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!

Gather Ye Practitioners While Ye May

I'm already getting excited. Christmas is coming and then there are two EFT 'gatherings' early in the New Year. I've gathered in the past, but this time I'll be presenting my work on 'multi-generational constellations': in English at The EFT Gathering organised by Gwyneth Moss at the Royal York Hotel at the end of January, and in French at the Rencontres Francophones d'EFT at Poitiers in the middle of February.

Both are going to help spread the word and give practitioners a chance to share experiences, good practice and perhaps difficulties. I'm hoping to give colleagues some insights about just how far back emotional baggage can go and how EFT has helped some of my clients un-stick the record and get out of the same old groove, so to speak.

It's probably true to say that EFT is less known in France than it is in the UK. The organiser of the Rencontres, Catie Bertoux, has done a great job in publicising it in her native land and this event will help to make it better known here – particularly as Gary Craig, the founder of the therapy, will be 'virtually' present at both events to endorse the work we're doing in Europe and answer questions from the floor. He'll be translated into French at the Poitiers event, which will give non-English-speaking practitioners a chance to consult the oracle.

I hope this doesn't sound like mass guru worship, because Gary is a remarkably down-to-earth guy, who has generously shared his work with others without milking it for all its commercial worth. When he retired in 2010, he released EFT into the public domain as a kind of gift to the world – so that everyone can do it. Curiously, he is an engineering graduate from Stanford University, but he long believed that the quality of our thoughts dictates the quality of our lives and worked as a personal performance coach.

He developed EFT from the work of a Californian psychologist by the name of Roger Callahan, whose TFT – or Thought Field Therapy – was based on tapping on the body's meridians or acupuncture points to shift our natural healing energy. Gary Craig trained in Dr. Callahan's procedures and then simplified them to come up with something that evolved into the EFT that we can all use today.

At the moment I'm in my initial preparation stage. In other words, it's all going on in my head rather than down on paper. The hardest thing I find when working with people is that I'm so involved in the moment that it's almost like a hypnotic trance – which makes it rather hard sometimes to hang onto all the details. Still, I used to spend hours learning my lines as an actress, so I know that it'll be all right on the night.

I'm looking forward to it. Or rather, to them.

Crime And Punishment

Guilt. It's something that people rarely bring to us as therapists. It's generally easier to talk of what others have done to them rather than what they've done to others.

I had a couple of really interesting sessions recently with a young boy. As kids, we normally grow up knowing that there are consequences to our actions. If I'm bad and don't do my homework, I won't be allowed to use my Playstation. If I get caught stealing, my parents won't buy me a bike. If I'm nasty to my brother or sister, I'll get smacked. And so on.

We don't want to be found out. How many people can remember doing something naughty when they were little – and hiding the awful truth? My own husband still vividly remembers sneaking into the larder as a little boy and stealing a spoonful of icing sugar. It turned out to be pure Robin starch. Quite disgusting and punishment enough.

What happens when you hide it so well that you are never found out? Who punishes you?

You punish yourself. The punishment our parents inflict tends to be one-off. It's over and done with. But when we punish ourselves, boy do we do a good job. It's like a life sentence to the power of three – with no time-off for good behaviour.

The guilt, the guilt! The trouble is, it's unconscious. We don't always realise that the reason we are giving ourselves such a hard time goes back, say, to that stolen chocolate biscuit at age 4.

The little boy of seven who came to see me recently was the middle one of five children. He was harbouring lots of anger and making family life a misery. I used a combination of EFT and aromatherapy with him. The former encouraged him to open up, the latter gave him some 'softness'. Otherwise, coming to see me might have been perceived as a punishment.

The essential oils I chose were lavender and frankincense: a great oil for deep-seated anger and frustration and for spiritual release. He loved the combination of therapies and let go of a lot of 'stuff'. After this one session, the family reported back that things had totally changed for the better and that meal times in particular were calm once more.

During our second session, it was clear that there was something he didn't want to let go of, but I wasn't sure what it was. I asked him if there was anything at all that he felt guilty about. There was. In his case, his family knew what he had done at the time and had punished him accordingly. So why was he still hanging onto the guilt?

