Identity Healing Practitioner Training

Learn advanced tapping processes to help your clients who are struggling to cope with the effects of abusive or neglectful childhoods.

If you are an experienced tapping practitioner, you will know that some issues are more difficult to work with than others.

Helping clients with problems derived from childhood abuse or neglect can be particularly difficult because some problems are very resilient and don’t respond easily to standard tapping techniques.

Identity Healing is a set of psychologically based tapping processes that gives you a direct way to work with these clients’ issues by helping them identify and gently heal those parts of themselves that cause are running their adult lives (no memories needed).

As a happy side effect, these processes automatically help them develop a genuine sense of self-compassion and self acceptance.

The Identity Healing Practitioner course is a 16-hour online training for experienced tapping practitioners to learn and practice a gentle way of working with the parts of their client that don’t respond easily to standard tapping approaches.

How can Identity Healing help?

If you are an experienced tapping practitioner, you will have completed the training, worked your way through certification and had a lot of practice working with clients.

You will have found and neutralised numerous painful memories, eased many difficult emotions and helped many clients to have happier, more fulfilling lives.

However, some clients have issues that are more difficult to work with than others.

For example:

• some clients can’t access some or any of their childhood memories, it’s all an unhappy blank.
• even though you’ve tapped extensively on some memories, they can never quite get resolved.
• some have the same attitudes towards themselves that their, less than perfect, caregivers had towards them. They can be wonderfully kind and accepting of others, but never themselves.
• some clients have parts that are at war with themselves.
• they have toxic identity beliefs, such as “I am worthless”, “I hate myself”, which are difficult to resolve with tapping.

Clients with these difficulties have often experienced abuse and neglect during childhood and its effects are damaging, pervasive and difficult to work with.

Identity Healing is designed to work directly with the ‘parts’ of the clients that are holding that distress and are causing trouble in the client’s adult life.

The origins of Identity Healing

As is often the case with people in the counselling or therapy professions, my interest in this kind of work grew out of my (Andy Hunt) own history and needs.

A very long time ago, I was a rather shy, introspective teenager that got interested in psychology as a way of better understanding myself, getting along with others and figuring out why I wasn’t as happy as I thought I should be.

At university, although I didn’t study psychology, I read a lot about it and got interested in counselling.

After university, at the tender age of 22, I took a three-year part-time Person Centred counselling diploma course with the Person Centred Approach Institute, an organisation associated with Carl Rogers, the originator of Person Centred counselling.

When I had completed this training, I realised that I was completely unprepared to be a counsellor and I needed much more life experience to be effective; so I went through various unrelated jobs that eventually led me to training to become a software engineer.

In 2000, I started to learn NLP and then EFT. Using these techniques consistently, I began to notice profound shifts in my experience. I started to feel more at ease with myself than I had ever done before.

Having helped myself, I wanted to help other people using the skills I’d learned, so I trained to be a Master Practitioner and Trainer of NLP, a Level 3 EFT Practitioner and Trainer of EFT, and completed an NLP Psychotherapy diploma in 2004, and many other trainings since. I have been in private practice as a psychological therapist and trainer since 2005. I am a member of EFT International, which is my professional organisation, I am also the co-chair of the EFT International Ethics and Professional Conduct Committee.

Of course, many practitioners are drawn to the work that resonates with their own situation and needs. Since I had been most affected by issues of poor self acceptance and limiting beliefs, I naturally gravitated towards this kind of work.

I have always experimented with tapping techniques (I’ve written a book about some of them), so naturally I started experimenting with approaches that would be helpful for me. I started on what would become Identity Healing in 2008 and the early version made its first public appearance in 2011 at an EFT Gathering event in York.

Since then, I have been refining and developing it, finding that it worked well for me and for my clients. Having used these techniques for some time, I’m confident enough in them to train other tapping practitioners.

As a therapist, I specialise in working with people who feel emotionally broken, who have not yet been able to change, and who may even blame or hate themselves for it; Identity Healing is a big part of that work.

The idea of healing in the sense of being made whole is very close to my heart, and has been a big part of my own personal self development. These techniques have helped me and many others experience valuable integrations and a quieter and more resourceful inner life.

What makes identity issues so difficult to work with?

It’s because there’s more to us than meets the eye

It’s easy to believe that there is just one of you, one “I” who inhabits and owns the body you are in. If you look at your official identities: passports, driving licences etc, there is just one photograph and one name.

