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For Practitioners: When Clients Get Stuck
We all have clients who just seem to be stuck, no matter what we try, they can't see past where they are at. This is when looking at a person's Unique Psychology, Unique Health, and Felt Safety can help us put ourselves in their shoes. Not only that, with Esogetic Medicine, we can shift their perception in a way that words never can.
If you have a client who is stuck, this is not a failure of your approach. It is often a sign that what is keeping them stuck is not accessible through words alone.
Why verbal approaches sometimes hit a wall
The part of the brain most involved in rational understanding, decision-making, and integrating emotional experience — the prefrontal cortex — isn't fully developed until our mid-twenties. See work by Dr. Dan Siegel.
Memories formed before when we are very young, particularly relating to experiences that felt threatening or overwhelming, are often stored not in the narrative, verbal parts of the brain but in the body and in subcortical structures that don't communicate easily with language. See work by Bessel van der Kolk, MD (The Body Keeps The Score).
This is why a client can understand, intellectually why they respond the way they do, and maybe even what it is costing them to do so — and still they can't change.
What I can see that talk therapy can't
I use a tool called Kirlian Photography — a method developed by Peter Mandel, founder of Esogetic Medicine, that captures the energetic emission from the fingers and toes, which allows us to see the state of the body's information and communication systems from a physical, psychological, and developmental perspective. We can see what is open, what is blocked, what is under resourced, and even when there is risk of making things worse if we don't reconnect someone's ability to process before we release memories from their subconscious.
This is what my Kirlian Camera looks like.
I use the term 'Felt Safety' — borrowed from Robyn Gobbel's work, which explores how people behave when Felt Safety is absent. Kirlian Photography lets us see whether it is present, and if not, the developmental history behind it, so we know what we can try to do to restore it.
Robyn moved from working with clients with a trauma history to expanding her work to anyone with similar behavioural issues, regardless of whether they think they have a history of trauma or not — and this tracks with what I see in practice. A client may be certain their issues come from the things they can name. But once we look at their photo and apply treatment, they often realize something else entirely was contributing — and with more clarity and more Felt Safety, they are able to move forward in ways that weren't possible before.
The photo can also show approximately when something got stuck — reading the attachment history from ages 0–12, including prenatal and pre-conception, and the adolescent period from age 12-24.
One example: a parent came in coping with stress by dissociating — not fully present in her own body. Her hands were barely showing in her photo. After a single treatment, her hands began to reappear. As she came back into her body, she was able to see a new way to support her child — an option she genuinely could not see before. We think we have no options because the information is unable to flow through our body and life. When we bring people back into their body and help them digest what's there, they start to see they are not trapped.
What changes when the block is addressed
This work has been studied in clinical settings, and the findings point to something consistent: simply identifying which regulatory category someone is in — shock, reactive, or rigid — and treating that, rather than the presenting symptom, is what moves things.
Peter Mandel's position is that no illness arises without brainwave dysregulation first. This is why brainwave induction is often applied before colour light therapy — it signals to the body that the brain itself is initiating the change, which allows the cells to open and accept what follows rather than resist it.
→ In a study of 64 patients with back pain, reading the Kirlian photo to identify regulatory state and treating accordingly led to improvement in more than 80% of participants — including more than 50% of those whose photos showed regulatory rigidity, typically the hardest pattern to shift. EEA Clinical Study — Dr. Peter Wollaert
→ A study of brainwave induction therapy found consistent reduction in stress index and sympathetic dominance, improvement in parasympathetic activity, and a reduction in negative feelings of up to 40% across participants. Induction Therapy Study — Dr. Peter Wollaert
If you want to go a little deeper into what this looks like in practice, here is a real example:
In the first photo, the hands are barely visible and the second toe on the left foot is closed. In Esogetic Medicine, this pattern reflects a system that is walled in — managing stress by shutting down rather than processing it. The information isn't flowing. The person is present, but not fully available to what's happening around them or inside them.
In the second photo, the hands have returned and the toe has opened. What clients typically describe after this kind of shift: a sense of lightness, of something having lifted. Mental clarity where there was fog. The feeling of being able to see options they couldn't see before. Not because anything new was added — but because something that was blocking the view was cleared.
What clients sometimes describe afterward is that something they already knew finally landed differently. The parts that had a hold on them feel less present. The parts that matter feel more accessible. And the work they were already doing with you now has somewhere to go.
Who this is for
If you work with people using a predominantly verbal or cognitive approach — therapy, coaching, counselling, somatic work, learning support, occupational therapy, speech-language pathology, addiction recovery, or any other field where you are trying to help someone shift a pattern — and you have a client who is genuinely engaged but not moving, this is worth considering.
I am not a replacement for what you do. I am a complement to it. You hold the relationship, the history, the ongoing work. I offer a way to see what the body is holding, and treatment that works to clear what has been in the way.
How it works in practice
A client comes to me — either referred by you or on their own. I take a Kirlian photo, do an assessment, and offer optional treatments. If they feel comfortable, I am happy to share what I find with you, so the work you are already doing together has more context to build on.
I learned this modality partly because when I brought my own child in for treatment, the practitioner wasn't able to hold space for me to talk about it. Your clients already have you, which is great. I do this work to fill that gap.
Get in touch
If you have a client who's stuck, or if you're curious whether this could be useful for your practice, reach out.