particularly
on the way stress affects our health.” I read the book and found it definitely fit
with my own ideas and offered a very clear understanding of how Energy
I called Dr. Loyd and talked with him extensively about his work. It is clear to
me that he is a caring and compassionate man who was looking for help for his
depressed wife when he found some of the answers he was looking for in the
In this book I will be showing you how to put these tools to work for you so
that you can get the most out of your life and can become a better man, a better
husband, and a better father. So, if you’re ready, let’s move ahead.