When you look at all the people around you there seem to be just one of each, one person for each body. We all appear to have a single identity. We all seem to be just one person, but beneath the skin and behind the eyes it is more complicated than that.

We may find that in one situation we can be one person and in another situation we can be quite a different person. Perhaps we are usually kind and patient, but at other times we are overcome with anger and impatience. It’s as if there are two or more personalities at work, in control and in conflict with one another.

Usually, there are more than just two parts of ourselves. There are many different younger parts of ourselves, all appearing at times to take a role in our lives.

Rather than one fixed identity, or self, we seem to be a walking community of younger parts of ourselves.

• Sometimes different sub-personalities are responsible for our emotions and behaviour.
• Sometimes these parts of ourselves agree.
• Sometimes they have different needs and aspirations.
• Sometimes they are at war with one another and with us.

These parts of ourselves are given different names in different psychological systems; they might be referred to as parts, sub-personalities, self-states, ego-states, self-schemas etc.

How are these younger parts of ourselves formed?

When we are very young, we are vulnerable.

In an ideal world, we would be supported by loving parents and siblings, our path to adulthood would be comparatively easy. With the right kind of support, we would develop strong and robust personalities.

Unfortunately, we do not all grow up in an ideal world, there are many threats to our physical and psychological safety which challenge our developing selves.

• Trauma - Physical or emotional trauma can have a lasting impact on our psyche.
• Abuse - Abusive environments tax and distort a child’s development in all sorts of ways.
• Neglect - While less obviously damaging, both physical and emotional neglect can stress our developing system.
• Withholding love - Withholding love and acceptance can be stressful for infants and children.
• Shaming and blaming - Shaming and blaming can be perceived as a threat to the system.All these threats (real or perceived) produce a stress response as the child tries to cope with the situation and manage their own distress.

We do the best we can in those situations, but our solutions to those problems can haunt us in our adult lives.

Our younger selves have to do the best they can to cope with whatever stressful situation they find themselves in. They try to maintain their own safety and to encourage their caregivers to continue to look after them.

They don’t have many responses to choose from because they are limited by their age, experience, resources and capabilities. A young child has a limited capacity to respond to a difficult situation, they do the best they can, but the tools at their disposal may not be well suited to the job in hand.

The responses that they come up with for that situation can become the default response for those kinds of challenges in later life. Those emotional and behavioural responses are ‘frozen’ into a ‘younger self’ (a sub-personality). As the child grows up, those impoverished and threatened younger selves stay frozen in place and become the inbuilt ‘solutions’ to those kinds of problems.

When faced with similar situations in later life, that younger self gets triggered and tries to manage the situation using those old responses.

How could we help those wounded ‘younger selves’?

The Identity Healing processes are used to soothe the stress and distress of those younger selves (that were not soothed at the time), give them all the emotional resources they needed at the time (but did not get) and invite them to ‘grow up’ and become integrated into our adult selves.

The six steps of Identity Healing are simple in principle:

• Identifying the struggling younger self (which is easier than you might imagine).
• Use visualisation to make it easy for us to tap for that younger self.
• Soothe that part, using tapping to relieve its distress.
• Give the soothed younger self the emotional resources that it needed at the time but did not have.
• Integrate that transformed younger self with the client.
• Invite the younger part to grow, so it can learn from all the wisdom and experience that the adult now has.

Of course, because people are complicated, the process can be a little more complicated than that.

These processes can also be applied to memories that don’t seem to respond to tapping.

As a happy side effect of this approach, clients tend to become more self-accepting and self-compassionate the more they use these techniques

You can find out more about Identity Healing in this short video.

The Identity Healing Practitioner Training

What this training is:

• This training is, above all, practical; it gives experienced tapping practitioners a thorough, skills-based introduction to using Identity Healing for their clients and themselves.

• The training is a hands-on and experiential training in a small group setting (8 people maximum) consisting of presentations, structured exercises, demonstrations, pair practice and lots of feedback to help you learn how to use these processes in real life.

• By the end of the training, you will be able to use these processes effectively with your clients and for yourself.

What it is not:

• This training isn’t a series of lectures where you can just sit back and take notes. You won’t just learn about Identity Healing, you will learn how to do it.

• This training isn’t an easy ride, there is a lot to take on and learn in a short space of time. It can feel unfamiliar and demanding at first, but the training is structured to make it as easy as possible for you.

