Two outstanding books that address trauma parallel one another:
Touch by Michael Changaris (Life Rhythm, 2015) and Waking the Tiger by Peter Levine (North Atlantic Books, 1997). They both assume that the body is the key to understanding psychic pain as well as the pathway to its healing.

For Changaris there is a direct neurobiological link with touch and that explains everything from developmental delays to techniques of healing. Therapeutic interventions most often utilized include touch of various kinds in different settings. For Levine trauma is body-based and healing comes through an awareness of sensations related to the trauma.

However important cognitive therapies are our emotional selves live in and express themselves through our bodies. Our interaction with body – listening to it as well as physically touching it – gets to the root of emotional suffering much more quickly without re-traumatizing the person.

EFT utilizes exposure therapy and cognitive restructuring. But it does so while simultaneously tapping on the energy centers of the body, activating the body’s innate power to clear trauma and replace it with the unimpeded flow of energy.

 

Ritualized Handwashing often becomes compulsive as it functions as a magical personal spell against perceived contagions. A sense of control is provided by a behavior that functions as a sedative for anxiety. Since different aspects of the perceiving mind are at odds with one another – one aspect repeating the compulsion and another at the same time knowing that it is fictitious and magical, EFT tapping on those opposiites reveals and exposes the polarities. Clearing and identifying the anxiety, ritual and sensation in the body often results in freedom from the self-enforced captivity.

 

All of us have contradictory thoughts that coexist within our minds and cognitive structures. We often hold two opposite ideas simultaneously and that internal conflict leaves us confused and anxious.

For example, a person may at the same time long for approval from others and also know that ultimate approval comes from a sense of inner belonging, what some would call a sense of being loved by God. By tapping on these opposites we not only expose the contradicting cognitive structures but more importantly the emotions attached to them.

Once the opposites are exposed and the tapping activates our energy to sedate the limbic system, we feel much calmer, more accepting of our internal contradictions. We develop a clarity about them and then, at the best, move back toward the origins of the convictions. These are most usually tied to narratives from our past experience that we have internalized; the stories have defined us. Clearing a story of its emotional charge allows us to view our own stories in a more objective way, as an observer who recognizes having chapters in a biography. This work reduces the sense of conflict realized in opposites that used to upset and unsettle us.

Anxiety attacks have several causes but often have at their root a fear of overwhelming feelings. This is the terror that the feelings will destroy us, that we will not be able to handle them if we allow them to surface. Paradoxically, the more we attempt to lock them down and out the more power they have and the more intense our panic becomes. We run from these feelings like we would a tiger pursuing us in the forest. When we tap on the fact that we are panicked and then move to the feelings that gave rise to the panic in the first place, they are cleared, emptied of their charge, their oversized sense of threat.

So called “free floating” anxiety often is not as amorphous as it seems; it is often based in very concrete fears. These fears are often masked by other secondary emotions and rationalizations. Anger is often a go to emotion that is a stand in for fear. And ideas cluster that steel one against fear. If my fear is that I am never quite good enough then I may write a canon of laws that keeps me from facing it. For example, I may decide that if I procrastinate forever then I will never have to face what I fear most.

Usually the present fear is linked to a coordinate in past experience, a charged memory that keeps the fear alive. By exposing and tapping on that specific event and remembered experience the charge is cleared and the present fear is addressed in addition. And then what seemed to be general anxiety dissipates as well.

Many times people struggle with pervasive, reoccurring, persistent, obsessive thoughts, ideas or images in their minds. EFT can be very helpful in clearing these.

On the one hand our minds are the containers through which thousands, millions of random neural fragments are firing then passing. These impressions, fragments and traces are much less important than we often believe them to be.

As a general tapping regimen used to clear these – or more specifically our preoccupation with them – we may tap repeating, “A thousand thoughts … passing through … a thousand feelings … passing through … a thousand images passing through …”

And then we tap on specific words, voices, fears, ideas and phrases that repeat and reappear. Remember – EFT is an exposure method so we always surface and name the troubling preoccupation.

If our reoccurring belief is “You will never be good enough” then that is exactly what we articulate as we tap:

“Never good enough … passing on through….”(repeat)

Close by reinforcing the general state of mind clearing: “A thousand thoughts … passing on through…”

 

 

Just working with some folks with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. One of the fascinating ways that EFT works with OCD is the way it exposes habitual ideas that are at odds with one another. As the opposites are exposed at the same time energy and paradox combine to quiet and clear them. In many cases the first wave of exposure brings the chaos to the fore. In successive sessions they slowly clear one at a time.