Allen, now himself a veteran, spent the following thirty years studying everything that might relate to what had happened. He tested every theory and procedure he could find, from talk therapy to witness interrogation to mission debriefing. Ultimately, he was able to create a counseling process called Semantic Adjustment, a guided whole-life personal clarification procedure. It worked well enough to help businesspeople solidify their corporate visions and goals, and to understand how they had been their own worst saboteurs. After testing and refining his procedure over the course of many years of consulting, and without fully realizing what he had, Allen retired from business consulting when the economy crashed and businesses stopped buying help.

Then, in mid-2013, the Wall Street Jounal ran a series of articles on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The series depicted the financial and social costs as enormous, and investigation has verified this to be true beyond belief. It's a huge problem, over fifty billion dollars a year and growing for the government alone. And, according to the military expert who wrote one of the articles, a problem without a solution. Upon reading that article, a close friend called Allen and suggested that his counseling procedure might be just what was needed. That conversation spurred him to return to his previous work.

After consulting with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, he set about adjusting the presentation of the procedure to accommodate the VA's immediate requirements. The first of those is that the interaction with the client (patient) absolutely must be non-proselytizing: there can be no need for the client to hear about any particular religious ideas. That work has been done, since the procedure was always client-neutral.

The VA's second requirement is that any proposal offering a service must be evidence-based. No untested theories considered.

Allen's business consulting history spanned twenty years and is preserved in client files, including at least one hundred clients who benefitted from Semantic Adjustment. In all that time, not one client failed to achieve significant improvement; most soon forgot that there had ever been a problem. That record is providing a wealth of case narratives.