On Acceptance

People ask me how and why EFT works. There's no real scientific explanation to call on. For all my training in anatomy and physiology, I can only suggest that it works in the same way that acupuncture does and talk about the body's major meridian channels and how tapping on these points helps to shift physical and/or emotional pain. What I know is that it seems to work for most people. Personally, I can accept that.  

Acceptance, though, doesn't always come easily. We have a mania for explanations. Sometimes, it's simply an enquiring mind, but often it's a kind of self-defence mechanism. For example, knowing that person x developed cancer because he or she worries a lot or lives a stressful life or used to smoke 40 cigarettes a day means that we may not be struck down by some arbitrary act of fate. It's scary to accept that things can happen to us without any apparent rhyme or reason.

So maybe it's not surprising that one of the hardest things I find for certain clients is to learn to accept. I've come across this often in women who have difficulties in conceiving. We live in a society where everything's possible. If you have enough money, you can buy your own Rolls Royce with a jet engine. And if you find yourself infertile, then there's always IVF treatment or test-tube reproduction. Whereas I grew up being told I want never gets, now we believe we can have whatever we want.

So clients who find that they can't conceive sometimes make themselves angry in pursuing what they see as their God-given right. In spending so much time knocking on a particular door that won't open, they can end up making themselves ill. In particularly difficult cases, I try to help people shift their way of looking at a source of so much unhealthy frustration. What if there were a positive side of not being able to have a child? Is there some positive reason why I am different from others? Might I have been singled out for something else that I can offer?

It seems sometimes that western society gets increasingly desperate to help people fulfil their needs rather than to help them cope with or grieve for the loss of what they can't have. Is it that we ourselves feel guilty or uncomfortable about having what others can't?

I had an interesting EFT session with a client about the issue of acceptance. He was a young man with a new partner and a little daughter. So he should have been happy, but wasn't. For the last two months, he has been constantly anxious. It stemmed from one particular evening when he got back, tired and irritable, from work. He found his daughter up in her bedroom, determined to cover her school book with plastic rather than doing her homework like a good girl. In the end, he snapped, grabbed the roll of plastic and bonked her over the head with it. But he realised that it was harder than he thought and now was obsessed that his daughter was going to die because of it. In spite of medical reassurance, he was waiting for the brain damage to materialise.

Hitting a child was not an option for him and he simply couldn't forgive himself. So we explored the scene as if running a film. We worked through his initial anger and frustration, then arrived at his guilt. Something bad was bound to happen as a consequence of his action. The key seemed to be that he was waiting anxiously, so we stayed with this one phrase: waiting anxiously, waiting anxiously...

Somehow, I had this image of him sitting frozen to the spot a long time ago, waiting for something awful to happen. I asked him about it and yes, there was a time as a little boy, when he was waiting anxiously with his favourite aunt in her kitchen for his drunken uncle to get home. The anxiety was not for himself, but for his aunt.

Finally, he came round to the notion that if he didn't let go of his fear and forgive himself for his transgression, his anxiety would just communicate itself to his daughter – and he and his new partner could never relax together. The rational side of his brain knew that it wasn't logical and he wanted nothing better than to let go of the feeling. What swung it finally was learning to accept: that for one moment he simply lost it – not with an iron bar, but with a 'dangerous' roll of plastic!