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FREE SPECIAL REPORT
Emotional Freedom Techniques
Acupressure stress release system
12 Tapping Turnarounds
EFT Case Examples: Results with Annie O’Grady
Copyright Annie O’Grady 2016
Have the life you want…
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Greetings from Annie O’Grady!
Hello dear reader, I hope you’re well and feeling over the moon – but I
suspect you’re not quite there, if you’re reading this.
In the 25 years or so that I’ve been a natural health therapist, I’ve helped
thousands of people to feel better, to dissolve specific parts of their
unique stress load, often permanently.
There are reasons that stress is a buzzword for millions if not billions of
us humans. Stress not only upsets us emotionally, it’s also proving to be
a health hazard, even a killer, because it opens the door to serious
illness.
Feel stuck, held back?
While I’m not a mechanic, I know that the word ‘governor’ refers to a
device that limits the speed of an engine. You can see your stress load
as a governor. It governs your daily life, and it holds back your big vision
for your life – whether you want it to or not.
Whatever you do, if you’re stressed you can’t go full speed ahead.
And you might be so used to your stress load that you think it’s normal!
You just don’t know why you can’t move on.
Stress operates in many ways, and some of those effects could surprise
you.
Do you feel stressed about family matters or your business or your
work, about your health or your pain levels or your fears and
phobias?
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Other people do too, and their stories comprise this Special Report.
Now these folk are free of that particular worry, they’re enjoying a new
level of peace. They’re able to move on, with abundant new energy –
and as a bonus, with a new view of far more possibilities for themselves
than they had before the change.
Plus, a new self-help tool to help achieve them.
How exciting is that?
A proven system
Ten years ago I discovered a young but already proven system of stress
release -- that I could hardly believe until I tried it. It’s called Emotional
Freedom Techniques, or EFT tapping.
EFT tapping is a meridian-based system of techniques where you
tap on a series of acupoints on your head and upper body to
release specific stresses, which you typically target with a few
words.
At the time I first tried it, I was upset, recalling a flash of a traumatic
event that had happened to me as a child. I was feeling thick-headed,
nauseous, and full of fear. I followed the Internet EFT instructions for
tapping on myself – and about three minutes later, I felt relief. The
trauma sensations were going away (I hadn’t even known they were
there, secretly stressing me for years.)
Ever since then, that bad memory has been about as powerful for me as
remembering yesterday’s breakfast. It no longer has any emotional
charge. I wish the event hadn’t happened, but it doesn’t bother or
influence me anymore.
By now this proven system, Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT
tapping), has been the object of more than sixty scientific studies,
including reports in prestigious science journals such as the psychiatric
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders. It has also been rated as an
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‘evidence-based’ method by the conservative American Psychological
Association.
Lowers stress hormones
A clinical study has demonstrated that one hour of EFT tapping lowers
the body’s stress hormone cortisol by a whopping 24%. No wonder so
many of my clients spontaneously say at the end of a session, ‘I feel so
much lighter!’
Harvard Medical School researchers have found that acupressure
(tapping on specific meridian points on the body) calms the brain’s fight-
flight-freeze response.
No wonder so many people say at the end of an EFT session, ‘I feel
lighter!’
Being an EFT tapping coach and trainer fills me with delight, because I
constantly see people getting freer and happier and opening up to bigger
dreams for themselves.
Why go to a life coach?
We do this when we need a new perspective on our ‘insoluble’
difficulties - to turn these into opportunities.
A skilled Emotional Freedom Techniques tapping coach has an amazing
facility to guide you to make even longstanding problem emotions and
blocking attitudes not just feel better, but vanish… typically permanently.
This can also happen for chronic physical pain, and a host of other inner
difficulties.
Life gets easier and easier!
I’ve gathered a few highlights from my client and student files, to give
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you a glimpse into some of the many and varied results The method
dissolves all kinds of stress, gently and often fast.
While dealing with their problems, my clients are also learning to use
tapping to feel better for the rest of their lives -- for themselves, also to
share with family, friends, strangers and pets – and even for first aid if
necessary.
The people quoted here are pleased to have their stories told, to help
others. Their names have been changed for privacy.
Perhaps you’ll find similarities between their problems and yours.
(In all of these accounts, the term ‘tapping on’ whatever topic refers to
the application of any of EFT’s 48-plus techniques.)
Note: Please consult your doctor for medical problems.
EFT is not a cure. It releases stress, enabling natural energies
to operate more freely.
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Contents
✰ 2 major cases
1. Biologist Marilyn: Procrastination and clutter
2. Massage therapist Delrae: Bone-on-bone arthritic knee pain
✰ Single issues
3. Office manager Valerie: Performance problem
4. Accountant Audrey: Elevator terror
5. Farmer Jody: Heart palpitations
6. Counsellor Rosalind: Public speaking
7. Library officer Claire: Snake phobia
8. Researcher Rilla: Family problem
9. Business Owner Larraine: Neck pain
10. Teacher: Driving phobia
11. Retiree Marigold: Body pain
12. Nurse Janice: Bereavement
Note:
In these accounts, ‘tapped on’ refers to any of EFT’s 48-plus techniques.
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1. Biologist Marilyn: Procrastination and Clutter
Marilyn had a good job as a biologist, a house of her own, a car,
friends, pets – and a shameful secret.
Every room of her house was permanently cluttered up with
papers, books, and other things out of place.
