...the easy way

As easy as EFT is to do, despite its utter simplicity of concept, many people–myself included–are often stymied by the question of just what they’re supposed to say during the first part, the part where you say, “even though I have this I deeply and completely accept myself.”

Even though I do know that it’s not necessary to get hung up on the words, it’s easy to get pulled into an overly analytical mindset, especially if you are working on a long chain of issues, where you start to clear one thing, only to realize its true cause is some other factor, which you begin to work on, only to find a deeper problem. It doesn’t take very long for this to seem threatening and confusing. When it happens to me, sometimes I find myself wanting to phrase the issue just right.

In one way, the words really do matter, because if we misrepresent the issue, the EFT feels “off.” It just doesn’t seem to address the problem, or does so only partially. Also, if we are untruthful with ourselves, our minds know this. For example, that “I deeply and completely accept myself.” part can be a real stumbling block for many people who might not accept themselves just then, or at all.

In dealing with issues which are subtle and complex, especially physical symptoms which change frequently, you might find yourself going in circles, and feeling very confused about which thing to address or how to describe your problem.

Fortunately, there is a way to cut through the confusion, and that is simply to forget words for a while and just focus strongly on the problematic feeling while you tap. You can do this both with a physical sensation or with an emotion. What’s so great about this is that feelings are the real issue we’re dealing with all along. After all, if you didn’t have a bad feeling, you wouldn’t have a problem, would you? (We might have to think about that one for a while. Please feel free to challenge me on this point if you don’t agree!)

Also, feelings are the native language of our minds and bodies. Every time we put something into words, we’re translating, and not always successfully. But it takes no special thinking to just focus on whatever we’re feeling, though we may have to keep reminding ourselves to do so while tapping, as the mind can tend to wander.

What about that “deeply accept myself” part, though? Will EFT still work if we leave it out? I’ve given this some thought and what I’ve finally decided is that this phrase is sometimes more problematic than helpful to begin with. See the above paragraphs about how people often don’t feel this statement is true. I think it is a good thing for some people, some of the time, but perhaps is just as often problematical as helpful.

Let’s think about what that statement is supposed to do for us. It’s there to remind us that we have an intention, that we’re not just dwelling on our misery here–we’re deliberately invoking our problem in order to resolve it and feel better. We already know this is what we’re doing. So in a way, that statement is kind of redundant. If we’re having to translate our feelings into words, that statement can be very helpful, since it’s more easy to get distracted then, but when we’re focusing on a feeling and tapping, we’re well aware of our intent to shift the feeling because the feeling will be so much more unpleasant than whatever words we can dress it up in.

Let me stress this point. The feelings probably hurt. The feelings are a bugger. They’re so awful that we’d do almost anything to avoid feeling them, so when we go to the trouble of forcing ourselves to feel them while we tap on these silly points, there’s no way we’re going to forget why we’re doing it! We know we’re trying to heal.

As I mentioned earlier, there is one pitfall to “tapping on the feeling,” especially if it is an emotional feeling rather than a physical one, and that is that our minds can wander and then we may have a hard time returning to that feeling. So what you need to do is to keep reminding yourself to come back to it, and to keep breathing. You can use your words for this.

When I do it, it goes

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Most of us will be famil­iar with some of the dif­fi­cul­ties involved in mak­ing changes in our lives. They can be immensely frus­trat­ing, con­fus­ing and worst of all, demo­ti­vat­ing. You want to achieve some goal, some­thing that is entirely rea­son­able, ratio­nal, good for you, and often, seem­ingly very sim­ple. Perhaps it is some­thing that your friends can do with ease. But not you.

You begin in good faith, or per­haps you did begin that way the first three or four dozen times you tried. But then things hap­pen. You for­get to exer­cise, or you just can’t stop your­self from eat­ing that cake or you were so upset by some ran­dom event that you really needed that cig­a­rette. And before you knew it, you were right back where you started.

After a few rounds of this, it might even become too dif­fi­cult to begin again. You feel dis­cour­aged when the sub­ject comes up. You no longer want to think about it. And you feel a lit­tle worse about your­self than you did before. Now, not only are you overweight/​addicted to tobacco/lonely/unsuccessful…you’re also a quit­ter and a failure.

