Dear Rue,I am an EFT practitioner (2 yrs) and struggling. I believe I am struggling when I work with individuals using EFT because of my multi-tasking mind. My thoughts, ideas, are swirling around in my head. I can, for the most part, see them clearly, but trying to translate my thoughts into written form is a struggle.
Words do not come easily to me for tapping. When clients tell their stories there is so much information that I struggle wading through it and choosing a starting place and working through just one issue at a time.
I work at an integrative medical clinic and I have 30-45 minutes with patients initially or as a follow-up appt. The issues brought in run the gamut from anxiety, depression, pain, stress, trauma, etc. I end up feeling overloaded in my head with thoughts. I’m not quick with my thoughts when working with people, and feel I should be.
Can you help?
Dear “tapping friend,”
I do have some thoughts and suggestions that might be helpful.
One thing I would suggest is that since you only have 30-45 minutes to work with someone, focus on a physical symptom they are experiencing. Help them to choose one, the strongest, or what seems to be most important right then. Ask the person to describe the symptom, and write down their words. When you are tapping you can just feed their own words back to them in a tapping sequence, without having to be wondering in your own mind what to say. That will free your multi-tasking mind and your intuition to make associations or insights, that can just flow naturally into your tapping.
The other benefit of focussing on a physical symptom is that you can continually invite the person to step out of their story about what happened or what is going on. I believe that in many cases the emotions are the physical representation of a story about their suffering, and the person may be stuck in telling their story.
So, when you meet with a person who has had a lot going on in their life, talking about their feelings about everything that happened can just reinforce it all. But if you can stay out of the story and remain with the specific physical manifestation, you can make more progress. Eventually you can work with the difficult experiences, but usually that is not a good place to start and is just overwhelming to you and to them both.
With this approach you don’t have to be quick with your thoughts. In fact, you don’t even need your thoughts. You can just be present to their thoughts and their feelings and their words. This deep listening in itself is healing, for you too!
The key in working with EFT or any modality is for you to learn how to stay present to another person while staying home in yourself. Practice returning to your own center. It helps to feel into an actual place in your body that feels like a center. It could be anywhere. For me it is a place in my chest, kind of right in front of my spine.
I continually remind myself to hold a quiet grounded space there for myself, and make sure I keep returning to it. That keeps me out of my head wondering what I “should” be saying to them, and just receiving what they are saying to me. And then I am free to go with the flow as it is presenting itself, and hear my intuition when it speaks up.
And of course you can do EFT to shift your beliefs about how you “should” be in sessions with clients!
Let me know how this goes.
With love and blessing to you,
Rue