Before any (rare) visitors were due, she would hurriedly scoop up the
clutter in one room and put it in another, telling herself she would clear
away later. Somehow, ‘later’ never arrived. And the bigger the mess,
the more paralysed she became to do anything about it.
Marilyn lived this way for a couple of years.
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One day, picking her way along the central passage of her home among
piles of papers, she came to a stop and shuddered. Suddenly she
recognised that something was seriously wrong. She simply could not
bring herself to clear up, or even to have someone come in and help her
do it.
She started worrying that she might be on her way to joining the packrat
brigade. She had read about old people living among so many piles of
saved newspapers throughout their homes, that when they became ill,
rescuers had to fight their way in.
This wakeup shook her so much that, bewildered and overwhelmed, she
came to me for help for her state of mind. She had previously learned
basic EFT but had forgotten about it.
She told me, ‘I used to be quite neat. I can’t understand this, but it’s
seriously getting me down.’
Was ‘Just do it!’ the answer?
Was Marilyn’s clutter problem a lack of willpower? Or a late version of
teenage rebellion? No. There was more to it.
EFT Master Lindsay Kenny writes, ‘Clutter is often triggered by an event
or a series of events that left the victim feeling traumatised, fearful and
powerless. Hanging on to things gives some people a sense of
commanding or controlling at least a portion of their lives.’
I asked Marilyn to list any traumas she had suffered. She told me of:
several physical accidents
having had to leave a country that she loved to settle in Australia
her father’s death
a painful split with her brother
several broken primary relationships.
As we talked, other more urgent problems came to light.
Marilyn’s workload was steadily rising
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her energy was so low that her busy daily life was feeling like a
struggle
a thyroid problem made her anxious.
She complained, ‘Ten years ago I could do four things at once, I had
heaps of energy.’
While EFT does not diagnose, her condition appeared obviously to be
an unrecognised mild depression, perhaps burnout, of which clutter was
a symptom.
Procrastination
Then she ‘just happened to mention’ another problem.
On top of her daily practical tasks as a biologist, which she loved, she
was expected to create 30 technical reports within a timeframe. These
required her to summarise research, some of which was new to her.
She had felt so daunted that although more than half the allotted time
had elapsed, she hadn’t begun. Failure in this could threaten her job.
As this was the most pressing difficulty, we began tapping about it, first
with the protocol for overwhelm -- which is simply tapping rounds of
EFT’s acupoint sequence without words -- until she felt calmer.
I recommended this daily during her treatment. I suggested she could
tap during the four hours a day she spent driving to and from her
workplace, as lots of people find solitary driving a good opportunity to
tap on what’s worrying them.
(Tip for tappers – instead of using both hands to tap the
karate chop point on your hand, tap the side of one hand
gently on the steering wheel.)
Feeling ‘caged’
When I asked Marilyn what happened in her body when she thought of
the reports she needed to write, she said she felt ‘caged’, and her whole
body tensed.
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She burst out with, ‘I hate study!’
I asked, ‘What does this body sensation remind you of?’ I asked.
It reminded her of her five years of intense study to gain her Master’s
degree, while holding down a day job as well, with overtime. In those
last years she had averaged only four hours sleep a night.
While we tapped together, we said:
Setup Statements:
Even though I feel caged and tense when I think of writing reports, I
accept and love myself deeply and completely.
Even though I hated and loathed those years with all that study, and I
never want to do anything like that again, I love myself anyway.
Even though I loathe study, and why shouldn’t I, I’m now bringing
healing to this.
Reminder words: Study makes me tense and I hate it.
Marilyn rated this intensity at 10/10, and it went to 14 as she
remembered more about being trapped in that grind, then went back to
10.
As we continued the gentle, fast, basic EFT process, her body relaxed,
she started to look brighter, and her intensity dropped. But she still
loathed study.
She said, ‘Thinking about those reports I have to do, I feel overwhelmed
by the information I’ll have to deal with,’ she said. ‘And “study” is
connected with lots of horrible experiences at Uni, and constant fears
that I would fail. My back feels sore, I feel slightly sick.’
Even though my back is sore and I feel sick at the thought of having to
write those reports, I accept myself.
Tapping took her intensity number down to zero, demonstrating that this
specific stress had now vanished, typically permanently. She said she
felt a little more hopeful.
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I asked Marilyn what else got in the way of her doing the reports at
home. She said, ‘It’s easy to create interruptions, like thinking I should
try and tidy the room.
‘But part of me feels really reluctant to work at home. Home is for
relaxing. I shouldn’t be working when I’m at home.’
We took this opinion as a personal rule she would like to waive in this
instance. She agreed that, logically, at home she became her own boss,
choosing when and where she would work, and that felt better than
being a victim of overwork.
We sketched out a time frame, requiring her to start tackling the reports
the next night. But although that made good sense, she doubted she
would break through her reluctance barrier.
More tapping
So we continued with the process: EFT requires that we tune into the
negative briefly, so we can release it and make room for the positive.
Setup Statements
Even though I can‘t be responsible for being my own boss at home
because I shouldn’t bring work home with me, I am ready to let this go.
Even though working at home reminds me of the grind of studying for my
Master’s degree at night after work for five years, and that was so
horrible I never want to go there again, I accept myself and I’m willing to
change and have a whole new deal.
(Now it was time to insert a little hope.)
Even though I shouldn’t bring work home with me, maybe it could be
safe now to be my own boss and organise my own working hours at
home.
Reminder: I don’t want to do work at home.
