Straight to the Heart: Radical Exposure Tapping and Transformative Healing of Trauma

Some memories do not simply fade. They crystallise, holding their emotional intensity intact for years, so that a moment long past can still overwhelm a person in the present. Radical Exposure Tapping is a structured method for reaching those memories and transforming them, so that a traumatic memory becomes an ordinary one, remembered without being relived. Developed by therapist and clinician-researcher Laurie MacKinnon, Radical Exposure Tapping draws together Gestalt therapy, EMDR, Emotional Freedom Techniques and the science of memory reconsolidation into a single, coherent ten-session framework. Rather than managing symptoms, it works at the level where a traumatic memory is held, so that the memory can be processed and updated, and its grip on the present released.This clinical training manual sets out the method in full. It moves from the theory that underpins it to the detail of practice, session by session, and grounds every stage in real clinical work. Annotated session transcripts show the method as it unfolds in the room, and a series of case studies follow clients through the full arc of processing, from a memory first activated to the moment it integrates.Written for therapists, psychologists, social workers and other mental health clinicians, it gives practitioners both the conceptual grounding and the practical structure to use the method with confidence. It carries a foreword by Dr Kasia Kozlowska, child and adolescent psychiatrist at The Children's Hospital at Westmead and Clinical Professor at the University of Sydney Medical School.For the clinician working with trauma, it offers a clear, teachable path from a memory that still wounds to an ordinary memory, part of the past rather than the present.