There are many ways of pleasing the ones we love, and most of them are far more glamorous than doing their chores and running their errands. I’m a huge fan of the more colorful ways of showing affection, mind you, but I’d like to take a moment here to celebrate the humble act of service.

When we’re young and healthy, with few responsibilities, this sort of affection doesn’t seem very important, or it didn’t to me. I barely noticed the things others did for me. When I became a mother, and then a single mother, however, I came to appreciate them much more. When you’re too busy, with too many responsibilities and worries, you come to yearn for someone to share the burdens, and things like candy and flowers, while nice, can come to seem almost insulting in their irrelevance to the overwhelming reality of the moment. Someone who will change your oil, now, that’s a hottie worth hanging onto! Someone who will take a little of the burden leaves you freer to experience some pleasure in its stead.

Today, my life is much less stressful, mainly because of my thoughtful sweetie, but I still have an almost erotic appreciation of the little acts of service, both the giving and the receiving. What I’m coming to realize is that it’s not only the body that we can please; it’s the entirety of our loved one’s reality.

Everything we experience comes to us through our nervous system. Loving kindness of all sorts provides us with pleasure. Overwork, stress and unkindness create pain. When someone relieves us of a chore, they are not only taking away a little of our stress and giving us some extra space to enjoy pleasure, they are also giving the gift of their mindfulness to our needs and our feelings.

Provided there is balance in the relationship, the loop closes nicely; there is pleasure in the giving as well as the receiving. It feels very good to do things for someone who is good to you.

So the next time you’re the one doing the dishes or picking up the dry cleaning, try to think of it as a caress. Because it certainly can be. It’s certainly more fun and pleasurable to think of it that way, and if you’re imaginative enough about it, you can even allow the mundane chores of the day to be a nice build-up to the other activities that are more likely to be come to mind when we think of “acts of love.”

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This recipe uses freshly grated ginger. If you keep a ginger root (unpeeled) in a ziplock in your freezer, it’s easy to pull it out and grate what you need anytime. Use a fine-toothed grater for best results. Serves 4.

1/2 cup sour cream
1/4 cup toasted sesame oil
1/4 cup lemon juice
3 T. grated ginger
1 t. garlic powder
1 t. onion powder
1/2 t. salt
1/2 t. tarragon, crushed into powder
sprinkle of freshly ground black pepper

Whisk all ingredients well.

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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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I have two indoor kitties who mainly eat Taste of the Wild, a high-quality, grain-free dry food.  Twice a day, I give them a very small spoonful (about 1/2 tablespoon) of this wet food, since any more will just go to waste. Your cat’s appetite may vary.

This recipe takes less than 20 minutes, including clean-up, and makes just over a quart, which lasts us for weeks after I’ve frozen it into small portions. You can vary this according to your whim, but basically all you will need are the following:

• blender or food processor
• something to freeze small portions in (I use a silicone muffin tin)
• largish spoon
• fork
• you may want to use a mixing bowl
• a small container to hold the thawed, refrigerated portion

• 1 pint raw chicken livers
• about 20-25 ounces inexpensive canned fish, some in each of oil and water (details to follow)
• any other nutritive items you wish to add

There are many types of canned fish available, and you are certainly free to spend more than I do. I buy the store brands of sardines and tuna in oil and in water, salmon, and jack mackerel. Just avoid any with hot sauce or mustard; I doubt your cat will thank you for that!

The reason I use both the fish in oil and in water is to provide enough oil to prevent hairballs, but hopefully not enough to make them overweight.

Chicken livers can often be found in your grocery store’s meat case, with the rest of the chicken parts. They are very inexpensive. I’ve been paying about $1.25 for a plastic pint container full. They are usually half frozen when I buy them, and you’ll want to use them right away as they will not keep.

It has now taken me longer to describe the background than it will take you to make this. All you need to do is dump the container of liver, juice and all, into the blender or food processor. Blend into a liquid. This is the only ingredient I do blenderize, because if you don’t, the liver will be stringy, and the cats will drag it out on the floor, for your scrubbing pleasure.

