Peak States^® Psychobiology Clinic

Why it works - the psychobiology of mental disorders

Institute certified therapists have been trained in quickly and efficiently eliminating symptoms of most common problems that clients see a psychotherapist for. More, we also have treatments for a number of serious psychological disorders. But how is it even possible that our private-practice therapists are routinely eliminating problems that most therapists (and academics) consider incurable?

Trauma therapy
The majority of issues a client comes in with are due to simple stuck traumatic feelings (in the extreme, we call these traumas PTSD). With the newest generation of trauma therapies, such as EMDR, EFT, TAT, TIR, and our own WHH, a therapist can quickly, easily, and routinely eliminate your presenting symptom(s) using these approaches. Unfortunately, there are a lot of therapies out on the market that don't work well, so some searching is needed to avoid these obsolete therapies (a bit like avoiding a doctor who wants to use leeches on you to get rid of your 'humors'). Our therapists are trained in the amazingly easy and fast meridian-based therapies, as well as in our WHH regression therapy - and most have training in a variety of other techniques as well. As a rough estimate, using an effective trauma therapy quickly gets rid of roughly 75-80% of client issues, including PTSD.

Unfortunately, a lot of emotional issues or disorders cannot be healed by using a trauma therapy to rid of the presenting symptoms; you cannot just talk your way out of them either. Why?

The epigenetic origin of trauma
There is a biological root to these issues inside the cell itself called 'epigenetically inhibited gene expression'. What this means is that when your body needs a protein to do something, some of the genes that allow this to happen are blocked from working. It turns out that trauma occurs because of these inhibited genes. Fortunately, some trauma therapies both eliminate trauma symptoms and restore gene expression. (If you would like to know more about this, we refer you to the references at the bottom of this webpage.)

Why is this important? Because epigenetic inhibited genes are the base cause of these disorders, be they mental or physical.

Subcellular psychobiology and pathogens
There is one more key part to this mystery - pathogens. It turns out that in our experience almost all symptoms of disorders and diseases (that are not due to simple trauma) are caused by the actions of pathogens. And generally we have to be able to identify the pathogen and find out how we are interacting with it to really be sure we're healing the right problem. Essentially, we have to solve the real causes for 'diseases of unknown etiology' before we can treat these disorders - and since pretty much all mental disorders are due to unknown causes, this means we've got to solve each one separately. The good news? We've gotten really good at doing this.

Developmental psychobiology
The next key piece is to figure out exactly what traumas you need to heal in order to eliminate the symptoms of a disorder. And this is where most therapists and researchers get stuck - they cannot solve this problem. Fortunately, there is a solution. First, you have to find an experiential marker for the disorder you are trying to heal. A marker is unique to a disorder, and if you can get rid of it, it means all your symptoms also go away. Next, you regress to when this marker first formed, generally in very early prenatal development. This whole field is called 'developmental psychobiology', by the way. And then you figure out clever ways to make healing this developmental event trauma easy and quick.

For the last 25 years we've developing treatments for various disorders using this approach. And this worked.

2nd generation psychobiology
But as any engineer can tell you, "better, faster, cheaper" is the goal. And in 2025 Dr. Kirsten Lykkegaard figured out a far simpler and much faster way to target and heal the traumas needed to get rid of symptoms. We are currently in the process of updating our existing disease treatments using this new refined approach, and these are what you see on this clinic website. And of course, we continue to solve the causes of more disorders and diseases that we've not addressed before.

Safety testing
The final piece of this story is safety, efficacy and stability testing. We take this topic very, very seriously, and in fact we routinely do phase 1 and 2 clinical trials on all new processes with volunteer therapists who have been trained by us. In fact, our entire Institute structure was designed in the 1990s so we could do safety testing routinely. If you would like to read more about our testing protocols, click here.

~ Dr. Grant McFetridge
Emeritus Research Director
Institute for the Study of Peak States