What to do when you can't find your own specific events or issues

By Jo Hainsworth

Hi Gary

Attached is an article that I'm hoping will be of use for your newsletter.  It's about a French woman who has watched The EFT Course and really been persistent in getting up and running with EFT.  I think she's a real inspiration.  She's a big fan of yours, and really appreciates how much EFT is changing her life and making things easier for her husband and little girl as well.

With gratitude,

Jo Hainsworth

Persistence, persistence, persistence!

Christel is such an inspiration for anyone wanting to take charge of his or her life.  For many years, before discovering EFT, she read everything she could get her hands on to help her to better understand herself, and what was going wrong in her life.  She had already completely turned her life around when she discovered EFT earlier this year, but was excited about how it could take her even further.  She enthusiastically threw herself into reading the EFT Manual, tapping, and watching the DVDs.  What has unfolded since for her is a great example of the three most important things to remember when using EFT: persistence, persistence, and … persistence!

Christel’s first successes with EFT were in eliminating all her fears relating to childbirth which resulted in the delivery going completely as planned.  She then used EFT to help her husband and her new baby, with great success.  But all the while there was a building frustration – “Why doesn’t it work for me with the issues I’m working on now?”  Spurred on by the success of one of her friends with EFT, she determined to stick with it.  She watched the DVDs and diligently learned all she could, researching on the emofree site and reading everything that she thought was relevant. 

One day when speaking to me she said she was ready for some more DVDs because she thought that was the best way to learn.  She felt that the more she knew, the more likely it would be that she could resolve her issues, which included her tendency to try to control the people around her, which she really wanted to change.  I suggested that while the DVDs contain a lot of valuable information, in actual fact the best way to learn EFT is to use it for yourself. 

She said she was disillusioned because while she knew that she had had a lot of issues when she was a teenager, she really couldn’t remember anything specific, just that her father and sister had treated her pretty badly.  She was concerned that without specific memories, she wouldn’t be able to use EFT to heal.  I suggested she make a start on what was concerning her right then and there with something like, Even though I’m frustrated that I can’t remember what happened, and I think I need to in order to be able to heal…

The next week when we spoke on the phone she said something really big had happened, and she wasn’t sure how to deal with it.  She had been tapping around the theme of the above, when she all of a sudden felt like everything just shut down and it was as if a part of her had yelled, “No!  We are not going there!”  As we talked on the phone, she still felt a lot of fear about what she might find out, and she really wasn’t sure she wanted to recover the memories of what had happened. 

I introduced her to the concept of sneaking up on the problem, and also talked with her about what Gary calls the fear of the fear – that the fear of finding out what happened might actually be worse than actually finding out.  I suggested she tap all around that theme, with statements like

Even though I’m really afraid of finding out what happened, and I don’t know whether I could handle it…

Even though I had this huge fear reaction when I was tapping, and it just shut everything right down and a part of me doesn’t want to go there…

The following week when we were speaking again (note that Christel does all the EFT on her own and just asks me questions when we happened to be talking to swap French for English conversation practice) she said that she’d done the tapping and it felt better, but she just couldn’t remember what happened back then, so she didn’t have any idea how she could get specific. 

I suggested that because she was trying to heal things that happened as a teenager, it might be a good idea to open a line of communication with her inner child at around that age.  Her initial reaction was that she didn’t know how, so I suggested that she just sit down, and have some pencils and paper in front of her, and talk to her inner teenager, and ask her if there was anything she’d like to say, or whether she would like to draw something, then tap on whatever came up. 

Christel decided before doing this to find a photo of herself at that age, which she really looked at, trying to get into how it must have been for her then.  To assist in the process, she also found her diaries from around that time, and she was amazed to realise how sad young Christel had been at that time.  But she still had no memories of anything to work on.  I stressed the importance of remembering that it would be like dealing with an actual hurt teenager – they won’t talk until you have their trust.

The following week I received a very excited phone call from Christel.  “She’s really talking to me Jo, she really trusts me.”  In the course of conversing with her inner teenager and tapping on everything that came up, Christel had uncovered a lot of unconscious beliefs that she had never considered.  Things like “It’s normal to be suffering” and “I betrayed my mother by healing”.  She also discovered things that the young Christel was still very angry about, and things that she was still carrying guilt over that she had long been forgotten about. 

She found that her tapping was getting harder and faster as her inner child finally found an outlet to express all the frustration that had been bottled up inside of her for so long.  She wrote down everything as it came up, and just kept following the trail, tapping away years of sadness and anger and hurt that she hadn’t even realised that she was still carrying inside.  As she tapped, she discovered things that she was projecting onto others, and the tapping helped her to turn the focus back to her, and clear all the guilt that came up, that she previously wasn’t aware of.  Each day one or two new memories surfaced, and some came into Christel’s awareness through her dreams.

Christel feels so incredibly blessed to have learned this wonderful method, and she wants everyone to know about how wonderful it is.  She wants to share her learnings in the hopes that they will inspire others to hang in there with persistence, and in doing so be able to heal old wounds and find new freedom in living their lives now.  Here are the main things that Christel has found with using EFT for self-healing:

• The DVDs are very inspirational, and in particular, watching the one at the end of The EFT Course (entitled “Toxins, Phobias & Persistence) is really important if you are wondering why EFT is working for everyone else but not you.
• Reading and watching DVDs is a great way to learn, but the best way is to set aside some time every day that you can, and tap on your own issues.
• Write down what comes up as you go, because then you are able to follow the trail later and have much more understanding of the issues.
• Even if it doesn’t seem to be working for you, keep tapping and persisting. 
• Having someone to bounce ideas off if you are stuck is really useful.  The EFT Forums are a great place to do this if you don’t have someone in your life that is using EFT successfully.
• When you hit a wall of fear or resistance, remember to tap your way through it.  Forget about what you were tapping on for a bit, and instead tap on all your fears or concerns.  Make a list of everything bothering you, and tap your way through it.  For example, Even though I’m afraid of finding out what happened…  In Christel’s words: “It started to work when I tapped on all my fears; unless you take the time to think about all the fears you have, you will get nowhere and turn your back on something incredible!!”
• If you can’t remember anything specific, then that’s the place to start tapping, Even though I don’t remember what happened…
• Talking with your inner child can be really useful.  Taking the time to gain his or her trust is time well spent, because then he or she will tell you everything you need to know to tap on
• EFT is magical!

Gary is one of Christel’s heroes now, the inspiration she has found in the DVDs and from this wonderful method is something that she will always be very thankful for.

Jo Hainsworth