I don’t use the machine to blend the fish in, because I want the food to have a little texture. Instead, I mash it up in a bowl with a fork, and mix it in by hand, or just place it directly into the liver and mash it there. Whichever way you do it, use all the water and oil, don’t drain it. You want to mash it just enough to keep your cat from pulling out the larger bits, and leaving them dried and stuck to the floor.

If you’re careful about the mixing, or do it over the sink, your cleanup will be very simple. Once it’s all mixed in, just go ahead and give a little to the cats just to keep from falling over them, since they’re almost certainly twining around your ankles at this point, meowing insistently. Pour or spoon most of the rest into the muffin tins, or ice cube trays or whatever you are using to freeze. Leave just enough for the next couple of days, and place this into a small plastic container to go in the fridge.

Everything should clean up easily with a rinse and a trip through the dishwasher. The next day, if you wish, you can transfer the frozen “muffins” to a ziplock freezer bag, with the date written on it. When you use up the refrigerated portion, just pull a new one out, put it in the fridge container, and let it thaw overnight in the fridge.

The last batch I made produced just over two pounds, divided into twelve “muffins,” plus a little left over to go in the fridge.

Enjoy!

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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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Anyone who has had extensive experience with an energy psychology technique such as EFT will find our responses to the above ideas becoming fairly nuanced, and probably in a way that their proponents never expected. If you carry it far enough, you might find yourself sometimes sharply at odds with some of the people around you.

The idea that a feeling is neither right nor wrong comes, I believe, out of a belief that feelings are outside our control. Feelings happen to us, and we learn to believe that we are more or less at their mercy. In the case of a negative, uncomfortable feeling, many people will be deeply offended at the idea that they are in any way responsible for having it.

From the time we are tiny, we are led to believe that we are the slaves of our emotions. We’re supposed to learn some coping techniques, enough to keep us from hitting others or behaving too offensively, but this sort of control is mainly directed toward helping us choose how to behave in response to our feelings, not toward learning how to mitigate or change the feelings themselves. Most people don’t believe such a thing is possible or even desirable.

A few years ago, my grandmother told me a story about how she came to get rid of the unsightly skin tags she used to have under her eyes, those little funny looking pouchy moles that some people get with age. She had simply suffered with them, vaguely thinking she should maybe go to the doctor and have them removed, but was reluctant to spend the money. Then one day, a friend of hers said, with typical Okie candor, “Anne, why don’t you get rid of them gawwwd-dammed things?”

This friend, it turned out, knew a very simple way to get rid of the skin tags. Dab them three times a day with warmed castor oil, and they’d dry up and fall off. My grandmother told me this story after I showed her that I was getting some of my own and I was wondering what to do about them. (This remedy worked for me, btw, but the castor oil really does have to be warmed; room-temperature doesn’t work.)

It turns out, it’s a lot less rude to be blunt about someone’s trouble, if you happen to know a simple remedy for it.

If you have no way to eliminate a painful emotion, if you’re doomed to experience it every time a certain stimulus occurs, then you can, with some justification, ask others around you to tiptoe around your problem spot. “Uncle Milton had a terrible experience with cabbages during the war, so we can’t ever talk about cabbages or coleslaw, not in front of Milton. We’ll just have to have mashed potatoes with our fried chicken, I’m sorry, kids.”

If you can’t do anything about it, then a feeling is just a fact, neither right nor wrong. It just is.

On the other hand, if you can do something about it, especially if the fix is extremely simple, even more simple (and clean) than dabbing warm oil on yourself, then the equation becomes rather different. The feeling remains a fact, and you still get to decide what to do about it, but it becomes a bit harder to ask others to change their behavior because of it.

Learning EFT was a revelation for me. I’d never realized how profoundly I’d been at the mercy of my feelings. You can’t know that until you begin to snip them away–there is just no way to see the bonds until they begin to come off.

I remember when I first learned about EFT. The letters stand for “Emotional Freedom Technique,” and for quite a while, I thought that was kind of a stupid name. Why didn’t they call it something less hokey? The words “emotional freedom” conveyed nothing to me. And yet, I loved the technique. I got really into it, and have been for years, because it actually worked. And I had a serious need for something that worked.

