About IEMT

Emotional Imprinting

Every experience causes a person to create a new kinaesthetic response to that experience and an Emotional Imprint is formed. This is how that person learns to feel about the experience.

Examples: At work the boss may say: “I’d like a word with you in my office”, or, we visit a hospital and see a doctor in a white coat. We may immediately feel like a child again being addressed by our parents, no matter how old we are. We may even be older than the boss or the doctor! These are examples of the Emotional Imprint in action.

IEMT asks the question, "how did this person learn to feel this way about this thing?" and resolves it.

Identity Imprinting

Identity is in a continual process of evolution, development and change. Our environment can have a huge impact on this.

Example: A shop floor worker who is promoted to management thus is no longer “one of us”, they are now “one of them - “the management”. This can create dramatic changes to status and acceptance by former workmates and new colleagues alike. So we can start asking ourselves “Who am I now?” “What does that mean to me”, “Where do I fit myself into this organisation”

Identity issues can have deeper aspects that can feed forward into the environment and occur in many contexts. Some are more robust than others such as gender identity, identity as a father, mother, wife, husband etc.

IEMT addresses the issue of, "how did this person learn to be this way?"

Problematic issues can arise from adopting an identity and cause patterns of chronic behaviour such as: “I am a depressive”, “I am a worrier”, “I am an anxious person”. Hence this becomes imprinted and we get absorbed within this new identity. It becomes how we primarily see ourselves and present ourselves to others.

IEMT specifically addresses the identity imprint and enables the therapist to by-pass the beliefs that often support the undesired identity such as, "I cannot do that because I am a worrier or a depressive"

IEMT is a proposed brief therapy and an evolving field that enables a core state change in minimal time.

Evolution: “IEMT is not the grand unified theory of therapy and change work and is an evolving model. It is an invaluable adjunctive for the trained therapist and when used in experienced hands, can provide an excellent remedial tool for emotional change, plus a generative tool for identity change.  IEMT enables positive results where previously a good outcome might have appeared improbable”.

Andrew T Austin, creator of IEMT