Meet Judith Orloff, the psychiatrist who taught us about “energy vampires.” In her new book, Emotional Freedom, Orloff tells us how to free ourselves from fear and negativity.

Late one evening after a day in which negative news dominated the media, psychiatrist Judith Orloff took to the airwaves on call-in radio program Coast to Coast AM to answer questions about dealing with stress and fear. The economy was on every listener's mind.

Many people are struggling with their emotions now, said Orloff.

“We live in a world permeated with fear and negativity,” she said. “What I'm seeing as a psychiatrist and an intuitive is that many people are like sponges. They absorb the negative emotions of others but also the negative emotions from the news into their own bodies … they're very tense, they're very anxious, they're getting depressed, they're getting depleted, because they're taking it all on.

“What we have to do to achieve emotional freedom is to turn our attention to what is more positive and not get sucked up into the vortex of negativity. From an intuitive standpoint, negativity is a loud signal, and our attention goes right to it. That's why we have to be mindful and shift our attention from all the negativity because it's everywhere.”

One call in particular was poignant: A man said that as he was going to a computer store to make a major purchase, he felt guilty for being able to buy such a luxury when other families could hardly afford to put food on the table. He ended up leaving without buying a computer.

“It's kind of scary,” he said. “Are we ever going to get out of this?”

That's a question that's been on many people's minds, said Orloff. In an interview with Unity Magazine, she reflected on the calls she fielded.  

“I believe that our society is in the midst of an emotional meltdown,” she said. “People are restless, volatile, and their tempers are about to blow. In the past year, Prozac has been prescribed for over 30 million people.”

Orloff, once called a “serene maverick” by USA Today, is convinced there is a better way to happiness. “I wrote Emotional Freedom because we deserve relief,” she said. “I want to offer new solutions for dealing with emotions because conventional coping mechanisms just aren't holding up in our hyper-tense world. It's madness that we've come to tolerate chronic anxiety or depression as normal.”


The Path to Success
Orloff, who is currently single, has a private psychiatric practice and is an assistant clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA. The daughter of two physicians, she discovered her intuitive abilities as a child and perfected them as she journeyed toward adulthood.

Orloff, who is in her fifties, did not immediately set out to be a psychiatrist. Indeed, as a rebellious teenager growing up in Los Angeles in the 1960s, she struggled with substance abuse and even received treatment at a psychiatric hospital. A psychiatrist helped her deal with her own emotions, and she was able to turn her life around.

“I went to medical school based on a night dream I had in my twenties,” said Orloff. “In the dream, I was told that I was to become a psychiatrist in order to legitimize intuition in medicine. Although at the time I had no desire to go to medical school (I had always been artistic and didn't follow in the footsteps of my parents), I trusted the dream enough to enroll in a junior college just to see if there was anything to the dream. And there was! I loved school. One class became two became fourteen years of medical training! I definitely found my true calling!”

Not only did she find her calling, but Orloff also has found ways to improve on conventional psychiatry. She is a pioneer in the field of energy psychiatry—a discipline that blends the traditional psychiatric understanding of emotions with a spiritual, subtle energetic, and intuitive perspective. A session with Orloff is a bit different from a session with a typical psychiatrist.

In therapy, I teach patients all the techniques I discuss in Emotional Freedom. I see difficult emotions as a way to open our hearts and become larger and brighter. When a patient comes to me for depression, I will always help them find the spiritual meaning of the experience and how to transform depression with hope. Emotional freedom involves connecting with a sense of spirit, however you define it, and tapping into that powerful energy to find hope. We can't do it with our intellects alone.

Orloff said she was compelled to write Emotional Freedom because she felt mainstream medicine failed to address the connection between spirituality, emotions, and health.

“It's impossible to grasp how we tick emotionally without a cosmic perspective; everything about us, including our biology, is an expression of the divine,” she writes in Emotional Freedom, which was four years in the making.

So what, exactly, is emotional freedom?

“Emotional freedom involves being able to deal with difficult emotions and transform them so that you can experience something more positive and experience more love,” said Orloff. “This is important, because then you won't be stuck in a state of fear.”

She learned much from her parents' transitions, she said.

“I feel one of the greatest gifts I was given was helping both my parents pass on, being there at their bedsides. Part of my personal work with the principles I write about in Emotional Freedom has allowed me to not be afraid of death, so I was able to be there lovingly for each of their passings, helping them on to the other side.”

In her book, Orloff outlines specific steps that lead to the achievement of emotional freedom:

• Identify the emotion.
  “When you deal with an emotion, you have to identify it and say, ‘This is what I'm feeling.' It might be ‘I'm afraid I'll never be a success' or ‘I'm afraid I'm going to be ill the rest of my life.' Get to the very bottom of the fear. Don't airbrush it. Do not attempt to get to a higher place with the emotion until you've leveled with yourself about how you're actually feeling.”
• Talk about it.
  Share that emotion with a supportive person. “Say ‘This is how I feel' so you can get that energy out. Then you have to look at whatever emotion that is and ask yourself, How can I rise above this emotion so that I can develop courage?”
• Investigate your fears.
  Emotions are a path to spiritual awakening. “You have to identify where the fears originate in order to get past them. Fears can go back as far as childhood. Then you have to ask yourself what emotions set off the fear.”
• Develop spiritual courage.
  The final step in the process is to ask oneself, What change can I make in my attitude to be freer? “This is your opportunity to do something differently. The greatest spiritual challenge we face is developing spiritual courage. And there would be no reason to develop courage if you didn't have the fear. You have to reframe every adversity as a spiritual challenge. There is always a reason for everything, and I believe that Spirit has given us this thing called emotions in order to help our soul grow, and in order for our soul to grow, we must go through some very disturbing things.”

A New World View
One way to look at the current difficulties is to view world events as a spiritual challenge, Orloff said, noting that opportunity is part of the Chinese definition of crisis.

She believes that the best can be brought out of us during these hard times, as demonstrated by the calls she fielded on Coast to Coast AM. One caller talked of helping a woman at a filling station who only had $2 to buy gas for her car. Orloff said she herself finds ways to help others in small ways, even sometimes leaving dollar bills in places where strangers can find them.

As we realize we're all interconnected, we'll become more compassionate, she said. In other words, navigating difficult emotions is part of our spiritual development.

“Every heartbreak, every betrayal, every success, is an opportunity to grow more loving and compassionate and more intuitive.”