Marilyn’s body was now feeling easier, but the reports still loomed
threateningly.
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Even though I still think that project’s too hard for me, I love and accept
myself anyway.
We kept on tapping away her fears and doubts, and reinforcing how
good she would feel when the job was done.
We uncovered and released a lot of residual anger at that Masters
system. She said, ‘I once had to do 14 stupid exams in two weeks, on
stuff that anyone could look up in a book!’
Even though I hate that unfair Masters system, I’m OK.
Finally, I saw a new gleam in her eye. ‘Hey, I feel lighter,’ she said,
‘Would you believe I’m actually looking forward to doing reports
tomorrow night?’
She was now relieved – and vitalised. She said, ‘When I was twenty I
used to feel curious and excited every day, about “What’s life going to
bring today?” Life was an adventure!
‘Just now I felt that again, briefly! That’s where I want to be.’
‘Everything was up off the floor!’
Ten days later, Marilyn rang me with an excited report on progress with
the clutter issue. ‘My family came over yesterday, and I had got
everything up off the floor!
‘I’m so far ahead of where I have been. It’s just terrific. I feel more like I
used to, when I could just rip through jobs. This is certainly working!’
And her next day’s email: ‘Even better! I have been working on the
hardest of the reports, and it just seems simple. I am dumbfounded.
Going through the research was straightforward, I could pick out useful
stuff easily. And it was no stress. Yay…’
She even had a health bonus: ‘Last night in bed I counted my heartbeat,
and it had improved! The only thing different is EFT.’
Marilyn is continuing her sessions for a while, to dissolve more of her
stored stresses, because she really wants to get back her youthful zest.
She knows this requires that we will be gently neutralising painful
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events: traumas, and a list of unresolved emotional situations, that
have been covertly draining her energy over the years.
But she’s no longer worried about clutter taking over, because now she
happily clears it up as it happens – mostly. (She hasn’t gone OCD.)
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2. Massage Therapist Delrae:
Bone-on-bone arthritic knee pain (This article previously appeared in the ACEP Journal September 2012)
A new client, Delrae, an attractive woman in mid-life, walked slowly
into my office. She was limping and a little bent over, because of
severe pain in her left knee. She later rated this pain at 10/10 ‘most
of the time’, so that she was constantly holding back tears.
Because of the pain, she had not been able to bend that knee for six
months. Arthritis had robbed the knee of cartilage, so she was walking,
or limping, ‘bone-on-bone’. Her normal life had literally come to a
standstill.
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Delrae assumed that the lack of cartilage meant that she would always
have to be in pain. She was exploring her options around knee
replacement, visiting physiotherapists and doctors. She had done some
tapping years ago, and wondered if EFT could help her now.
An hour later she walked normally around my room -- without that left
knee pain. She easily bent the knee to a right angle. She was standing
upright.
Six weeks later Delrae emailed me. She was jubilant that, not only was
the knee still free of pain, but the improvement in her posture had
apparently freed a trapped nerve that had been creating a sciatica-type
pain in her lower back, so she was now free of that too.
She added, ‘I still need to do exercises for the knee, but it’s all good.’
How did this happen?
Here is how this new freedom happened so quickly for her.
I first told her that, as unlikely as it seems, I had read of cases where
people with a similar knee problem had become pain-free, although
there was no guarantee this would happen for her.
I shortened my client intake process with her as I was keen to start
tapping, because she was in such pain. Even so, gathering information
took up a third of this one-hour session time.
I asked basic health questions. She had been diagnosed with
depression recently, had a weight issue, and suffered from various other
aches and pains. She quoted a recent X-ray on her left knee as
showing ‘L4/5 and L5/S1 disc height is lost, and Grade 1 anterolisthesis
at L4/5’.
I next asked her to list traumas she’d experienced throughout her life,
especially up to age 18.
I gave her a 1-page questionnaire from the U.S. Adverse Childhood
Experiences (ACE) major scientific study of how trauma in early life is
likely to result in serious illness or behavioural problems later in life.
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This includes arthritis, as well as cancer, heart disease, bone fracture,
diabetes and more.
Delrae briefly identified traumas from her upbringing, including physical
violence in her childhood home, lack of emotional support, often
watching her mother being physically attacked, and having a mentally ill
family member. She also included trauma caused through her church
upbringing.
Simply listing these memories brought tears -- and she had not even
thought about any traumas beyond age eighteen.
Where to start?
Delrae now said that she constantly felt angry and tense. So to me that
was the place to start. I was of course looking for the fastest way to
relieve her suffering in the knee. If this ‘doorway’ did not lower the pain,
I would try another.
Her left knee pain was 10. Her anger about having it was 10. I asked her
to imagine the color of the pain, and she said red. ‘Even though I have
this terrible red pain always in my left knee, and I am so angry about it, I
love and accept myself deeply and completely.’
I tap along with my clients, to guide them. Our first round took both the
anger and the pain from 10 to 9. So we continued with this, and over the
rest of this one-hour session her intensity slowly crept down by ones. In
her mind, the color of the pain started to fade.
Along the way Delrae went into overwhelm a couple of times, and I
taught her the overwhelm protocol of tapping silent rounds to swiftly
restore calm.
As we tapped away the current stress, her anger focus shifted between
anger about the knee pain to anger about her remembered childhood
situations. We were still working generally about her anger.
Occasionally another aspect would intrude, especially sadness, and we
would tap that down before returning to the anger.
