The Gentlest Approach
“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.”
Valentine’s Day is just around the corner, and one of the most loving things you can do is to take care of yourself and how you feel if this is not your favorite holiday. If you’re at all dreading it, you might just want to do some Tapping around that this week to get yourself through what can be a tough time for a lot of people. It sometimes brings up feelings of discontent, disappointment, envy, or even heartbreak, and this can all be quite overwhelming in contrast with the romantic demonstrations that abound at this time of year. If you’re feeling any of these, your mission is just to give yourself some comfort around them, and that’s plenty. If you feel like you can take on more, or if some of those feelings are generated by a specific bad experience, then read on, as the below suggestions may help.
This week I’d like to take a look at a technique that is built for a very specific kind of situation. Before I do so, I want to caution you that you should never work on anything with Tapping/EFT that feels too big or scary without help, because you don’t have to. The whole point of using EFT is to save yourself pain and suffering! It’s not something you “power through,” it’s specifically built to to alleviate discomfort, but you need to know how to use it correctly in order to get the best results. Sometimes what you really need is the support of someone else who can guide you.
That said, this technique is great for working at a distance on something that feels very intense. It’s called the Tearless Trauma Technique. To use it, we start by selecting the thing that happened that you still have strong feelings about. Note that in Tapping, we always want a specific experience we’re working on to be something that only took a few minutes to happen in real life. No more than 10 minutes is a good guideline, and shorter is better. If you feel that your event encompasses a longer time frame, it’s best to break it up in smaller pieces, each with its own emotional spike. Once you’ve selected your event, you very studiously DO NOT think about it deeply, DO NOT try to re-experience it, DO NOT close your eyes and feel around in it, etc. You just stay in the here and now and just refer to the fact that it’s in there somewhere.
Next, with your eyes open, you just guess how intense your feelings around this would be IF you were to replay the “movie” of the event for yourself in your mind (which, again, you will not do right now) using a subjective scale of 0-10 where 0 is nothing and 10 is the most emotional charge you could possibly feel. Remember, this is a subjective scale, and it’s just for giving you a road map of where you’re starting out so that later you’ll know if you’ve made any progress. There’s no right answer, and no need to overthink it, just go with whatever pops into your mind.
Finally, you will go around the Tapping points repeating a phrase like, “This thing that happened.” In this case, unlike in most Tapping techniques, you actually DO NOT want to be more specific, you do not want to tune further into any emotions associated with the experience, and you don’t want to actually think about any of the details. Just make some reference to the thing that happened and Tap.
You may need to do several rounds of this kind of Tapping, stopping after each to see what your new guess for the intensity is. You should notice that eventually, when you guess again what the number might be IF you remembered some or all of the details of the event, your best guess goes down. You never want to try to force anything in Tapping, so if your number isn’t budging, that’s fine. Sometimes this very simple approach quickly helps. If not, you may need to try a different approach. Often, just switching to different language like, “This event has had a huge impact on my life and I’m scared to even think about it” as you Tap around the points will help, as you are understandably feeling something that needs to be acknowledged outright before your system will relax and you’ll start to feel safer to move forward.
If you’ve tried both of these linguistic approaches and given each one several rounds of Tapping to work but your best guess is still very high, then go no further. This is probably an experience you need help in addressing. However, if your guessed number is now between 1 and 3, you might want to allow yourself to just start imagining the very beginning of the scene and see what happens, giving yourself total license to stop and immediately open your eyes if you become uncomfortable. If your intensity is higher than you thought it would be, go back to the previous steps. However if the intensity really is manageable, now you can use another technique to work on resolving every little piece of it, and we’ll discuss how to do that next week.
Good luck with all of your Tapping efforts this week, and remember, if you ever come across anything that you’re too uncomfortable about, stop and take a break and come back to it later, work in smaller pieces, or just wait on that subject until you can get some help.