This triggered an emotional outpouring. It was something he couldn't forgive himself for, and he felt so awful that he couldn't tell me what it was.

So we started tapping together on the meridian points and repeating words like, Even though I feel really, really guilty and can't tell Deborah what it is, I'm a cool kid and my mum and dad love me.

Another great thing about EFT, as I learnt from my mentor, Gwyneth Moss, is that it can still work even if you can't actually bring yourself to voice what it is you feel so guilty about. So, I proceeded with something like, Even though I did xxxxx and it's unforgivable, my mum and my dad forgave me – and so did my grandad. He particularly respected his grandfather as a very truthful, upright person. If he could forgive him...

When we started, he gauged the intensity of the guilt as 15 out of 10. By the end of the second session, I asked him to test whether there was any guilt left. I asked him if he could imagine doing the same thing again. He looked at me aghast. Well no. It was a stupid thing to do, but I was only four years old. After punishing himself for three years, he had finally forgiven himself.

By the end of the session, there was a great big smile on his face and when his mum came to collect him, it was touching to see how full of love and joy he was.

He hasn't needed to come back.

Back In The Playground

Last time, I looked briefly at EFT's role in helping people deal with the emotional baggage we are often handed down to carry around with us through life – even if some of it doesn't belong to us.

This time, I want to go back to the playground to suggest how EFT can liberate us from the ghosts of the past. For some, the playground can be an early emotional battleground. My father, for example, was kicked as a child by another boy in the playground. The damage to his leg was so bad that, had it not been for the new wonder drug of the time, penicillin, it would have been amputated.

As it was, the incident shaped his life. The disability stopped him going back to school and the embarrassment he felt probably spurred his eventual success in business. It also left him in physical pain for the rest of his life, which probably explained why he became such a bitter and angry character.

My father never worked through the incident. And how many of us, I wonder, have suffered or still suffer from what happened in the playground? I had a young client recently, whose parents referred her to me because she was driving herself so hard at school that she was putting herself under enormous pressure. Both parents work in the education system, but no matter what they said to their daughter, she wouldn't ease off – even in the holidays.

I love the challenge of working with children and young people. They keep me on my toes and bring out my creativity. What's more, to act early enough is to help them realise their potential. My young client told me that she needed to be 'the best'. That meant perfection. The trouble was, if someone else also achieved 100% in a test or exam, she wouldn't be the best. Her fear, she told me, was that if EFT worked, she wouldn't see the need to work so hard and might therefore no longer be the best. It was a delicate balance; she might easily have chosen to sabotage our sessions. But she did confess that she felt constantly stressed – and didn't want to feel like this. So this was her point of departure.

I knew from talking to her mother that she wanted her daughter to achieve what she never had. So her daughter was no doubt carrying around a certain amount of emotional baggage that didn't even belong to her. But I try to avoid any preconceived interpretations and start instead with what EFT practitioners call 'curious questions' to fish for core issues. Why do you have to be the best? What would happen to you if you weren't the best?

We arrived at a moment in the playground as a five-year old: an incident of bullying by a friend who became a hated enemy. The bullying made her feel really, really bad about herself. She started working so hard because subconsciously it made her feel much better about herself. She could be the best at something. The bully was pretty, but she wasn't clever. So, effectively, her drive for success became a kind of act of revenge. Bingo! She looked at me as if to say, Oh my God! Is that the reason for me working like this?

Having identified the problem, we tapped together on the meridian points to bring down the intensity of the different aspects: shame, anger and finally hate. I ask people to gauge the intensity of the emotions on a scale from 1 to 10, and eventually we managed to bring it all down to a neutral level.

Subsequently, she has eased right up on the pressure she was putting on herself. She feels a lot less stress – but has discovered that she can still achieve very high marks.

There's nothing particularly unique about this story. It could be the story of any number of young people. But it does illustrate the simplicity and effectiveness of EFT. The difference between this story and others lies in the individual aspects and the individual's perceptions of a given event. All too often we tell ourselves, I can't change this; there's no way out of this situation. But often all it takes is a simple shift in perspective – to see something a little differently.