• This training isn’t all you need to do to become a certified Identity Healing Practitioner, to get good at these techniques requires, time, mentoring and the ability to demonstrate that you have the skills. The certification process is available to everyone who has completed the training.

Practicalities

This is an online training running online on Zoom.

Trainings are available at times that work for the UK, Europe and Australia, and trainings that work for the UK, Europe, America and Canada.

The training includes a real 170-page paperback manual (so you don’t have to print it yourself). This manual will be shipped to you before the training and is only available to trainees, it cannot be purchased separately.

The training entitles you to a certificate of completion; however, it does not include certification as an Identity Healing Practitioner, which requires additional steps.

What will I learn?

In four modules of the training, you will:

• be introduced to the psychological model being used and principles of the Identity Healing processes.
• work step by step, building up small parts of the process in ‘skill-builder’ exercises, and then combining them to create the full process.
• see at least one live demonstration of the process.
• have practice sessions where you can be client, practitioner and observer of the process.
• have ample time to practice using the process.
• get lots of detailed and encouraging feedback from myself or one of my experienced assistants. Because it is a small group, will get a chance to have a lot of personalised feedback to develop your skills (if you like to hide in a crowd and hope nobody notices, you are probably not going to enjoy this course).

The course is split into four x four-hour modules, usually spread over two weekends or one weekend and one day each for the next two weeks. These gaps are to give you time to recover from the demands of the module and for you to internalise what you have learned.

After this course, you should be able to:

• Quickly and easily identify identity beliefs and issues from the language that your client uses.
• Dissolve challenging identity beliefs and enable a deeper sense of personal integration and self acceptance.
• Use a simple two-step process to identify and uncover the distressed sub-personalities / younger selves associated with those identity beliefs.
• Make those younger selves ‘tappable’.
• Relieve those younger selves of distress by soothing their flight, fight, freeze responses.
• Identify what those younger parts of clients would have needed, at the time of formation, to be better able to handle the situations they found themselves in.
• Make use of the resources and unconscious wisdom of the client to help them heal their younger selves.
• Direct those resources using visualisation and metaphors, so your clients can make the changes they want to make.
• Integrate those previously isolated and struggling parts back into their adult selves.
• Use visualisation, metaphor and trance-work to enhance your results.
• Add a new dimension to working with parts of ourselves.
• Have a new way to work with traumatic memories.

In short, after this course you will confidently and competently know the basic Identity Healing process and be able to use it with your clients and yourself; you will also be able to identify when younger selves are at work and be able to work with them gently when you do.

How much does the training cost?

In 2024, the cost of the training is:

• The early bird is £245 and is available up to 1 month before the training starts

• The full fee is £295 available up to start of the training.

Please note these fees are only valid for the trainings in 2024, in 2025 there will be a substantial rise in fees.

How many places are available on each training?

There are only eight places available on each Identity Healing Practitioner training, this is to guarantee that you have the highest possible quality training and guidance.

In a group of eight people, you will be guaranteed lots of feedback when you practice, lots of time to ask questions that matter to you, and you won’t feel like you are lost in a crowd.

Who is this training for?

This training is for certified and experienced EFT, IEP or other tapping practitioners who:

• are looking to find ways to work effectively with their client’s ‘parts’ or ‘inner children’.
• are working with clients with problems derived from childhood abuse/neglect issues.
• struggle to find memories to work on with some clients.
• want to work effectively with attachment issues as well as traumatic experiences.
• like learning, practising and strengthening their skills
• like using what they have learned to help themselves.

Note: this is not a beginner’s training, you must be familiar and experienced using either standard EFT or IEP.

The minimum entry requirements to take this training are:

• an EFT Practitioner certification (or its equivalent) from a recognised EFT Training organisation, or an IEP Practitioner certificate.
• to be a member in good standing of a recognised EFT organisation: EFT International, EFT Guild, EFT Universe, etc.
• to have at least one year’s tapping experience with clients.
• current professional liability insurance for your tapping modality.

To make the best of the Identity Healing techniques, you need:

• Good rapport and calibration skills
• A confident grasp of EFT, or IEP
• The ability to make and help people feel safe as they do deep work
• Flexibility and patience

This training is for people who like small training group situations, the maximum number of participants is eight people.

This training is for practitioners who are willing to use their own difficulties for raw material. There are no role-plays in this training. We gently work with real issues so you can get the felt experience of how this process works from both the client’s and practitioner’s side.

