Three EFT sessions eliminate pain from degenerative disc disease – underlying emotional issues involved

By Ray Perkel

My friend Akiva was suffering from chronic debilitating pain in his upper back, with referred pain in his right shoulder and neck.  He was struggling to get a good night’s sleep, and could not turn his head easily when driving nor could he do his customary stretches upon waking in the morning.

Three consecutive weeks of intensive twice-weekly physiotherapy had failed to have any effect at all.  His doctor and physiotherapist recommended X-rays.  He thought his shoulder might be dislocated although there had been no injury to cause such a condition.  The X-rays showed that he has degenerative disc disease - compressed discs in the upper spine put pressure on the nerves causing muscle spasms and the pain in the shoulder. There was no evidence of any damage to the shoulder. He turned to his doctor for advice.

The doctor, who happens to be my doctor too and is also a friend of mine, incorporates homeopathy and acupuncture into his conventional and very successful medical practice.  A couple of weeks prior to Akiva’s conversation with him I had providentially introduced the doctor to Gary Craig’s website. I had told him about my experience with EFT and that I was training to be a practitioner. When Akiva approached him he unhesitatingly recommended that he call on me for EFT treatment as he believed that this modality would be the most effective for his condition! (I am moved by the humility and openness of this respected, highly experienced professional referring his patient to me - an inexperienced lay healer)

We did 3 sessions with extremely positive results.  In the first session Akiva rated his pain intensity at 8 on a scale of 0 to 10.  We began the session with a few rounds of chasing the pain.  The pain kept shifting position and he felt small increments of relief with each round of tapping.

Unexpectedly, he noticed a feeling of tension in his stomach area.  I asked him to describe the emotion associated with that sensation and he reported feeling frustration with a tinge of anger.  Intuitively, I asked him to recall any event which he associated with that feeling.  He instantly remembered a water-skiing experience that had occurred 15-20 years earlier.  

A family member was driving the speed boat with Akiva in tow on water skis. When accelerating the boat in order to start Akiva up on his skis he kept making the boat surge forward much too fast and in a jerky and rough manner, so that Akiva lost his balance and fell into the water several times.  He recalled feeling humiliated, frustrated, resentful and angry.  We tapped on these emotions. He immediately experienced a significant drop in the pain to around 4 out of 10. He was delighted and very impressed with the process.

When we met a few days later for our second session, Akiva told me that in the intervening period the pain had spontaneously eased up further each day.  It was now down to about 3 out of 10. He was sleeping peacefully and had much more mobility in his neck and shoulders.

Continuing with the theme of powerlessness and frustration, I evoked him to probe for other memories.  He recalled a recurring experience from his pre-teen years of being repeatedly bullied by the next door kids, who would gang up on him, pin him down and spit in his face.  Tapping on this reduced Akiva’s pain down to around 2 out of 10.

About a week later we did a third and final session. After chasing the pain for a couple of rounds, the issue of humiliation and frustration once again came up.  Akiva recalled himself at the age of 5, alone at home, with his parents out to work.  The family domestic worker would hold him upside down by his ankles and painfully smack the soles of his feet with a slipper as punishment for bed-wetting.  (The punishment didn’t help!). Tapping on this emotional memory reduced his present pain down to 1 out of 10.

Subsequent to the treatment Akiva said that he had experienced a continued steady reduction of pain over the period of the treatment and that it currently has stabilised at an almost imperceptible intensity of around 0.5 out of 10.  He says that, although there is still a subtle sensation of his former condition, his life has “returned to normal again” and his shoulder and back do not bother him in the least.

I am fascinated by the apparent link of Akiva’s skiing experience with his pain in the upper back and shoulders – because these are the muscles with which a water skier takes the strain of being pulled by the rope attached to the speed boat.  It appears to be there that Akiva unconsciously stored unexpressed emotional energy relating to powerlessness and anger, even in early childhood.

This case seems to illustrate clearly how stressful and suppressed emotional memories can store themselves in the body and eventually present as pain or disease, even decades later. EFT offers a remarkably direct and powerful way of healing these kinds of conditions.

I am very grateful for having been given the skills to facilitate such healing.

Ray Perkel