I did as instructed. “Try it on everything,” they tell us. I did. Over and over again, it worked. Not every single time, and not always immediately, but it worked most of the time, and mostly, it worked very, very quickly. I began to see my feelings in a whole new way. A painful emotion was no longer something to hide from, suffer from, create a backache over. It just meant my energy system was out of whack, and I needed to spend a few moments to set it right. In 20 seconds, it could be all over, or maybe I needed to dig a little. Maybe I needed 20 minutes. Or a couple of days. Whatever. The main point was, this is transient.

Also, the meanings of events began to change. From being dumped by my boyfriend, to the death of my father, as I did this simple technique for the immediate sense of pain, I also found that my entire understanding of the situations changed and deepened. I wasn’t just shoving bad emotions under the carpet; I was actually changing my relationship to the world. So many of my negative feelings were based on falsehoods, misunderstandings, or old data. How valid is a feeling if it’s based on an error, or on a whole series of errors?

Over time, I found I experienced negative emotions more and more rarely. I began to feel basically calm and neutral most of the time. Even more surprising, the meaning of “emotional freedom” began to become more and more clear to me.

When you’re at the mercy of your feelings, and you have been all your life, you develop whole classes of thought and experience which have become problematic. Your responses to wide swaths of experience can become constrained, layered with emotional grime, and to a large extent, you don’t even realize it. In fact, you are probably better off not realizing it, if you have no way to do anything about it. It’ll only make you more miserable.

But once you’ve chipped away a section of this crud, and suddenly you’re free in some area you probably hadn’t been since you were a small child, if then, the words “emotional freedom” suddenly take on a great sense of relevance. You want more and more of it!

I don’t know if we’re ever totally emotionally free, and please don’t suppose I’m suggesting I’m there. For me, it’s very much an ongoing effort, much like trying to clean and maintain a big house when you’re a natural packrat. I suspect we keep finding newer and deeper levels of it as we go, and since life keeps happening, there are always new things to respond to. What is interesting to me at this moment, though is how frequently I read or hear something from out in the world and have exactly the same reaction as my grandmother’s friend.

I read about soldiers with PTSD. A child who witnessed a murder. I hear about a friend who always gets mad when someone is late. A child down the street is dyslexic. A talk show host has a germ phobia. Someone has chronic allergies. A woman wakes up from nightmares every night after being raped years ago. My friend has a headache because she’s mad at her sister. A man nearby is saying that women will never be interested in him because he’s too nice. On and on and on.

I keep wanting to say, “why don’t you get rid of that gawwwd-dammed thang???”

Only I can’t do that because it sounds callous. Since we’re trained from birth to suppose we’re helpless to do anything about our feelings and bad memories, and since we all have so many of them, we’ve developed really elaborate social protocols for responding to one another’s feelings, and part of that is, we’re supposed to take their feelings seriously. We’re supposed to care, not just about the person, but about the feeling itself. The feeling itself is supposed to be seen as important, as is the event that caused the bad feeling. I’m supposed to act like I care about all of those things.

Only…I don’t. I can’t. I care about the people, certainly. I want them to be well and experience life in a happy and good way. I’m very glad to point them toward any one of probably dozens of techniques for relieving the impact, or walk them through a technique. But who cares exactly how any one of them got hurt? Or exactly what way their psyche happened to recoil, what shape the bruise took? Everybody has some sort of trauma. If you know how to do the work, it quickly begins to seem so much more sensible to just fix it than to sympathize.

I know I make it sound a lot easier than it necessarily is. Anyone who has suffered for a long time, and learned to feel helpless (which is most of us,) will have a hard time suddenly accepting the almost magic-wand nature of techniques like EFT. Had we been raised from childhood to use these tools, it would be different, but most of us are coming from a lot of hurt, and a lot of disempowerment.

Even though I know all of this, and even though I’m still working out my own release, I feel a little bit like a member of the underground railroad, or one of the first of the hostages to untie some of the bonds. I have a sense of what some of these ropes and chains are made of. I know they’re not as tough to untie as we’ve been led to believe. When I meet another of us wondering around loose, broken chains still hanging from our wrists, there’s a feeling of great joy and excitement, and almost inevitably, we start plotting about how to free the others.

Empathy takes on a whole new meaning. I wrote all this out, just needing to clarify it for myself.

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