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When both anger and pain had reduced to 1, we did the Choices
process: ‘Even though I still have some pain in my left knee, I choose
instead to have total peace in my left knee (her words)’ She reached 0.
Testing the work
Then I asked her to test how her knee felt when she walked on it. That
was when she walked around the room, marvelling at being free of the
pain that had blighted her life, and at her new mobility.
I explained that we could not predict how long freedom from this pain
would last. If it came back, I said, that would probably be a signal that
she needed to clear more of her burden of emotional pain, but she would
need also to consult her doctor.
Modern research suggests that emotional pain can exacerbate physical
pain by at least 65%. Here, we had done a lot better.
Follow- up report
Six weeks after her session Delrae emailed me that the knee was still
free of pain. She also reported that, because her posture was now
upright and she no longer limped, the lower back sciatica-type pain had
also disappeared.
‘Tapping has very much become a regular happening in my life now, and
once again, ever so grateful to you,’ she wrote.
She added, ‘The surgeons are saying yes, go ahead with knee
replacement. But just at the moment I’m doing so well. I will give it
some consideration if I'm in trouble.’
She now had a breathing space to consider her choices for longer-term
care of the knee.
Meanwhile, she had returned part-time to both her own bodywork
practice and a retail job too, both requiring her to stand for up to an hour.
Some of her depression had lifted. She was no longer always on the
verge of tears.
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Single issues
EFT treatment for bigger issues is sprinkled with smaller
victories that often occur along the way.
Here are some examples of stress dissolved from smaller
issues.
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3. Office manager Valerie: ‘I’m a slow learner’
A client, Valerie, was worried about her performance at work. She
told me, ‘I’m a slow learner.’
‘Oh?’ I said, ‘How do you know?’
She said, ‘Because a teacher told me, many years ago. She said that
although I was a slow learner, finally I would really “get it”.’
This woman had years of university study behind her, but had just told
me how much she hated to learn new things. Now her big boss had told
her to learn a new skill – and she kept putting the task off, because it
reminded her of many painful past experiences of trying to absorb
something new.
I asked if she had ever checked out that teacher’s opinion with other
people who had shared her study years, for their opinions. ‘No,’ she
said, looking surprised.
I asked, ‘How do you know you aren’t actually an average or normal
learner? Or even a fast learner?’ She blinked and said she didn’t.
‘Perhaps the teacher was right,’ I said, ‘but would you be willing to
explore this?’ She was.
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Stress of new challenges
We discussed this perception of herself as a slow learner. Obviously it
had put a dampener on her self-image, plus it added big stress to new
writing or reading or practical tasks. We looked at the possibility that
she’d accepted one person’s assessment as truth -- and that perhaps
this had become her own belief, which seemed to be proving itself.
We began to tap on the topic.
Setup Statements
Even though I think I’m a slow learner, I accept myself.
Even though I think it has to take me so long to understand anything
new, I love myself, and I acknowledge that I did succeed in getting my
Master’s degree.
Even though perhaps that teacher was wrong, I still think I’m a slow
learner, and I accept myself without judgment anyway
Reminder: I’m a slow learner.
Tapping along these lines for a few rounds shook her certainty that of
course she was a slow learner.
A new choice
We ended with a Choices tapping process. She was excited as she
chose the words.
Positive:
Even though I’ve loathed new learning for many years, I choose instead
to find new learning exciting, a delight, and it works, and I’m proud of my
work!
Negative
I’m a slow learner
After we’d finished tapping this way -- one round on the negative thought, one round on the positive, and one round alternating the two -- she amazed herself by saying, ‘Wow, I almost can’t wait to get into this new skill!’
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She was so impressed that she asked if she could have another session
right away, for another problem.
We could both see that now there was a good chance her work
performance wouldn’t be hampered any more, by her reluctance to do
anything that looked like new learning.
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4. Accountant Audrey: Elevator Terror
One of my clients who worked in IT made me aware of the plight of business people who suffer with a heights phobia or an elevator phobia. They can only apply for jobs where they work at street level, or one or two floors above. In high rise cities this is severely limiting.
So when a new client, Audrey, contacted me at a friend’s suggestion to try EFT for her terror in elevators (Australians call them ‘lifts’), I expected phobia.
But a phobia is an apparently irrational fear. It turned out that Audrey
had good reason to be too terrified to set foot in an elevator. She had
been traumatized by being in three elevator accidents.
She’d not had this fear until an elevator she was in dropped three floors.
At another time, she was trapped, panicking, in a hospital elevator for
ten minutes, where passengers included ‘a patient with a gaping wound’.
In a third incident, she was in a Hong Kong elevator that dropped
twenty-six floors.
Afraid for her job
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Currently Audrey, an accountant, was working at a job she liked a lot on
the second floor of a city office building, and had managed to keep her
fears a secret by often using the stairs. But she had just been told she
would be moved to the seventh floor.
She was afraid she’d have to try and find another job. So there was a lot
at stake for her in these sessions.
After I showed Audrey how to do the basic tapping technique that is the
core of all EFT work, we began by collapsing her emotional intensities
over various parts of the current problem. This took her gently through
panic after an elevator’s doors closed, through feeling at the mercy of
the elevator, through tensing with terror at the movements of the cage.
All these intense reactions were lessening through the tapping.
Next we used EFT’s Tearless Trauma techniques on one of the three
incidents, where the Hong Kong elevator dropped twenty-six floors.
