EFT Won’t Work For Me

Woman says, "EFT Won't Work For Me" – And Her Depressed Husband Becomes a One-Minute Wonder

by CJ Puotinen

(Gary Craig published this report on June 2, 2006, in his online newsletter.)

A woman who called for information about an EFT workshop explained that she wanted to attend so that she could learn how to help her daughter. “I already know that EFT won’t work for me,” she said.

I asked how she knew that and she said she had worked with an EFT practitioner for several sessions without experiencing any kind of change or improvement. She had had polio as a child and now has post-polio syndrome, which has caused a progressive loss of motor neurons and muscle function. As a result, she can no longer work. Because of incapacitating pain in her shoulder, she had surgery, but the surgeon botched the operation and now she worried about her deteriorating muscles and loss of function.

I had some free time that afternoon, so I offered to tap with her over the phone. Her pain seemed a logical place to start. In response to my questions about her pain and how she felt about it, she described her worst symptom as a rough-surfaced red softball-sized pain in her left shoulder projecting a spike that stabbed straight to her shoulder blade.

We tapped on:

Even though I have this hard, rough red ball of pain in my shoulder and its spike is stabbing my shoulder blade, I deeply and completely accept myself.

Even though this pain is incapacitating, irritating, and thoroughly frustrating, I love and forgive myself, I forgive my shoulder, I forgive the pain, and I forgive anyone and anything that might be contributing to it. I forgive my body for falling apart, I forgive myself for getting fat as a house, I forgive myself for being as weak as a kitten, I forgive myself for every disappointment and irritation and moment of impatience that has made me feel worse.

Even though this red ball of pain makes me angry, furious, and upset, I deeply and completely accept myself.

Even though I’m terrified of being helpless, living the rest of my life in a wheelchair, dying before I’m ready, and leaving behind people who love and need me, I accept myself and am willing  to release this pain now.

Even though EFT doesn’t work for me, I’ve proven that it doesn’t, I’ve spent a lot of money and effort working with EFT and it just doesn’t help me, I would like to  set the past aside, forgive and let go of the past, live in the present moment, and let my body heal itself from the inside out.

This is a very condensed description of a tapping session that took half an hour or so, with frequent stops for questions on my part and descriptions on hers. We alternated between long setup phrases, during which she tapped on her karate chop point or rubbed her sore spot, and reminder phrases that changed at each EFT tapping point, such as pain, shoulder, hurts, angry, can’t work, frustrated, red ball, steel spike, this pain, upset, and similar “problem” reminders.

I thought she had to be making progress because her voice kept growing more relaxed, her breathing sounded slower and deeper, and her sense of humor returned. Suddenly she exclaimed, “My shoulder feels hot! What does that mean?”  She also had a massive draining of the sinuses on her left side, just above the painful shoulder.

I said, “I think it means that your energy is shifting and that maybe EFT works for you after all. What does your shoulder pain look like now?”

She realized that the pain had completely left her shoulder, but now it was lodged in her spine. After we tapped for the pain in her spine, she discovered that it had moved to her neck. After another round of tapping, it moved to her shoulder blade, then into her head. In each case, we addressed the pain with a new Setup Phrase:

Even though the pain has moved to my spine, I deeply and completely accept myself. Even though the pain has now lodged in my spine, I love and accept myself. Even though the pain is stuck in my spine, I forgive this pain and let it go.

Tap, tap, tap. Then she would check to see where it went, and we’d tap for that location.

“This is called ‘chasing the pain,’” I told her. “It’s not uncommon, and it’s a good sign. It means your energy is moving, it’s no longer blocked.”

From time to time I would stop and ask whether her condition or the pain reminded her of anything. These questions made no sense to her and were beginning to annoy her until suddenly she exclaimed, “Yes! This does remind me of something! When I was five years old, I spent a year in an iron lung. I lived in a terrible institution with a very abusive staff. All of us kids were beat and punished all the time. Our parents weren’t allowed to visit at all for the first nine months, and then they were allowed to come only on Sundays. Every Sunday the staff would line us up and warn us that if we complained about anything, we would never see our parents again. The pain I’m feeling now reminds me of having polio when I was young and spending all that time in the iron lung.”

We tapped on:

Even though what they did was unforgivable...

Even though it’s impossible to forgive them...

Even though I don’t want to forgive them, I don’t even want to think about them….

