We all know that working with specific events with EFT helps people to heal and, the
earlier the
specific event, the
quicker the healing. The challenge is in finding those specific events.
I ask my clients to imagine their energy system as a stream running round their body. When an event makes them
feel bad, be it sad, hurt, angry, afraid, or guilty, it is like a log jamming that energy ‘stream’. As time goes on, other logs (negative events) catch onto that first log. Over time there may a
whole log jam around the feeling, or person, or situation that is currently giving them the problem.
You may need to do some work on the here and now, to help your client feel more comfortable. You may have to clear a few current ‘logs’ to enable the person to ‘go there.’ However,
clearing the early logs in the log jam is essential to have real healing of the situation, in the fastest and most effective way. An added bonus is that as you start to clear them, other logs clear as well which can speed up the healing process.
What can you do if the client doesn’t recall an early specific event? There are several ways to do this.
1. When your client doesn’t know Sometimes just tapping on “
Even though I don’t know where this started, I deeply and completely accept myself anyway.” is enough. It prompts the subconscious to bring up the relevant memories. Ask the client to interrupt if something comes into their mind while tapping – be it a thought, feeling, or picture. Your goal is to pick up whatever the subconscious is offering.
2. Focusing on the Physical One of my favourite ways to get to early events is to ask the client to focus on the feeling that they get when they focus on the current event. Get as much information about that feeling as you can (e.g.
Colour, size, hard/soft, rough/smooth, moving/still, quiet or noisy.) Sometimes asking if it has a
voice and what would it be
saying can be useful too.
Get a very through description of the feeling. Then ask the client to close their eyes really focusing on that feeling. Ask them to go as far back in their life as possible and
share the earliest time they remember having that feeling.
It can be helpful to ask them to go back to even
before that time and see if that is still a familiar feeling. If so, there will be events that are even earlier to find. Often these earlier events pop up as you work.
In my experience, most
core issues are created within the first 2 or 3 years and can even have taken place in the
womb if the mother was distressed while carrying them.
One case where this occurred was with a client who had a profound sense of
rejection and being
not good enough for all of his life, as far back as he could remember. He was the 8th child of 11 and when he asked his mother later about his birth, she told him how desperate she’d felt when she was pregnant again and said that she’d tried to abort him and it didn’t work – the ultimate rejection. We tapped on that event and worked through other early events in his life. He left with a totally different perspective of himself and of his mother. It helped their relationship as well.
Testing After finding the earliest event that you can, or that your client is willing to address, evaluate the strength of the emotion around the event. You can use the
0-10 scale or use the information about the
physical feeling to check on progress and shifts by following physical changes. The ultimate goal is to find no evidence of the feeling left when they focus on the event.
Tapping Now
tap on the earliest event that you can find and the feelings that come with it and clear it, making sure the client lets you know if any other events come up as you tap, (they often do). Using the information about the feeling around that event allows several aspects to be cleared at the same time. It is also very useful if the client doesn’t want to talk about the event. You can clear for them without knowing what happened, if you use the feelings.
- Even though I have this hard, rough red lump in my chest, When I think of x event, I’m OK
- Even though I have this hard rough red lump in my chest and it’s moving and buzzing, I’m OK.
- Even though I have this red lump and it’s saying you can’t do this, just like my mother, I deeply and completely accept myself.
- For reminder phrases you could just say one word on each point, hard, red, lump, rough, moving, buzzing, can’t do this, I’m OK.
Use their words You continue to tap through any changes. After one round the hard red lump might be softer, or less rough, or less red, or still, or quiet, or saying something different. Whatever is there, you put into a new round of statements, there’s no right or wrong, just keep following what the client says. Eventually you will get to the point where the feeling is no longer there, or there is just a shadow, or a space where it was. Tap for that too.
Is it complete? You will have
finished the work when you say to the client how does that feel and he says: great, or
comfortable. But check even more closely by asking if there is anything else around that feeling. Watch their
body language and you’ll know if there is still something there.