Who it is not for

This training is not for you if:

• you are not a certified EFT or IEP Practitioner. These processes are not for beginner tappers, you need to know what you are doing with regular tapping before you learn these advanced techniques.
• someone looking for a quick fix technique, the problems Identity Healing helps address are usually multi-faceted, intertwined and challenging. Identity Healing is a useful set of processes for these challenges, but it is not a magic wand.
• people who want to know about something, not how to do it.
• people who aren’t prepared to use their own issues as raw material in a training context.

What previous trainees say about this training

Rachel O’Connor, Mind Body Coach

How does this training work?

The practitioner training is designed to be friendly and relaxed, while giving the trainees a thorough and practical grounding in the skills of Identity Healing.

The trainings are small (with no more than 8 trainees) and low key to make them friendly and guarantee the maximum amount of feedback and guidance for you as a trainee.

The Identity Healing Practitioner training is divided into four, four-hour modules.

This training is about 25% presentation and 75% practice, so if you like to practice what you are learning, this is the training for you, if you would like to learn about something rather than do it, you probably won’t enjoy this training as much.

Module 1 - Foundations

Module 1 starts with friendly introductions and moves on to the training guidelines, which help to make the training a safe space. Then we begin with a presentation the theoretical perspective, or model, of identity beliefs and issues that inform the process. Having this understanding helps you make sense of the pieces and how they work together.

To prepare for running the full process in Module 2, you practice a series of ‘skill builder’ exercises to give you some experience of the parts of the process.

This approach builds a ‘scaffolding’ to help you understand and be skilful in some of the components of the process. When you come to use this approach for a real issue, those skills are already available to you and you can direct your attention to the finer points of the process.

Module 2 - The Basic Process

In the second module, we introduce the final pieces of the process. Now the pieces are in place, we put them together with a live demonstration of the full process. The rest of the module is taken up with two practice sessions where you run the process for yourselves in pairs, or threes, with lots of feedback and support from the training team.

At the end of the first two modules, you will have experienced the process for yourselves for the first time and had the experience of taking a person through the process themselves.

Module 3 - Going Deeper

While the Identity Healing processes are simple in principle, in practice people are complicated: there is a lot to learn.

In the third module we explore some of the finer points of the process and there is another opportunity for supervised pair practice. Once again, with lots of feedback and time to ask questions.

Module 4 - Healing Trapped Memories

In the fourth and final module, we explore the use of Identity Healing in resolving disassociated memories.

Although Identity Healing is not a memory-based process, it turns out that it can be used very effectively to work with certain kinds of memory that are more difficult to clear with standard EFT processes. If you have ever tapped repeatedly on a memory which refuses to settle down, you may find this a useful approach.

After a final pair practice session, we introduce some of the ways trainees can use the Identity Healing processes for their own self-help

Why buy this training?

In summary, Identity Healing is:

• a conceptually simple process that can be used in many common client situations.
• it’s based on psychological principles rather than metaphysics or ‘quantum physics’.
• a powerful addition to your tapping toolkit
• a powerful self-help tool for the practitioner

The Identity Healing Practitioner training includes:

• an introduction to the Identity Healing model and how it can be used.
• step by step skill building exercises to practice parts of the process easily
• at least one live demonstration of the approach in use
• lots of practice opportunities with personal feedback and encouragement.
• a real paperback manual, which is only available to trainees.
• a maximum of only 8 places, so you can have a lot of individual attention and ample opportunities to ask questions and get answers.

If you book one month before the start of the training, you are entitled to an early bird fee of £245 before the price rises to £295

How does this compare to other tapping trainings?

Even though Identity Healing is an advanced training, the current fees are similar to the average EFT Level 2 training.

Compared to other advanced EFT trainings, the fees are quite low. For example, an EFT Level 3 training of the same length may cost between £500 - £600.

I believe the current fees represent excellent value for money given the small group size, personalised training, full manual and free access to the Identity Healing community membership site (see below).

Note: these fees will going up in 2025

The first online version of this training was presented during the COVID pandemic, where just about everyone was experiencing financial stress. So, I pitched the prices for the training to be the same as the EFT Level 2 trainings I was running at that time.

Since then, I have been reviewing my fees because the Identity Healing Practitioner training is an advanced training and has much more in common with an EFT Level 3 training than an EFT Level 2 training.

Accordingly, in 2005 I am going to increase the fees for the Identity Healing Practitioner training up to £545 for the full fee. This is quite a price hike, but I sincerely think it reflects the value of the training and the techniques you will learn.