While tapping, she felt a connection between what she experienced as a child in the hospital with polio and what happened during and after a recent surgical procedure.
“Once again I was left completely at the mercy of people in the medical field,” she said, “and I could not take care of myself. I could not protect myself from them. It was a feeling of complete and utter helplessness.”

This realization triggered a flood of tears. I had told her we were using the Tearless Trauma Technique, and if at any point she felt uncomfortable, it would not be necessary for her to continue. We would back off and tap the uncomfortable thought down to a zero before continuing. At first she didn’t know why she was crying, so we tapped on how even though I’m crying and I don’t know why, all of a sudden I’m full of tears and I don’t understand it, I deeply and completely accept myself. Then she realized that her tears were triggered by feelings of helplessness, both after her unsuccessful surgery and during her year in the iron lung.

That’s when we tackled the surgeon who did everything wrong when he operated on her shoulder. We tapped about every mistake he made and every problem he caused and how she would love to hang him by his incompetent thumbs from a bridge, how she would cheerfully run over him with a truck, a tank, a bulldozer, how she would be delighted to blow him up with dynamite, or just watch him drown and disappear.

We tapped about every hassle presented by the insurance companies, every irritating follow-up visit with doctors and physical therapists, every symptom, and every disappointment. By the end of our session, which lasted an hour altogether, she still had some pain, but it was less than what she had started with and it had moved to yet another location. It was difficult for her to comprehend that EFT had removed energy blocks, allowed her energy to flow freely, and done something to improve her condition, but she decided to just relax about it and enjoy whatever relief she experienced. She said that the EFT practitioner she had previously worked with used only the basic EFT Setup Phrase and hadn’t explored her emotions or past experiences, and that’s why she hadn’t experienced any of the emotional or physical changes she was feeling now.

The next day, I received the following email from her:

“CJ, I really enjoyed talking to you on the phone yesterday and you were so generous to help me with tapping, right then and there on the spur of the moment. I wanted to let you know of some of the outcome of that session on the phone. 

First, even though some of it brought me to tears, I felt better afterwards.   Also, you made it clear that something was working, even though the pain moved somewhere else. I believe that yesterday brought forth a long forgotten memory of my stay in the hospital as a child with polio. I remembered that we children were punished severely if we cried. I learned very quickly to become invisible and not be noticed. I learned survival skills -- give those in charge what they want. I had forgotten all about the forbidden crying. Now it makes sense why I never cried as a child or as an adult. I thought it was because I didn't want to reveal any weakness or vulnerability. I didn't cry until more recent years. Instead, I got angry. But no crying. Once when I was a teen, I suppressed crying so much while watching ‘West Side Story’ that I had to leave the show and was physically ill. So I tapped that it was OK to cry. 

“Even more amazing was what happened with my husband today. He tried tapping (in private) for the first time while I was at the doctor's. He was out on an errand when I returned. When he got home, his behavior was most unusual.  He walked in the door smiling (he doesn't smile), walked over to me, gave me a hug and kiss and told me he loves me....again unusual behavior. He continued smiling until he left for work. He told me that he tapped for the depression that he has had his whole life. He can't remember not being depressed. Here is what happened. After he finished his strenuous exercise on the bike, he did the tapping sequence twice.  He said he immediately felt different....happy. He said it was so profound that it was almost scary.”

The following day, in answer to my questions about what exactly he did, she wrote, “My husband read the EFT manual that I downloaded. He then read it again and tapped yesterday. He just followed the basic recipe, except he said his affirmation statements to both sore spots, to be sure he got the right one. He just borrowed his setup phrase from the manual on depression. Very simple. He is a simple man in many ways. His depression is chronic, mild to moderate, but persistent. He thinks that maybe the strenuous exercise that he did before tapping may have augmented it. The resulting feeling he got was very intense.....in a good way. 

“He went into the tapping in a depressed state and walked away feeling profoundly different. This morning, he told me that he was bouncing off the walls all night at work, which means that he felt very good. He says he still feels good this morning. Altogether, he tapped for two complete sequences, but in only one session. This morning he has been talking to me and even talking to our birds and dogs. He is usually stone-dead quiet and won't talk even if I try to engage him. He told co-workers at work about what happened, and I'm sure they were surprised at the change in him. He has a reputation for not being social.”

How’s that for a success story?

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