EFT is a pow­er­ful tool for mak­ing changes in one’s life. It came along for me right when I was both des­per­ate for some­thing like it, and yet also cer­tain that some­thing like it would be there, some­where. I was look­ing for a magic wand tech­nique, and I found one in EFT. If I tried to out­line for you the huge num­ber of times EFT has served me, you’d be very bored and skep­ti­cal, or you would if I could remem­ber them all.

Still, as won­der­ful as it has been, I finally came to a place of immense stuck­ness and frus­tra­tion in my EFT work. Despite hav­ing laid to rest so many demons and reliev­ing so much of my pain, my life still wasn’t where I wanted it to be (still work­ing on that, yes…) and I could no longer find a way to make any progress.

One of the core tenets of EFT is the instruc­tion to address spe­cific inci­dents in your life. In my expe­ri­ence, every spe­cific both­er­some mem­ory I have addressed with EFT has resolved into a dim mem­ory with no emo­tional charge at all, so this is really excel­lent advice…as long as you have a spe­cific mem­ory to deal with.

But what if you don’t? Or, what if you’re like I was, and you’ve already dealt with all the both­er­some mem­o­ries that come to you, and you’re still trou­bled, only now you don’t even know what the prob­lem is any­more? Your pain no longer seems to be attached to any­thing you can point to? It’s just there, stop­ping you from get­ting on with your life, but is appar­ently with­out any cause.

Sometimes I think that there are those among us who are sort of like therapy’s mid­dle chil­dren. We were not so for­tu­nate as to have been raised in any sort of healthy, sane way, and yet we were lucky enough to have escaped the most heinous abuse. Perhaps you could just say we were raised on the out­skirts of Hell, rather than in one of the actual pits.

Life on the out­skirts of Hell is surely a great improve­ment over some of the alter­na­tives, but grow­ing out of that space car­ries its own chal­lenges, and one of them is that once you’ve dealt with most of the spe­cific ugly mem­o­ries, you’re left with this sort of miasma of ick.

This ick was my prob­lem. I couldn’t think of any par­tic­u­lar mem­ory attached to it. It just seemed to be a fact of life. Worse, when I tried to address the ick itself, or try to do an affir­ma­tion for some­thing bet­ter, I sim­ply couldn’t. I’d find my energy plum­met­ing, like a great big suck to my soul. Usually, I would dis­as­so­ci­ate com­pletely when this hap­pened, sim­ply for­get that I was even try­ing to tap.

This became a really big prob­lem because it seemed the ick started to spread to every­thing I wanted to do. I could barely accom­plish any­thing. It felt as if every gain I’d made through EFT or any other means had come undone and mul­ti­plied. This was an extremely upset­ting time!

It was out of this awful fog that “eas­ing” came to me. Fortune tends to favor those who are absolutely deter­mined to find solu­tions! Since I could do absolutely noth­ing of any use with­out a solu­tion, find­ing one was only a mat­ter of time.

What I did was to get very sen­si­tive to the feel­ings in my body and my “energy.” When I would try to make a state­ment, “my life feels good to me,” for exam­ple, I would tune in to any sen­sa­tions I was having.

What I quickly dis­cov­ered is that some statements–the most hope­ful ones–were caus­ing me to zone out because to me, they seemed like lies. Most of us don’t like to lie, espe­cially to our­selves about things we care about. Try to tell your­self a clear-​​cut lie about how you are, and see how you feel in your belly. See what hap­pens to your breath­ing. Maybe you get sad or angry, or maybe your mind just won’t stay on the point.

Once I real­ized this was the prob­lem, it seemed obvi­ous to try to back off a state­ment until I got some­thing my gut could accept as true, or close enough to true, and for a while, this resulted in some really weird and sad state­ments because at first, I really had to back up a whole lot!

Like this:

“My life feels good to me.” Zorch, no freak­ing way!!

Okay, how about, “I deserve to have my life feel good to me.” Even worse!!

Um, alright, “I wish I deserved to have my life feel good to me.” Hmmmm, still not quite.

“It would be nice if I felt I deserved to have my life feel good to me.” Yes. That would be nice.

