When you work with clients, good detective work is key to success.
You can take what the client tells you about the current situation they’d like to change in the here and now and work on that and you can get results, though they may not come quickly and they may not always hold long term.
The way to long term change for a client is to find the roots of the current problem, the logs at the bottom of the log jam. Those roots almost always go back to child hood. Most times, the current situation is merely the current hook to hang familiar negative emotions on to.
A simple way to take the client back to those early times, is to get them to focus on the emotion that they’re currently feeling in the problem situation. Get some information about where that emotion is in their body. What colour? Size? Rough/smooth? Hard/soft? Moving/still?
You could just tap on that emotion and the details you have, but it can be much more effective to ask them to focus on that feeling and then go back in time to another, earlier time they had that feeling.
Back to the earliest time they can remember is what you are aiming for, although it’s possible that there may be earlier times that they don’t remember. I have tracked anxiety as far back as to when they were in the womb and the mother was going through a difficult time during the pregnancy.
If you don’t know if there’s anything earlier, you could assume that there might be and as you tap you could say “Even though I have this hard red knot in my stomach when I think of …(specific event) and I may have had that feeling even before then, I choose to let it go now, because that time is over.
Using the emotion to take clients back to an early specific event is a simple way to do detective work and it works very well.
When you’ve cleared the emotion of the early event, you can then clear the emotion from other events that may have popped up while you tapped and then, finally, you can check out the emotion around the current situation.
It is likely to have reduced, even without working on it, and what remains, is likely to clear much more quickly than if you’d gone straight for it, as now there are no roots supporting it.
