What Is the
MACE Energy Method?

If you've heard the word "MACE" — maybe from one of Jerry Marzinsky's podcast episodes, maybe from a friend — and gone looking for a real explanation, you probably ran into a lot of talk that didn't actually tell you anything. So let me try to do better than that.

Where it comes from

The MACE Energy Method (MEM) was developed by a man named John Mace in Australia, built out over many years of work under a framework he called Causism. I discovered it in 2024 through Jerry, a  psychologist I often appear with on podcasts. Before I ever offered it to a client, I read Jerry's book, I read John Mace's own work, and I spent months really considering becoming a practitioner.

The idea behind it

Most approaches to emotional pain — talk therapy included — work by helping you understand why you feel the way you do. You tell your story. You dig through your history. You look for insight, and you hope insight eventually changes how you feel.

MACE starts somewhere different. It treats emotional energy itself as something real and physical — not just a thought, not just a memory, but an energy that gets lodged in the body in a moment of pain and stays there, still firing, long after the moment is over.

Here's what that looks like in real life. A harsh tone of voice from your spouse suddenly has you feeling like a scolded eight-year-old. A moment of being left out at work drops you straight back into the sting of the playground. Someone goes quiet, and you feel the old ache of being neglected, even though nothing is actually wrong right now. You didn't choose that reaction. It happened before you had a chance to think.

MEM calls that a trigger — a stored emotional charge from an old "upset" that fires again whenever something in the present resembles it. And sitting underneath most triggers is what MEM calls a negative identity: which along with negative emotions, includes an unconscious "I am" statement you picked up in that painful moment and have been carrying ever since. I'm not good enough. I'm unlovable. I'm a failure. I'm not safe. You didn't decide these things about yourself. They got assigned to you in a moment you didn't choose, and you've been living inside them since.

What actually happens in a session

This is the part people are usually most nervous about, so let me be plain: you do not have to tell me your story.

You don't have to describe what happened. You don't have to walk back through it and relive it out loud. I've sat with clients through a full session and finished without ever knowing what actually happened to them — and they walked out free anyway.

Instead, a session works like this. I ask you some questions — not about the event, but about how it feels in you right now. You close your eyes. You notice the feeling, wherever it's sitting in your body. And then I walk you through a specific, guided process to locate that negative emotional energy and release it. No lying on a couch analyzing your childhood. No homework. No reliving.

Most issues take one to two sessions. More complex or deeply layered issues — the kind with several old wounds stacked on top of each other — may take two or three. When a negative identity is fully dis-created, it doesn't come back. You may uncover a different one later as you keep growing, but the one you already dealt with stays gone.

I want to be honest with you the way I'd want someone to be honest with me: MEM doesn't cure anything, and I'd never tell you it does. What it does is give you a way to lessen the burden of what you're carrying, and to see yourself more clearly.

How people feel afterward

The most common thing I hear isn't "wow, that fixed me." It's relief — specifically the relief of not having to relive it to be free of it. People describe a noticeable shift during the session itself or right after. The fear that had a grip on them for years quiets down or disappears. The fog they'd been walking around in lifts. The same situation that used to send them straight into dread or panic just doesn't have the same pull anymore.

Longer term, the change tends to show up in ordinary moments: responding instead of reacting. Not snapping, not shutting down, not withdrawing in the old familiar pattern. Relating to a spouse, a coworker, a parent from a settled place instead of an old wound. Meeting stress from where you actually are right now, not from where you were when the wound first formed.

Is this compatible with faith?

I get this question a lot, and I don't dodge it. On the surface, MEM is a secular technique — it didn't come out of a church, and its language is about energy and identity, not sin and deliverance. I wrestled with that honestly before I ever brought it into this ministry.

Here's where I landed: MEM is a tool for surfacing negative emotion so it can be released, and for identifying the false things a person came to believe about themselves through their pain. That work doesn't compete with what Christ does — it clears ground for it. I don't see it as separate from deliverance; I see it as complementary. Some of what holds a person back is spiritual oppression that deliverance addresses directly. Some of it is an emotional imprint from an old wound that MEM is built to reach. Very often, it's both, and clients work through each in turn.

MEM is not Reiki, and it isn't New Age energy work, even though both use the word "energy." There's no channeling, no chakras, no invoking of anything outside you. It's a structured, practitioner-led process aimed at one thing: finding where an old hurt is still active in you, and dis-creating it.

Is MEM right for you?

If you've got a reaction that doesn't make sense to you — something that fires too big, too fast, for what's actually happening in front of you — that's usually a sign there's a negative identity underneath it. If the idea of having to tell your whole story to get help has kept you from getting help at all, MEM was built for exactly that hesitation.

You don't have to have a name for what's wrong. You don't have to be ready to talk about it. You just have to be willing to notice how it feels, and willing to dis-create it.

If that's where you are, I'd be glad to walk through a session with you.