Before she began to describe in detail what happened, we collapsed her
anxiety about doing this, from 10-0.
As the techniques began to dissolve her stress, within a few minutes
Audrey could tell the story of that accident without feeling any emotion.
She could hardly believe the change.
‘A bit more relaxed’
Returning for her second session, Audrey said she ‘felt a bit more
relaxed about this elevator problem’.
We worked on more aspects of her fears:
Even though I hate the whooshing sound a lift makes…
Even though I hate the bouncy wavering movement…
Even though I’m afraid there’ll be something wrong with this lift…
Even though I’m afraid I’ll get stuck again…
Reminder
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Afraid of this elevator
Then we applied EFT’s Movie Technique to the remaining two incidents,
including everything we could find that still bothered her in those
memories, such as:
Setup Statement
Even though I feel trapped and stranded and I hope they can get me out,
I accept myself.
Even though I’m afraid I’m going to die here, I love and accept myself.
Even though this elevator will kill me, I love and accept myself
Reminder
Afraid I’ll die in this box.
Tapping brought up other memories
As we de-fused the emotional impact of the accidents, other memories
came up, of:
three earlier panic attacks involving her feeling threatened
being in a hospital incident where she was drenched with the
blood of her haemophiliac brother.
We tapped on every aspect we could find, until she felt calm.
Finally, we tapped a bundling release on ‘the last residue of this elevator
trauma’. She said she felt calm about using an elevator now, and was
willing to try it.
One year later
A year later Audrey contacted me for an EFT session on another
problem.
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She added, ‘By the way, I kept my job. I’ve been happily going up and
down in elevators to the seventh floor several times a day since our
sessions.’
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5. Farmer Jody: Heart Palpitations
This is a case where a woman’s recent severe heart palpitations
disappeared after one EFT tapping session, although we did no
tapping about the palpitations themselves.
Jody had started having heart palpitations that frightened her so much,
she was about to go to a doctor for a heart check-up and medication.
Her farmer husband and teenage children were also worried about her.
I happened to be visiting on a property neighboring her farm when Jody
arrived in tears after a scene with her husband. This was a familiar
event where, she said, he had sounded angry and this had made her
cry. He had never struck her, but whenever she heard an angry tone in
his voice she felt fearful.
She had often attempted to talk about the situation with him, and had
asked him to moderate his behaviour, but he refused to agree that he
was angry, and said it was her problem.
Her neighbour suggested that Jody have a tapping session about her
palpitations and her distress, as I was there. Jody thought the idea was
strange, but felt desperate enough to try it.
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The problem seemed to be her reactions to her husband’s angry words.
For years she had cringed at the tone of his voice when he felt irritated
about anything, even if it had nothing to do with her – and even if he said
he was not angry.
Although they loved each other dearly, lately she was so disturbed about
her heart palpitations that she’d been wondering if she could even go on
in the marriage. The possibility of having to leave her home and family
for the sake of her health was adding greatly to her present stress.
Body sensations
I asked, ‘When you hear this tone in his voice that to you means he‘s
angry, what happens in your body, apart from the new palpitations?’
She said that her stomach churned, her throat got tight, and her whole
body caved in.
I asked her, ‘Who or what do those sensations remind you of?’
The recall was easy. Her father came to mind.
I asked if she could remember the worst time of hearing or seeing her
father angry. She remembered being a small girl crouched trembling in
her bedroom, listening while next door her father angrily berated her
elder sister. His rage seemed to go on and on, and so did the little girl’s
terror. Now, as she remembered, her terror reached 10/10.
We tapped on her self-talk at the time:
--What if he hurts her?
-- What if he hurts me?
-- He’s like a monster
-- We’re both in danger
-- He’s out of control
-- There’s nobody here to help
-- What can I do?
-- What if he kills her?
-- What if he kills me?
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But as we continued to tap, the intensity of her terror fell steadily, until
she was smiling. ‘This feels different,’ she said.
When her stress was down to 4, we tapped on forgiving her father, who
was normally a reasonable man:
Setup Statement:
Even though I don’t understand why he was so angry, he must have had
his reasons, and I don’t agree but I choose to forgive him, for my sake.
Reminder:
I forgive you, Dad
Jody was smiling with relief as she left. A few months later I heard that
her palpitations had never returned after that session.
She said happily to me on the phone, ‘Now when he sounds angry I let it
just flow past me. Sometimes I’ve even laughed. It’s amazing.’
Not only Jody but her whole family is relieved at her new lease of health.
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6. Counsellor Rosalind: Public speaking
Adult fears of public speaking often hark back to child or teenage
events involving ridicule or put-down behaviour by other people,
which the speaker has taken to heart. With EFT, the main healing
task is to neutralise the causal event/s so they no longer intrude on
the present.
Counsellor Rosalind managed to speak in public for her work, but at a
painful price. Every time she did so, she would have what she called ‘a
terrible ache in my jaw.’ This would last for a day, often longer, and had
been occurring ever since she was teenage.
She told me, ‘Nothing I could do would stop it happening.’ This aftermath
happened not only with public speaking, but whenever she’d performed
publicly in any way, or even when she had done something else to prove
herself to other people.
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Hunting the cause
As we started to explore possible origins of this phenomenon, Rosalind
began to recognise that the jaw ache connected with a childhood need.
She recalled, ‘I had to show people I could do it myself and not let
anyone know that I was afraid.
‘This was connected with authority figures.
