When the Personal Peace Procedure isn’t enough…
I want to share with you parts of a recent email exchange that I had recently about the Personal Peace Procedure in EFT. The PPP involves making a long list of all the experiences you have had over your life that caused you emotional pain. Then you tap through each of these experiences until it no longer triggers those old negative feelings in you.
The writer’s question was about how, as a sensitive person, to use this process. She wondered why she was still feeling so much generalized pain and fear, even though she had done a massive amount of clearing the pain of past experiences with her tapping. She has given me permission to share her thoughts anonymously. I have edited what we both said a little bit for coherence and clarity.
Hi Rue,
I have some questions regarding the Personal Peace Procedure I was hoping you could help me with. I am an HSP (Highly Sensitive Person) and I have been working on this process diligently over the course of a few months. It’s been hard to find information online of peoples’ actual experience with the process, in particular HSPs to compare to.
I have cleared the majority of my fairly long list. What remains carries a very low intensity, and I am working through those events as well. I have had changes along the way. The most significant being that when I recall an event or become emotionally charged I don’t feel it in my body like I used to. I used to feel very chronic “negative” feelings deep in my gut and now they are centered around my head and seem somewhat distant, like an echo.
I have been struggling in four major areas.
- I have been trying to slowly work in positive and affirmation tapping to help counterbalance the clearing. I have been going at this slowly as I have a hard time accepting affirmations.
- I still have a generalized nervous fear that comes up in waves, even though I have cleared so much and the remaining events are of low intensity. I don’t know why. I thought maybe this is the fear of the unknown or uncertainty of the future.
- Sometimes I have really bad drops and become really afraid and depressed. Perhaps I cleared things too fast?
- One of the questions that has been on my mind all along is: “What’s on the other side?“ Meaning when I clear “everything,” what will happen and who will I be? I am aware that this is an ongoing process and I plan on doing maintenance tapping.
The final thing is as a sensitive person, I have always struggled with being present. I have often felt out of my body and not in reality. Since doing this procedure I have felt like I am not here at all! Nothing feels real. I have had this before, but now it is very extreme.
I have been doing my best to ground myself and “refill” the cleared energy with good thoughts and visualizations of what I desire. This is where I am now.
I believe I still have some resistance to doing positive/affirmation/visualization work. Perhaps I have residual feelings of unworthiness, or perhaps I am scared of all that possibility and that what I want could actually happen?!?
But why? I don’t know why I am still so afraid when I have cleared so much.
With regards to change, I have felt an internal shift, and I have seen some external shifts. I confess I hoped I would have seen more external shifts.
I have known about EFT a very long time and have used it relatively little (am I the only one like this?). I have hated myself for this because I had the tool to help me, but I was so afraid to feel my feelings.
Any thoughts on why there is still so much depression and fear?
I believed on some level using the personal peace procedure would be like hitting the reset button and things would then be ok inside and out.
Here is my reply:
Congratulations for being so diligent with the Personal Peace Procedure!
I believe that what you need now goes further than standard EFT and the Personal Peace Procedure can take you.
Sensitive people take in difficult or critical experiences so much more deeply than others do. Being so sensitive affects the sense of our very identity.
Sensitive people are often worriers. Many worriers have an unconscious belief that “I have to worry or I will die.” A worrier can tap in such an intense way to save themselves from their fears, that they can actually counteract the benefits of tapping, ending up even more fearful and worried than they were when they began tapping. And then they think, “I must be doing this wrong!” So when they don’t get the results that they want , they also worry about their tapping skills.
I see many people approaching EFT with the thought “If I beat up what I don’t like about myself long enough and hard enough that it dies off or goes away, then I can like myself and solve all my problems.” All these kinds of thinking are not very helpful.
Everything you said above suggests that you have done a good job at dissolving the limiting beliefs and pain that had collected around those painful experiences that you tapped on.
It would make sense then that there is a part of you that is keeping much of what you are feeling out of your conscious awareness to protect you. So the effectiveness of the PPP can only go so far. Transformation is not just about “clearing” what you don’t like about yourself.
And deep inner transformation is really NOT like hitting a reset button and suddenly finding that things are now OK inside and out! I believe we humans, especially we sensitive humans, are much much more complex and interesting beings than this model would imply.
EFT is extremely useful for many situations and conditions. But I have always thought that most practitioners don’t know how to tap far enough into the very good question that you asked: Who will I be when I “clear everything”?
You mentioned affirmations. I personally believe that just inserting affirmations into a tapping routine or sticking them on to your bathroom mirror is not enough.
Sometimes using affirmations can be damaging instead of helpful. If you repeat a positive statement about how you want to feel about yourself over and over, you may even be reinforcing, unconsciously, the reverse statement- the negative belief that brought you to the problems in the first place. Even repeating the EFT phrase “I deeply and completely love and accept myself” can be a constant reminder that “Underneath it all I feel I am really not worthy of love, especially for myself.”
You may not have much experience in knowing how to feel “full of yourself” (in a good way). Now you need a Path of Intention to set forth on Likely no one knew how to teach you to explore the depth of possibility in you.
Probably no one in your early life ever mirrored your worth to you. It hadn’t been done for them, so they did not know to treat you any differently. We learn from what is mirrored to us.
The process of living our lives and bumping up against sharp hard places on the road generally leads to limiting beliefs that cover up the knowing of our worthiness. So you may not know who you really are. That could make you feel empty and fearful.
The idea of the immensity of possibility in us can be truly scary. To deal with these feelings we want to learn how to go to a deep pool of possibility in ourselves, and hold this space. We want to allow our lives to emerge from here, take action from here. This is way beyond the capability of the Personal Peace Procedure, and beyond the basic recipe of EFT. A profound level of spiritual identity doesn’t just arise from that scary empty space by itself.
In my view, the reason we are here is not to learn lessons or to pay dues for “bad karma,” but to learn to honor our inner power and presence, and our home in the earth, with joy and delight. We need to take the kind of care for ourselves that no one around us knew to do when we were growing up.
You would benefit a lot from learning more about how to frame who you are and what your life is about. This is something that I have spent my whole life learning too, for myself. Every teleclass that I teach and every individual session I do is really about partnering with people to approach change in this way.
EFT is an exceptionally good tool, but it can’t do all this by itself! It needs to be directed by tapping that knows that
self worth is not something you need to work towards or be good enough to deserve.
We are born worthy. The true invitation of being human is to rediscover our inner truth, and bloom from this center. Transformation is experiencing, embodying and living from our inner sacred sovereignty.
Coming to this knowing will fill that empty space that is often left when we have cleared all the painful triggers and problems with a process like Personal Peace Procedure.
With my love and blessing to you,
Rue
PS: Watch this space for news of my next teleclass, “Living Lucky” coming soon!