Once I got to a state­ment, no mat­ter how silly, that I could accept as being “true,” I was then free to tap. I could do a few rounds of EFT for “it would be nice if I felt I deserved…even though we know I really don’t, but still, it would be good if I could come to feel I did…” and grad­u­ally feel the ten­sion ease off. After this, I could go to the state­ment just above the last, “I wish I deserved…” and see how that felt. Usually, it would feel a lot more true, so I would tap on that one, and so on, grad­u­ally mov­ing into the more com­pletely pos­i­tive state­ment, which soon felt com­pletely okay to say. It became true because I hon­ored my need to ease into the positive.

I’ll have more to say about this, and will be pro­vid­ing more exam­ples of how to ease into your own pos­i­tive state­ments, but if you’re already famil­iar with EFT, and you’ve been hav­ing sim­i­lar trou­bles with affir­ma­tions or pos­i­tive mes­sages for your­self, I hope you feel free to just try it your­self. Don’t be attached to the spe­cific words, and don’t worry about which points to tap–just tap where it feels right.

Deserving or wish­ing may not be the right words for you. Once you make a state­ment that feels like a lie to you, chances are pretty good you’ll have some notion of what about it seems wrong; just dilute the state­ment until it feels true, even if you wind up with some­thing that would seem silly to any­one else. There’s no wrong here; you’re only try­ing to get your lit­tle kid mind to move into a big­ger sense of pos­si­bil­ity. Talk to your own mind as if you were speak­ing to a fright­ened child. Be kind, be gen­tle, and be patient. Soon enough, the fear will ease off, and you can begin to grow up in a bet­ter neigh­bor­hood.

Hope this helps!

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Most peo­ple have heard the old say­ing, “if you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll keep get­ting what you always got.” This is some­thing many of us have butted our heads against when we des­per­ately wanted a dif­fer­ent result, but some­how kept com­ing back to the same old place. People around us might have won­dered why we didn’t fig­ure things out much sooner, why we seemed hell­bent on sefl-​​sabotage. We didn’t know, either. We just fig­ured there must be some­thing wrong with us, or with the world.

There is a way to ease into the results we want, and out of the self-​​sabotage, and I will go into it later in this post, but first, it is impor­tant to under­stand a few things about how our minds work. I’m going to dis­cuss two prin­ci­ples that are cru­cial to mak­ing delib­er­ate life changes, and espe­cially to escap­ing the awful trap of self-​​sabotage.

1. You are large; you con­tain multitudes

When we say “I,” it may seem as if we’re speak­ing of a mono­lithic thing, some­thing sin­gu­lar and uni­fied. Yet, when we look closer, we may find that there are many parts of each of us. Some of these parts are very obvi­ous: the “grown-​​up” part of me knows I should work, but the “lit­tle kid” part would rather go play. Other parts are much less obvi­ous, and we can only become aware of them when we find our­selves repeat­edly blocked from accom­plish­ing our goals–or even from lik­ing our­selves very much–because of our own self-​​sabotage.

As I under­stand it, this sort of frag­men­ta­tion is often more fre­quent and trou­ble­some for peo­ple who have under­gone trau­matic expe­ri­ences, espe­cially at a young age.

This leads us to assump­tion num­ber 2. All parts of you are always act­ing in your own best inter­est. Everything you do is for a reason.

This is pos­si­bly the most impor­tant idea I’ll ever present here, and if you’ve been bat­tling self-​​sabotage for a while, it may seem like a cruel absur­dity. Yet, I assure you it is true, and the more deeply you can embrace it, the faster and eas­ier you will find your­self real­iz­ing your fond­est wishes for your life.

How can this be true? After all, just look at the things peo­ple do to them­selves! The messes peo­ple cre­ate in their lives. If you’re try­ing as hard as you can to give up some self-​​destructive behav­ior, it may seem as if you clearly have an enemy inside, cer­tainly not a friend.

The key to com­ing to terms with this idea, and to get­ting all your frag­mented selves in uni­son, is to under­stand–really under­stand–that not all parts of you par­take equally of your con­scious, ratio­nal intel­li­gence. In fact, the more fre­quently you have expe­ri­enced painful cir­cum­stances, espe­cially when you were young, the less ratio­nal some of these parts will be. You, the con­scious you, can think and rea­son, but these “splits” can­not. They can only feel, and sort of grab onto things, some­times in very much the same way as a drown­ing per­son might grab onto what­ever bit of flot­sam comes by.