‘As a child I had lived for some time in an orphanage, and then I was
fostered for two years by a large, very autocratic man whose opinions of
me terrified me.
‘My fear of being judged unworthy seemed to clamp painfully in my jaw.’
We tapped on every aspect of this problem, including her emotions
about suffering this way, and some still painful events where she had
been criticised by adults in her young years.
Her feedback later: ‘Now I’m freely able to speak in public. The jaw
ache does not happen any more!’
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7. Library officer Claire: massive phobia of
snakes
Claire, a library officer, was so afraid of snakes that she couldn’t
say the word ‘snake’. If pressed, she would say ‘that thing-y’.
She had developed the snake phobia in her teens, with no idea why.
She could not remember ever having an encounter with a snake.
By the time she was in her twenties, if she said ‘snake’ or saw a picture
of one, she would break out in a sweat, feel nauseous, develop an
instant headache, feel her heart slam against her chest. So she
avoided the word. She lived and worked in outer city suburbs, where
snakes were not uncommon.
Sometime after completing EFT training levels 1 and 2 with me, Claire
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was driving a friend home, when she realised with a shock that she had
just driven over an already flattened snake.
She could only pull the car over to the side of the road and collapse
against the steering wheel, sobbing and shaking. She went through two
waves of panic attacks, while her passenger, a fellow tapper, tapped her
through them.
‘What’s the matter?’ her bewildered friend was asking. Eventually Claire
gasped, ‘I just drove over a thing-y.’
Claire decided to confront the phobia in a tapping session with me.
A kindergarten memory
Claire later wrote, ‘A week after that driving episode I met with Annie.
Through tapping on the anxiety and fear I felt over snakes, a memory
from my early childhood resurfaced spontaneously.’
We’d reached that point after I’d asked Claire about other times when
she’d had similar physical and emotional reactions. She suddenly
remembered an incident when she was very young in kindergarten,
involving another child and her own feelings of guilt.
Although she preferred not to share details, we applied the Matrix
Reimprinting with EFT process, so that Claire could tap on her young
self in her mind.
‘By the end of the hour session,’ she continued, ‘I was saying the word
“snake” with no hesitation and no negative side effects, mental or
physical. I was imagining a snake slithering along the ground, and to
my shock, I didn’t feel a thing!’
Testing the work
‘Later that day I watched “The Tapping Solution” EFT documentary by
Nick Ortner. No-one had warned me that there was a snake in the
DVD.
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‘When the snake first appeared my instinct was to look away like I
would have in the past, with my feet up off the floor, feeling like I was
going to be sick.
‘But I started tapping, and worked up enough courage to sneak quick
glances at the screen, without any real discomfort. By the next day I
could watch the entire snake scene without flinching, and I even found
myself thinking how cute the snake was!
‘Thank you Annie, and thank you tapping! I had a complete turnaround
of a massive phobia in just one hour. Who knew it would be so easy?’
What caused the phobia?
The mystery remaining is – where did the phobia come from? And why
did it go? Claire said that her kindergarten memory did not contain a
snake, nor any snake-like object. The only similarity was Claire’s
emotional state.
Do we need to bother about why? Claire’s suffering over seeing snakes
is at an end, probably permanently.
If by any chance the phobia should resurface later – perhaps when she
is ready to deal with some other hidden memory – now that Claire has
become a trained tapper, she will know how to free herself again.
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8. Business Owner Laraine: 30-year neck pain
An EFT newbie attending one of my weekly EFT evening classes
during a six- week course did her homework -- and dissolved the
neck pain she’d suffered with for nearly three decades.
Laraine, owner of a small business, learned in detail how EFT
techniques deal with physical pain, also with clearing events.
She explained, ‘I started wondering if my neck pain and stiffness were
connected with two car accidents, one 25 years ago, and one 30 years
ago. I usually get relief by going to my chiropractor.
‘So the next day I spent a couple of hours at home tapping about this,
using the Movie Technique to tap on the emotions I still had from both
those accidents.
‘There was fear, shock, and some anger, and in one case rage at the
person who had driven into the back of my car. Then I tested and
tested.
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‘My neck pain disappeared! So I cancelled that day’s chiropractic
appointment. I’m so happy!
‘And I understand that if the pain came back, I’d need to do more of that
sort of thing.’
At the following class she was still pain-free. And she showed us how
she could now turn her head from side to side normally, for the first time
in decades.
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9. Researcher Rilla: Family Dynamics
Rilla was about to travel across the world to a rare family
gathering. She was dreading spending a few days around a family
member by marriage, Alan.
On their rare meetings over a few decades, Alan had publicly treated her
with contempt. Previously she had played his game and had felt inferior.
She didn’t want to do that again, but she couldn’t talk herself out of it.
In our EFT tapping session I asked her, ‘When you think of Alan, where
do you feel this dread in your body?’
She said, ‘My whole upper chest tightens up.’
We could simply have tapped on this body symptom to decrease its
intensity. But I decided to use EFT Master Gwyneth Moss’s
‘Imagineering’ application of EFT. This process works with metaphor,
and I thought it might enable Rilla’s right brain capacities to offer her a
useful experience.
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A ball of light
I asked her to imagine she was holding a ball of beautiful white light in
her palm, then to shrink the ball to fit on her forefinger. Then I
suggested she close her eyes and gently place her forefinger against a
part of her body that was comfortable. This was for comparison later.