When you ask for a number on the 0-10 scale, the answer should be
0. If it’s not, just check that they’re still focusing on that event and if they are, and it’s not 0 there’s more tapping to do. If the feeling has gone, it’s very likely that the scale will be 0.
You’ve cleared an important log from the log jam. Other logs can be cleared at other sessions, but you have started the process and it is likely that other ‘logs’ will not register as high on the scale as they once had.
3. Sometimes you know that there must be
early incidents that are contributing to the
current situation, but they’re just not coming into the conscious mind.
Sometimes clients will have
no memory of their childhood, which can often indicate
unhealed emotions that they weren’t able to deal with at the time.
One way of dealing with this, is to make up something that may have happened and tap on that. ALWAYS do this with the clients permission and with them
contributing what they think MIGHT have happened.
If you use lots of
possibly’s, maybes and perhaps’s the subconscious will take what you say and find links with what really happened and clear the emotions. It’s rather like
borrowing benefits while working on yourself.
An example of this, is a client that had difficulty feeling comfortable in long term relationships. She got to about 18 months into the relationship and then her feelings switched off.
We did some
detective work around her early life by
asking her family, ( the client had no conscious memories of that time) and discovered that her mother had been seriously ill when her brother had been born and had to stay in hospital for a long time and then was ill when she came home. Due to family circumstances she was left with her father, who also had to run a farm. She was 18 months old at the time and the client surmised that perhaps she had been left alone for long periods of time and that perhaps she had learnt to switch off her feelings, in order to survive.
We had no means of knowing whether this was true, but we tapped, (
with the client’s permission,) as though it might have been.
Even though it’s possible that I was left alone when my mother was ill, I deeply and completely accept myself.
Even though I might have been so scared and confused and felt abandoned, that I decided to switch my feelings off, I deeply and completely accept myself.
Even though this, or something like this, may have happened I choose to clear all those feelings now, wherever they come from.
This languaging is telling the
subconscious to look for anything that might
link in any way and to clear it.
This client had great difficulty in accessing feelings to scale, but we noticed that she got hot at the thought of certain statements and so we used that as our scale. After a few rounds, she cooled down and we assumed that something had cleared. You could equally well ask the client to
guess what
the scale might be. They can be surprisingly accurate.
As always the proof is real life. Eighteen months hasn’t passed yet, but the client went into a relationship soon after our session with very different feelings and knew that if there was a problem, it was just another aspect to tap on.
4. Another way to clear
early specific events that you
can’t find, is really simple.
Find the earliest event that you can and tap on that and include in the statement,
instructions to the subconscious to clear anything earlier.
Even though I feel so angry about xxxx and I’ve probably felt that lots of times before and since then, I deeply and completely accept myself.
Even though this is a very familiar feeling, (Pause to check that the client agrees), I deeply and completely accept myself and that feeling.
Even though I’m so angry about xxxx I choose to release that feeling wherever it comes from.
You may find that once you start tapping,
earlier events pop up.
If they don’t you will still have started the healing process from those earlier times and they will impact the feelings in the here and now. If there were no earlier events, you will have done no harm and if there were you’ve included them in the healing, a
win/win situation.
So don’t limit yourself to the here and now, if you feel there are earlier roots, do some detective work and tap. If something you say doesn’t fit, give the client permission to interrupt you and tell you what does.
Remember,
there is no failure, only feedback.
Jaqui specialises in
Personal Transformation. She loves working with clients who are committed to being all that are and creating their lives as they want them to be, both on a one to one basis and on the
EFT for Transformation retreats that she creates with fellow EFT Master Ann Ross. (To sign up to our email list to hear about our latest retreats, as booking becomes available, click here.)
She has a reputation for bringing her warmth and humour into her Level 1 and 2 courses and for those who really want to use their intuition and flow when using EFT, her Level 3 courses and supervision days have been created with that in mind, bringing in NLP and Hypnotic Language to make EFT even faster and more effective.
