As a child, my father would threaten my sister and me that if we
weren't good he would disinherit us. It
became a bit of a joke in our teenage years: we were constantly in and out of
his will.
Since my grandparents had little to leave my parents, what I took away
from all this was that I never expected to inherit anything. You had to make
your own way in life. My father encouraged us to do just that, so I never felt
that inheritance was my birthright. The money that my parents made is their own
money. On the other side of the coin, however, I don't necessarily feel that I owe
my mother anything. If I choose to take care of her in her old age, it's
because I want to: I'm doing it out of love and not obligation. And that lack
of obligation takes a huge weight off my shoulders.
Over here in France, though, I've done a lot of work with people on
issues deriving from inheritance. Whereas in the UK parents can disinherit their children - and leave everything to the
RSPCA if they see fit - French children automatically inherit their parents'
effects. But that works two ways. Inheritance here is a whole package. Not only
do you inherit by law your parents' money and property, but you are also
legally responsible for them and for their debts.
And with all this goes the emotional baggage handed down through the
generations. As often as not, people aren't aware that it doesn't belong to
them - and this is where EFT can really help. I've often used aromatherapy with
people who have been referred to me by their doctors because they recognise
that the specific problem - asthma or urinary problems, say - might have an
emotional root and therefore not respond to simple medication. Often there
would be huge improvements, yet I've had this lingering feeling that something
was blocking them.
The goal of complementary medicine is that these conditions don't come
back. It's like pulling a weed out by
the root. Instinctively I felt that I couldn't do this with certain people, because
they seemed to be carrying around stuff that didn't belong to them - but I
didn't know where to go with this feeling.
We talk about atopic families: eczema, asthma, weight problems handed
down from parent to child because it's in the genes. It's in our family; that's just the way it is. There's nothing you can
do about it. I've had a number of clients with weight problems, for
example, who come to me and tell me things like: My mother says 'You're just like me; you've got my figure and it's just
the way you are'. Even if this creates real anger and a refusal to be that
way, these beliefs are usually very deeply engrained. So they might be able to
lose weight easily enough, but they always put it back on - because finally
they have been programmed to be like their mother.
With EFT I can now take someone back and discover where these messages
come from. We can go deeper and trace them back to their roots - and pull them
out at the root, so they are no longer false truths and no longer written indelibly
on their wall.
This has been particularly clear in a number of cases of respiratory
problems, such as asthma or bronchitis. We've cleaned out the wound in their
own lives, so to speak, but found that the problem is still there for some
reason. In going further back, I've found: Oh
yes, my mother suffered from that, too. In one fascinating case, we've gone
back to a great grandfather who worked down a coal mine and died from
emphysema. Using EFT on these issues, the emotion that arises can be
astonishing - from people who often don't even realise that they had that kind
of emotional attachment to someone in their past.
The lungs are associated with grief. So it can be an inherited grief.
These days, we can voice grief and other emotions more easily. But with our
parents' or grandparents' generations, it was often more a case of keeping a
tight lid on such things. So something traumatic can become a family secret,
and children know that it's a no-go area. However, the grief doesn't
necessarily go away. It can be passed on from one generation to the next, but
without any conscious notion of where the emotion comes from.
So the whole inheritance package often includes not just money and
physical goods, but also emotions. Of course, science might explain things
through DNA and genetics, but from my professional point of view, I always look
first at the emotional inheritance. Whereas you can't do anything about DNA,
the great thing is you can do something about the emotional root.
Many people in the UK told me that it would be impossible to practise
complementary therapies in France, but what I inherited from my father was my
drive and determination to prove the nay-sayers wrong. Sometimes stubbornness
has its uses!