You prob­a­bly have expe­ri­enced the strength in some of these parts. They will cling with intense and per­verse stub­born­ness to behav­iors that may be incred­i­bly destruc­tive for the indi­vid­ual. And yet, truly, the motive behind them is ALWAYS for the person’s own good. Only the logic is flawed.

Also, to com­pound the con­fu­sion, since these “splits” (and their trou­ble­some deci­sions) were often cre­ated in response to painful or trau­matic cir­cum­stances, we tend to hide them from our­selves. Most of us don’t really like being reminded of times when we were help­less, or humil­i­ated or harmed. It’s as if we are oys­ters, and the painful events are grains of sand that we wall off, hid­ing the raw real­ity from our con­scious minds. So when we look, all we see is some ugly behav­ior that we can’t seem to stop doing.

Most efforts to cre­ate change in our­selves or in oth­ers use some sort of force or coer­cion. Yet in so many cases, this is exactly the tac­tic that must be avoided. If you were con­vinced that your com­mu­nity were in dan­ger, and that pro­tect­ing all that was most impor­tant to you required you to act in a cer­tain way, you’d do so with all your strength! Anyone who tried to get you to stop would be seen as your enemy, or at least severely mis­guided, and you’d resist them to the death. After all, our babies are in dan­ger! Fight!!

Rather than bat­tling a ter­ror­ized and deter­mined enemy, what we need to do is to gen­tly, but per­sis­tently allow this frag­mented part to tell its story. What is it pro­tect­ing us from? What is the mor­tal dan­ger to our­selves it is work­ing so hard to avert?

It is pro­foundly impor­tant that we approach this with as much self-​​acceptance as we can. This may not be easy! You might have to ease into it. After all, this is the part of you which has caused you so much suf­fer­ing. You may hate it. Yet if you can ease your­self into com­pas­sion, your efforts will be rewarded beyond your dreams.

I’ve talked a lot about the­ory, but I promised you an easy way to over­come self-​​sabotage. How do you actu­ally go about doing that? Before I offer that, I should pro­vide a disclaimer.

What fol­lows is a pow­er­ful tech­nique. It can be very rapid…but also pretty intense. It is meant for rea­son­ably healthy adults who want to over­come some of the more typ­i­cal forms of self-​​sabotage. If you are suf­fer­ing from a more seri­ous emo­tional or phys­i­cal ill­ness, or have expe­ri­enced a severe trauma that has not yet been addressed, then I urge you to first seek some heal­ing for these issues from a com­pe­tent health care provider (ide­ally one who is pro­fi­cient in EFT or sim­i­lar energy psy­chol­ogy tech­nique.) At the very least, please con­sider learn­ing such a tech­nique for your­self and using it to get your SUDS level (sever­ity of the prob­lem on a scale of 1–10) down to at least a 2 or 3 before attempt­ing the following.

If you don’t know how to do EFT yet, but do feel you’re ready to dive in, you may wish to use this chart to show you where the EFT tap­ping points are, or you may sim­ply tap on your breast­bone or hold your hand over your heart or on your fore­head in order to stim­u­late phys­i­cal release of energy.

Be sure to do this at a time when you will have at least an hour to your­self, and noth­ing major sched­uled for a while. You prob­a­bly won’t need a whole hour, and you will prob­a­bly feel won­der­ful when you’re done, but give your­self that space in case you need it.

I’d like to throw out a spe­cial thanks to Dr. Carol Look for offer­ing the idea of tap­ping on the feel­ing dur­ing the Tapping World Summit. It brought me far enough to do this blog in the first place!

The first thing you need to do is to sort of halfway for­get about the behav­ior that’s both­er­ing you so much. The trou­ble­some behavoir may be some­what of a smoke­screen. The real prob­lem may have lit­tle to do with it. Instead, you have to go where you may really not wish to go–with the feeling.

The feel­ing may not be obvi­ous. In fact, the prob­lem­atic behav­ior may be what you’re using to avoid feel­ing this! Because it won’t be a feel­ing you like. In fact, I can pretty well guar­an­tee it’s going to be a very sucky feel­ing indeed. But hang in there. You won’t have to feel it for long; the EFT or other phys­i­cal touch you’ll be using will help to gen­tly bleed off the painful feel­ing, like let­ting the air out of a tire.