Bonuses

Free mentoring session after the training

I think these processes are really useful and I’d like to make sure that you get the most from them. Therefore, 10 days after the training concludes, I will offer a free 60-minute one-to-one mentoring session to help you get the best out of these processes and its use in real life.

Access to the free online Identity Healing membership site.

Once you have completed the training, you will be invited to the free, private Identity Healing membership website.

This site contains a wealth of extra material about Identity Healing, including articles, videos, recorded demonstrations and discussion groups.

The community membership site includes free access to a monthly ‘Ask Andy Anything’ online streaming session.

Access to this membership site is only available to people who have trained in Identity Healing.

But, what about … ?

It’s natural for people to have concerns about spending time and money on a new training.

• You might feel out of your depth and that you won’t understand. To help you learn and integrate these skills, the training is broken down into a step-by-step process of presentation, skill building and gentle practice.

• You might be concerned that you may be asked to bare your soul to a group of strangers when working in the delicate area of identity. We work hard to create a safe and supportive learning environment. As part of this we begin the training by agreeing to a set of guidelines to help create that safety, these guidelines are:

  • Start and finish at arranged times.
  • Do the exercises as described and as best you can.
  • Only use the techniques that are being taught (both as ‘practitioner’ and ‘client’).
  • Keep personal information confidential.
  • Drive carefully in other people’s worlds
  • It’s OK to check when you are not certain.
  • It’s OK to ask questions (I encourage it).
  • It’s OK to make (lots of) mistakes.
  • Have fun (if there is still time).

• You might feel reluctant to be observed while you are practising. This is understandable, we strive to give kind, supportive feedback to all the trainees because our aim is for our trainees to become skilled with these processes. We have and encourage a non-judgemental atmosphere, this is not a contest. There are no winners and losers.

• You might worry that the training will be recorded and you will unexpectedly appear online in an informational or promotional video. That won’t happen, we do not record the trainings to preserve the confidentiality of our trainees.

• You might worry that you could get overwhelmed by the amount of information and the experience. This is why we have a comprehensive physical manual, good breaks in the trainings and gaps between the modules so that you can recover (this can be hard work) and integrate the experience with ease.

• You could be concerned that after the training you may need to pay large fees to achieve certification. This is not the case, the certification process currently costs £180 which includes reviews of case study videos, case studies and three one-to-one mentoring sessions.

My money back guarantee

Sometimes, people go on a training in good faith and find that for some reason they just don’t gel with the approach or the trainer. That’s no one’s fault, it sometimes happens. If by the end of the first module of the training you decide that this is not a good fit for you, I will refund your money, no questions asked and no hard feelings.

How do I sign up?

There are only two Practitioner Trainings available in 2024, before the prices rise significantly in 2025. Each training has just 8 places available.

September 2024

This training is designed to be accessible for people in the UK, Europe, Asia and Australia

Dates And Times(UK)

• Saturday 28th September 2024 – 9:00 am - 1:00 pm (BST)
• Sunday 29th September 2024 – 9:00 am - 1:00 pm (BST)
• Saturday, 5th October 2024 – 9:00 am - 1:00 pm (BST)
• Sunday, 6th October 2024 – 9:00 am - 1:00 pm (BST)

Fees

• Early bird fee: £245.00 (available up to 1 month before training)
• Full fee: £295.00

November 2024

This training is designed to be accessible for people in the UK, Europe and the Americas

Dates And Times(UK)

• Saturday 16th November 2024 – 2:00 pm - 6:00 pm (GMT)
• Sunday 17th November 2024 – 2:00 pm - 6:00 pm (GMT)
• Saturday 23rd November 2024 – 2:00 pm - 6:00 pm (GMT)
• Sunday 24th November 2024 – 2:00 pm - 6:00 pm (GMT)

Fees

• Early bird fee: £245.00 (available up to 1 month before training)
• Full fee: £295.00

The Certification Process

The Practitioner training is only the first step towards becoming a Certified Identity Healing Practitioner.

To be certified you need to demonstrate that you understand the process and can apply it effectively with clients.

The certification process includes reviews of recorded client sessions, using Identity Healing on one of your own issues, a case log of at least 20 client sessions and a minimum of six hours mentoring.

Only when certification has been satisfactorily completed will an Identity Healing Practitioner Certificate be awarded.

Visit the Practitioner Certification page for more information.

If you have any questions, please email me: andy@practicalwellbeing.co.uk