Tue Feb 7, 2012 1:45pm EST

(The author is a Reuters contributor. The opinions expressed
are his own.)
    By Lou Carlozo
    Feb 7 (Reuters) - Energy psychology combines Eastern
approaches to mind, body and spirit with Western psychology and
psychotherapy, delving into unconscious and subconscious
patterns that go back to childhood. So what exactly does that
have to do with building wealth and managing your portfolio?
    Plenty, says Julie Murphy Casserly, a wealth manager in
Chicago who manages about $100 million in assets and is a
proponent of a very alternative investing strategy.
    If you use energy psychology to probe your habits and
beliefs surrounding money, you can uncover destructive patterns
that cause you financial grief, she says. After all, what good
are high rates of return if you have the ingrained habits of a
control freak or compulsive debtor?
    Casserly recommends energy psychology for her clients when
she's up against behaviors and beliefs that a simple uptick in
the market won't cure. "It is never, ever about the money or the
numbers when there is a conflict between adviser and the
client," she says. "It's something beneath the numbers."
    Here's how it works: Unlike conventional psychology, which
takes lots of time and talk, energy psychologists try to
pinpoint a client's problems in as little as one or two hours.
They ask lots of questions to probe your unconscious for
negative beliefs you may have embraced in childhood: "You can't
trust anyone with your money," for example, or "You'll always
have to work hard to survive."
    The sessions can get downright mystical. Some energy
psychologists claim to connect with a higher consciousness to
find a client's "ancestral patterning": destructive beliefs that
have existed in a person's clan for generations.
    It can also involve "holographic repatterning," or
"resonance repatterning." Developed by Chloe Wordsworth, who
holds a master's degree in English from UCLA, it posits that our
physical bodies are literally energy frequencies that go haywire
when our needs go unmet. Therapists use "muscle checking" -- a
process of testing a person's limbs for unusual resistance in
response to a question or statement -- to tell if your body-mind
energy frequencies are "in tune" or not.
    Casserly, who operates her own firm, JMC Wealth
Management, says about one third of her clients are engaged in
energy psychology. "If something bad is going on in your
personal life or your spiritual life, it often manifests itself
in the money," she notes. "When we act out, we tend to do it
with food, or we do it with our financial behavior."
     In Casserly's practice, she'll send a client to an energy
psychologist and then ask what the sessions revealed. Using that
information, she helps them make behavioral and even investment
decisions to improve their bottom line.
    Casserly cites a female business owner client who was "wound
up really tight" and "trying to control everything her employees
were doing." Energy psychologist sessions caused the woman to
recall that as a child, she ran her dysfunctional household
because her parents let things go.
    "If she didn't try to keep it all together, she wouldn't
have survived," Casserly says. "But when you do this work, you
discover that what worked as a child no longer serves you as an
adult."
    Thus enlightened, the client gave up micromanaging
Casserly's investment choices and loosened up on the business
front. As her portfolio has grown, "She has also gone from
$250,000 in revenue and two employees to more than $1 million
and six employees," Casserly says.
    Of course, you won't find any of this in the finance
textbooks at Wharton or the London School of Economics. It's
more in the realm of spiritual retreats or vision quests, which
may explain why Casserly invokes hippie parlance in going
public.
    "Now that I've decided to let my freak flag fly" she says,
"I've noticed that a lot more people are willing to talk to me
about it, and tell me that they're doing it, too."	

    HOW SHE GOT STARTED
    Casserly first consulted an energy healer 10 years ago,
mired in endless toil without getting ahead. The sessions
revealed her own workaholism, and that "this pattern went back
in my father's family (for) eight generations," she says.
    Shortly afterwards, Casserly experienced breakthroughs. She
wrote a book, "The Emotion Behind Money," saw her business take
off, and cautiously began to share energy-psychology themes with
select clients.
    She also brought the woman she'd consulted, Anne Emerson of
Sedona, Arizona, to her office for a few days of energy sessions
with JMC clients
    "I had to add three days and double her time here because of
the high demand," Casserly says. "I never would've thought that
this is what people are starving for."
    Emerson says money is a common theme in her therapy
sessions.
    "I work with some people who are absolutely rich and live in
spiritual poverty; they've got to make more, they've got to make
more, because there's never enough to fill that hole," Emerson
says. "The principles of wealth are different from having money,
and most people are not wired up to get that."
    Indeed, Emerson is a walking advertisement for fiscal
prudence. "I own my house outright with no debt and if I can't
afford something, I look at how much I'll have to sacrifice in
the future to pay for it now," she says. "Credit cards? I pay
them off every month." Casserly also has other energy
psychologists she recommends who work more like life coaches.
And the theme seems to be going down well with some.
    One of Casserly's longtime clients is Sharon Doyle, 43, of
Evanston, a Chicago suburb. Says Doyle: "I always found stuff
like alternative therapies fun. I love acupuncture, and I'm into
psychic stuff. But seeing Julie and what a positive effect it
had on her, that was the best recommendation."
    Doyle saw the energy psychologist after lamenting to
Casserly about a cycle of stress and sleeplessness regarding
money. Self-employed in operations and marketing, Doyle says her
cash flow often resembles a rollercoaster.
    This was entwined with anxiety over getting pregnant; a
doctor had just told Doyle and her husband they'd need in-vitro
sessions costing $30,000.
    Doyle instead tried a few $150 energy psychology sessions
with Emerson via phone. That work, she says, revealed her
unconscious need for control and discipline, coming from her
father's side. She worked to let go, and less than four months
later she got pregnant without any in-vitro. (She is currently
expecting her second child.) Her finances are much better, too,
and not merely because she saved $30,000.
    But the approach doesn't sit well with all investors.
    "I have had clients look at me strange," Casserly
acknowledges, "and have had people just not do it."
    "There may be a place in a person's life for 'energy
healing,'" says Kevin Lynch, an assistant professor of insurance
at The American College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. "But as a
licensed financial adviser, I recommend you restrict your
recommendations to quality energy stocks, bonds and other
financial instruments."
    "We're clearly in the camp of using time-tested methods of
planning and investing," says Neal Price, a principal with
Strategic Wealth Partners in Deerfield, Illinois. "That's not to
say that we don't think outside the box, or (that we) ignore the
psychological and emotional side of investing -- but at the end
of the day, we don't believe you can solve someone's complex
financial problems with a little pixie dust and hocus-pocus."
    Casserly has heard such objections before. In the
male-dominated, button-down world of financial planning, she
doesn't expect that most men will get or embrace the practice -
which she sees as a way of supplementing sound investment
strategy with intuitive tools.
    "I know numerous financial planners -- particularly female
ones -- who say, 'I see those energy psychologists, but I don't
dare tell my clients about it.'" She is quick to add that in
Chicago's North Shore suburbs, where some of the Midwest's
richest denizens live, "Everyone does it. But no one talks about
it."
    Yet if going public with her unconventional methods comes at
some risk to her business reputation, Casserly doesn't seem the
least bit fazed.
    She says, "I just have to have the courage to do something
outside the box if I think it's going to help people."	

 (Editing by Beth Pinsker Gladstone and Andrea Evans)