What if you have no idea what feel­ing you’re look­ing for? You’re a total blank–you feel noth­ing. What am I talk­ing about? Oddly enough, you can take this as a good sign. The feel­ing is there alright, but it’s a doozy, and your “split” is try­ing to pro­tect you from feel­ing it.

Another point is that it is prob­a­bly a com­pound feel­ing. Not just fear, but also fear/​helplessness/​injustice/​rage, for exam­ple. Any of these things is painful to expe­ri­ence, but put them together and almost any­one will have dif­fi­culty deal­ing with them ratio­nally. Almost any­one will try to pro­tect them­selves from feel­ing that, so you are not in any way unusual or weak for doing so, espe­cially since you were prob­a­bly a child when you first expe­ri­enced this whop­per of a feeling.

You have to do some real gen­tle self-​​talk here. Remember that you are talk­ing to an over­wh­lemed child. If it helps you have com­pas­sion, think of this part of your­self as an ani­mal, per­haps a puppy or some other crea­ture you might want to protect.

If you know EFT, just start tap­ping on the points–any points you like, it doesn’t mat­ter. If you don’t know EFT yet, that’s fine, just tap your­self gen­tly with your fin­ger­tips in the cen­ter of your chest, or in some other area of your body if it seems use­ful, or sim­ply hold your hand over your heart or fore­head and gen­tly rub as you might mas­sage the back of a bereaved friend. If you already know the feel­ing, focus on that. If you don’t, then keep telling your­self that it’s okay that you’re not ready to feel it yet, that you want to let your­self feel all your feel­ings, even the ones you don’t like. Keep the phys­i­cal touch, the tap­ping or the gen­tle palm pressure.

What you say to your­self might go some­thing like this, “even though I can’t stand to feel this feel­ing, this help­less, ter­ri­fied feel­ing (or what­ever feel­ing it is,) and I can’t even stand to accept myself for feel­ing it, because it’s just too awful to feel this, it would be nice if I could let myself feel a lit­tle com­pas­sion. After all, I’ve been feel­ing this for so long, and it’s so unbear­able. I’d like to think I’ve been doing my best, even though it’s not even close to how well I’d like to be doing. Surely I’m not such a bad per­son; I try so hard. If it were any­one else, I’d be more under­stand­ing. Maybe I deserve a lit­tle under­stand­ing. Maybe I can let myself have a lit­tle under­stand­ing, since this is such a ter­ri­ble feel­ing to have to live with.”

Don’t be attached to my words here. The pre­cise words for you can never be writ­ten down. People often are very con­cerned with say­ing exactly the right words, but I think that con­cern is only because it’s sim­ply so very painful to look at the real feel­ing. I’d much rather con­cen­trate on say­ing exactly the right words than to have to look at that ugly emo­tion, wouldn’t you?

The rea­son we say these words is so we can ease our­selves into deal­ing with these feel­ings. You may have to pre­tend you were try­ing to coax a fright­ened ani­mal out of a burn­ing build­ing. What words do you use then? It doesn’t really mat­ter, right? You’re sim­ply try­ing to help the poor crea­ture have the courage to put one foot in front of another. You speak softly, entreat­ingly, lur­ing it along with promises of under­stand­ing and acceptance.

But…and this is crucial…always tell the truth! If you know you don’t totally accept your­self, or don’t love all parts of your­self, that’s okay. Who does? Only say what is true. In tra­di­tional EFT, we say some­thing like, “even though I have this prob­lem, I deeply and com­pletely love and accept myself.” Which is a fine thing, only it sim­ply isn’t always true for all peo­ple at all times. At this par­tic­u­lar time, it may be so jar­ringly untrue as to throw you right out of your process. If it’s more true to say, “I can barely stand to face any of this, and I wish I didn’t hate myself for it,” then say that.

Keep tap­ping. Keep breath­ing. There is no need to push your­self any faster through this than you need to go. Just stay with it and keep tap­ping. If you find that your face is squinched up and your chest is tight and the feel­ing is really huge and on top of you, please just let that hap­pen. Don’t stop!! This will pass. Just breathe and keep gen­tly coax­ing your­self along.