I asked, ‘What do you ‘see’ in that beam of light? Just say your first
impression. The picture might be biological, or it might be anything at
all.’
She said, ‘I just see a smooth surface,’ she said.
Next I asked her to think of Alan, and place her forefinger against the
part of her body that reacted.
Rilla said, ‘It’s my chest, I see tight muscles.’
I asked her to open her eyes and we tapped a round with the words:
Setup Statement:
Even though my chest muscles are tight, I accept myself.
Reminder: Tight chest muscles
Then she put her beam of light into her chest again. This time she said,
‘Oh, now I see a meadow in sunlight.’
I said, ‘Take a good look all over that meadow, what else do you see?’
She said, ‘Oh, there’s a little green grass snake. They’re harmless, I
used to play with them when I was a child.’
I asked her to open her eyes, and we tapped again.
Even though there’s a snake in the grass, I accept and love myself.
Next time when Rilla shone the beam of light into her chest, she said,
‘I’m picking the little snake up.’
‘What is it doing?’
‘It’s hissing at me.’
She opened her eyes and we tapped on:
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Even though the snake is hissing at me, I accept and love myself deeply
and completely.
Now when she opened her eyes, she said, ‘Alan just treats me with
contempt to protect himself, that’s all it is. I don’t need to react.’
One more time Rilla shone the light into her chest and said, ‘The snake
has gone down into its burrow. There’s just the lovely field in the
sunlight.’
Where did the dread go?
We went on to other matters until the end of the session, when I tested
the work by repeating Alan’s name to Rilla and asked what she felt.
She looked at me blankly. ‘There’s nothing there,’ she said. ’Except I
feel a bit sorry for him.’
The dread that had been her companion over years whenever she
thought of Alan had dissipated in a few minutes, even making way for
some compassion. With this obstacle out of the way, Rilla could now
enjoy her family get-together.
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10. Teacher Melanie: Driving Phobia
When teacher Melanie started to panic while driving her car around
the city she lived in, she couldn’t understand why. This began to
happen whenever she came to a freeway, or to a road curving off to
one side.
She told me at the start of her EFT tapping session with me: ‘I would just
freeze and I couldn’t drive on. It was terrible, and dangerous too.’
Melanie had been driving for some time, if a little nervously, before this
fear developed. She’d decided to try for help from EFT, as she’d heard
that it could dissolve phobias quickly and gently.
To introduce her to EFT, we did four fast demonstration rounds. For this
she focused on sadness she’d felt for three years, over a
misunderstanding with a friend. She was astonished to lose the
sadness so quickly.
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A solo drive
Melanie’s driving difficulty tracked back to her first solo interstate drive.
She had been enjoying country driving, and had bought a chicken roll for
lunch. However, soon after eating it, she began to feel strange –
disoriented and ill. Fighting the worsening sensations, she kept driving
when she could.
Her heart now started pounding, she had to stop to vomit. She
suspected food poisoning. She stopped at a roadhouse and vomited
again. (Melanie also has a vomiting phobia -- which she can now deal
with later through EFT.)
Closer to home on the freeway, as she pressed on she became even
more disoriented. She hallucinated that the (flat) road was rising up and
down, felt she was speeding although the speedometer showed 10 kph.
She gripped the wheel desperately.
Terrified, she pulled into the next truck layby, hoping to find help, but it
was empty. She tried to call her son in her home city, but her cell phone
would not operate. This was the worst part of her journey.
Later the phone worked. Her son and a friend eventually arrived, and
her son drove her car home with the friend following.
Tapping all over it
In EFT terms, we tapped all over this series of events, for all the
emotions that had been involved, especially fear, for body sensations,
disorientation, vomiting, for her feelings when calling her son --
helplessness, embarrassment that she, the mother, was out of control,
guilt for bringing him out.
When we tested the work, her anxiety was at zero.
I asked her to remember the times she had tried to drive on a freeway
when she had frozen, and we collapsed her current emotions about
those.
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I asked her to close her eyes and imagine she was now about to drive
on a freeway. She easily imagined it.
Later Melanie reported to me on email, ‘I can now drive on freeways! And
the impact on my general driving has been very positive, I’m much more
relaxed, I am really enjoying driving now.’
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11. Retiree Marigold: long-standing body pain
A special delight for EFT practitioners is seeing clients healing
right in front of us.
After a decade of specialising in this energy therapy, I still feel wonder at
the fact that – even at the most basic level of EFT, as this account
shows -- its rewards can be out of all proportion to the small amount of
effort required.
My 70-year-old client sat tensely on the chair for her first EFT session.
Her blue eyes showed worry. And she’d forgotten to bring her hearing
aid.
Marigold was there because she had read an article I wrote on EFT
helping relationship stress. ‘That sounded so good,’ she said. ‘I’ve had
abusive relationships.’
She had rung me on the 33rd anniversary of losing a 12-year-old
daughter, who had been abducted on her way home from netball, and
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was never found. ‘I can’t get past it,’ Marigold said. ‘I’m seeing a
psychiatrist and a psychologist, they’ve been so kind.’
Her children’s rejection
By means of a raised voice and gestures, I managed a brief intake form
with Marigold. She spoke of the present, of one of her 4 adult children
rejecting and abusing her, spoiling Marigold’s relationship with the little
grandson she adored.
She also spoke of the past, of her history of working in shops. She
repeated the words her mother had told her were her response to
Marigold’s birth: ‘I didn’t want a girl, throw her in the rubbish.’ Marigold
said now, ‘I still can’t look at myself in the mirror, I feel totally displaced.’
I said (loudly), ‘After talking about all this, what are you feeling?’
‘Sad,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I think all this sadness will choke me.’
So I taught her the basic EFT release process focussing simply on ‘this
sadness’, which Marigold rated at 10 plus/10 at that time.
‘Like going down in a lift’
After the first round, Marigold looked surprised, because her intensity
dropped to 8. After the second round it went to 6. After the third round
she gasped, ‘Five.’
Her body visibly sagged and she curled over so I was seeing the top of
her head. Was she fainting? Not quite. She was simply overcome with
relief. She said, ‘Oh, I feel like jelly, oh, it’s a lovely feeling.’
We tapped the next round and she folded over again, saying, ‘Oh, it’s
like going down in a lift. Thank you, thank you.’ (We were both thanking
EFT.)
She reached zero and looked stunned, still sagging in the chair.
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Dealing with a painful lump
A little later she showed me a hard lump of flesh at her midriff, painful to
touch, that she described as a calcium deposit that showed up on X-
rays.
It had grown 55 years ago, starting when she was 15 years old.
The lump appeared after her father had punched her there so hard that
she had flown out through a doorway and lost consciousness.
He ‘d punched her to punish her, one day when she arrived home from
work. Her crime? Having refused that morning -- when Marigold was
about to run for the bus to get to work on time -- to make her abusive
mother a cup of coffee.
Marigold said, ‘I feel I lost myself when he punched me, he took my soul,
does that sound crazy?
‘Now I think if I say no, someone will kill me. So I’ve always let people
walk all over me.’
Pain diminished
‘Is the lump painful now?’ I asked.
‘When I touch it, it’s a 5 out of 10,’ she said. So we tapped
Even though this lump is painful, I love and accept myself deeply and
completely.
She bowed her head again, dizzy this time, as the pain shot up to 10.
As we tapped another round the pain went to 2.
‘That’s so nice, the relief, that’s so nice,’ she kept saying. Testing by
prodding her midriff, after the next round she could not find any pain.
She was astonished. She said, ‘’Could that have anything to do with the
cough I’ve had all my life?’
I said that the pain might return, as we had not dealt with the trauma that
had caused it, but for this, and for help with other traumas, she would
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need to return with her hearing aid. She said she certainly would,
adding, ‘I feel so relieved, I could sleep for Australia.’
I explained that now she herself could repeat the basic tapping
technique whenever she felt sad or uncomfortable. She left with a
tapping guide and my DIY EFT book, ‘Tapping Your Troubles Away with
EFT’.
‘I’m going to be busy,’ she said.
Follow-up 3 days later
‘After that session,’ Marigold said on the phone, ‘Walking up the street I
started to laugh. And I can’t stop writing light-hearted poetry, it’s pouring
out of me.
‘And something else strange happened. For years I’ve had such pain in
my hips and back, and I tapped, and it has lessened so much – ‘
She gave me permission to share her experiences because she herself
had come to EFT from reading an article.
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12. Nurse Janice: bereavement
Janice, a nurse, was suffering from an annual malady: feeling sad
and depressed around the anniversary of her father’s death five
years previously.
She came to me in the hope that she could stop this regular depression.
What could she do? It wasn’t getting any less each year. She didn’t
want to have to take drugs every year to feel better.
As we talked, what emerged was that hers was not just sadness over
the loss of a loved parent. There was more to it.
Janice felt weighed down with sadness because she hadn’t known her
father well, although he had lived with the family. Tears came into her
eyes.
She said, ‘He wasn’t at home a lot, and I didn’t get on with him anyway.
He was emotionally cruel to Mum. Why am I so sad?’
‘That was his fault!’
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She listed a number of uncomfortable events in her own life that, deep
down, she felt were her father’s fault because of his behaviour when she
was growing up, although she’d never said anything to him about this.
We began to tap down her anger at him, but she stopped and said, ‘I
know I need to let this anger go, it’s not good for me, but doing this
makes me feel disloyal to him.’
So we tapped on the disloyal feeling, which evaporated as she focussed
on his behaviour and her suppressed rage, which she rated as 8 /10.
She continued, ‘He’d put Mum down in public, and force her to do things
that would make her look foolish. That poor little dolly! He was a bully! ‘
She burst out with: ‘My father was contemptible!’
Tapping continued to diminish this long-held rage -- which she hadn’t
known what to do with, all through her life.
A spontaneous change
When Janice felt her anger was only 4/10, she started to wonder how
her father had got to be a person like that.
She said, ‘His own father came home from a war, and I guess these
days we’d say he had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but in those days
it wasn’t known.’ I told her that now it was quite well known that if a
parent was suffering from PTSD, the rest of the household members
were also likely to become traumatised.
She said, ‘I guess Dad’s father didn’t treat him very well then, when he
was young,’ she said. ‘But adults do have choices. He could have tried
harder to be a kinder person! His brother is a very kind man, and he
went through a war too.
‘Maybe Dad just didn’t have the mature tools to do that. Yes, I would
say he was immature.’
As her anger continued to dissolve, soon she was spontaneously saying,
with conviction, ‘I forgive you, Dad, for being immature.’
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And then she couldn’t find any anger at all. She didn’t approve of how
he had been, but she could feel some compassion for him.
And strangely – she wasn’t sad any more, either. She left smiling.
THE END
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