I can’t tell you exactly what will hap­pen as you go through this. It may be very sim­ple and straight­for­ward, or it may be a very twisty and com­plex process. You may get insights. Memories may come up for you. Stay with it. Trust the insights. You may real­ize you’ve never liked some­thing, or never felt safe about some­thing. Work all those insights into your self talk. “It’s really tough that I’ve never felt safe with this, even if I’m impa­tient with this fear, I choose to let myself feel it now…”

Trust any mem­o­ries that come up, too, even if you have no idea how they could be related to your issue. I have had seem­ingly irrel­e­vant mem­o­ries crop up, which I ignored sev­eral times–and won­dered why I got nowhere with the prob­lem, only to find, when I finally tuned into the mem­ory, that while it didn’t seem to have any­thing to do with the money prob­lem I’ve strug­gled with, it turned out to be the key to the whole issue.

Whatever hap­pens, always keep com­ing back to the feel­ing. This is ALL about feel­ings, not so much about thoughts. If you find your­self ana­lyz­ing and try­ing to fig­ure it all out, just try to let that go. Take a breath and return to the feel­ing. If you go blank–and that can hap­pen, don’t give up, keep tap­ping and breath­ing. Tell your­self that you choose to let your­self expe­ri­ence the feel­ing, even though you know it won’t be com­fort­able. Tell your­self you’re decid­ing to hear from all parts of yourself.

Gradually, the feel­ing will ease and fade, though it might rise and fall and change sev­eral times. Gradually, your self-​​talk can get more and more accept­ing until it may even be pos­si­ble and true to say, “I am so grate­ful for this part of me that tried so hard and so lov­ingly to pro­tect me. I am such a won­der­ful per­son. I“m so proud of myself for try­ing so hard.”

You will know when you are done. You will feel so amaz­ingly relaxed. There might be tears of grat­i­tude in your eyes, as impos­si­ble as that might have seemed at the out­set. It will feel like a very shin­ing moment; you will feel radiant.

If you wish to test your results–and if you feel sure you have more time and energy for more pro­cess­ing, because there may very well be more–then you can look again at the prob­lem­atic behav­ior, and try out a state­ment about the behav­ior, or imag­ine a scene where you’re behav­ing the way you’d like to be.

If the prob­lem was in mov­ing toward things you’d like, say if you were hav­ing prob­lems earn­ing as much money as you’d like, or choos­ing appro­pri­ate roman­tic part­ners or stand­ing up for your­self, then you can imag­ine your­self doing the desired behav­ior and see how you feel. Can you say, “I eas­ily and nat­u­rally find myself earn­ing $X, and I feel great about that”? Can you say, “I’m so happy with my lov­ing, sexy mate”?

If the prob­lem has been some­thing neg­a­tive you’ve been doing, like smok­ing or drink­ing, it might be a bit more chal­leng­ing. You can think of times when you’d nor­mally be reach­ing for the cig­a­rette or the wine, and instead, imag­ine your­self feel­ing calm and relaxed. See how that feels.

When you pic­ture these scenes, or make these state­ments, tune in to how your body feels. Pay atten­tion to even sub­tle ten­sions. Does your back sud­denly feel even a lit­tle bit tight? Does any part of you twitch? How does your stom­ach feel? Any lit­tle aches and pains at all?

If your body feels totally calm and filled with ease, then you are finished!

If you had a phys­i­cal reac­tion, though, you might want to do a bit more, either now or later. You’ll want to tap some more, and say some­thing like, “even though my stom­ach isn’t quite happy about (new pos­i­tive behav­ior…) I want to feel safe all through myself, I want to hear from my stom­ach about what I really need.” Or, “even though it’s not safe in my back to (what­ever the desired out­come…) I trust my back. My back wants what is best for me. I want to know what­ever my back needs me to know.”

When you reach a place where you can say or imag­ine your pos­i­tive, desired out­come, and all your body feels relaxed and com­fort­able, then you have done it! Congratulations! While there may cer­tainly be more to work with at a later time (or not,) you’ve done a huge amount of emo­tional work in a very brief time, and you’ve even been good to your­self in the process. Way to go!

Please feel free to ask me about any­thing that may be con­fus­ing in this. I’ll be happy to pro­vide clar­i­fi­ca­tion as needed.

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