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Getting to reasons behind vertigo.

Gary:  Okay. So I'm talking with Laurie? 

Laurie:  Yes.

Gary:  And we'll call your client "Sally". That's not her real name, of course, but we want to honor client privacy. Sally recently--about three months ago--came up with vertigo, correct?

Laurie:  Right.

Gary:  And really hasn't been able to make much progress on it with EFT. So the purpose of this is for you and I to discuss the case. And we may or may not be able to end up helping Sally, but at least we could find some avenues to go down.

Laurie:  Okay.

Gary:  All right. Well, all right. So why don't you tell us a little bit about what's going on and then we'll go from there.

Laurie:  Okay. Sally has struggled with this dizziness and sometimes vertigo since about the beginning of May, for about three months. And it has been quite disabling, to the point where she had to stay home from her job. She couldn't even be at work. And she has gone to every doctor for all sorts of tests, including MRI, Eye, Ear, Nose and Throat specialist, chiropractor, acupuncture, everything. The only positive diagnosis they seem to have come up with is something called Meniere's Disease, which is not actually a distinct diagnosis. It's more a collection of symptoms.

Gary:  Sure.

Laurie:  And she describes it as a fullness in her right ear and a sense of pressure. And a sort of chronic, low-level dizziness. When she was in my office this last week, she said it felt like there was a magnet just pulling her down toward the floor. And she felt like she had to be resisting and pulling back.

Gary:  Sure. She told me about a spinning room. Like she's in a spinning room.

Laurie:  And she had tried EFT months before on other issues and liked it very much.

Gary:  Did you make headway on the previous issues?

Laurie:  Yes, including some very interesting ones. The first time we used it was on defensiveness and her relationship with a partner. And typical of the apex effect, she didn't really realize the impact of it until later, when she said that her partner mentioned that she wasn't nearly as argumentative in discussions with her. And we kind of realized that she was defensive. She was not feeling defensive. But, of course, I have to point that out to clients frequently. That this is actually EFT that made this difference.

Gary:  OK. Now I'd like, if I could, to zero right in on the vertigo and what you were doing about it. Because apparently whatever you were doing with EFT wasn't successful. So how were you going about it. "Even though I ... what?"

Laurie:  Let's see. With the dizziness ... let me see ... I think ... Even though .. Let me see here in my notes if there's anything other than the dizziness ... "Even though I'm feeling dizzy, I deeply and completely accept myself."

Gary: "Even though I'm feeling dizzy." Okay. All right.

Laurie:  Three times. I think we may have done fear of helplessness.

Gary:  Even though I have this fear of helplessness?

Laurie:  Right.

Gary:  Okay.

Laurie:  Sometimes, we'd talk about it and I would suggest that she would tap, you know, on her own. The last time we tried tapping in the office on the dizziness, she said it didn't seem to help.

Gary:  Sure. Okay. I'm going to interject here, because I've had some conversation with her along these lines as well, and she mentioned that to me as well. "Even though I feel dizzy now or even though I have this dizziness, you know, and this fear of helplessness, etc." Let me comment there if I can. Oftentimes, we can take a physical issue, like a headache or a dizziness, if you will, or a stomach disorder or a breathing thing or whatever it may be. And we can tap with EFT for that specific, physical sensation. And oftentimes, it will lift. You've probably experienced that.

Laurie:  I've done it two times in the last week on headaches. It worked wonderfully.

Gary:  So oftentimes, if we just zero right in on whatever the physical issue is, it will lift for them. Or, it will start changing nature. Instead of being a sharp pain, it's a dull throb. It'll change to this side of the head, then to that side of the head. You know. This side of the body. Someplace else. I call it "Chasing the Pain" when you do that. That's one way to go about it. But when it doesn't move, then, rightly or wrongly, what I say to myself is, "Ah, we have an emotional contributor here and we have to get to the emotional contribution--or cause--to make any headway." Okay? So that's where I would go with that. Now. We can get to that in a second. The other thing is this fear of helplessness. To me--at least my take on that--is that helplessness is too general. I know somebody feels helpless. But it's like when somebody says, "Well my problem is I have this low self-image." Well, that's too broad. Cause that's made up of hundreds of events that have occurred over somebody's lifetime. All the rejections, fears, guilts. They're all loaded into one thing they generalize and call Self Image.

Laurie:  Yes.

Gary:  So helplessness is maybe not quite as broad as Self Image. By the same token, there are reasons--specific reasons--for the helplessness. If you go back into childhood and try to find some specific events ... .I talked to her about this a little bit and she mentioned she had some with her father -- some specific events back there where she felt helpless as a child or helpless as somebody younger. See, what's going on now is whatever has happened that triggers this helplessness feeling is, in fact, triggering something from her yesterdays. And that's what they're feeling again.

Laurie:  Oh.

Gary:  So what we need to do. At least this is where I would go if I were you ... would be to go back into the past and start finding those specific instances. Now I'm going to make this up. We didn't talk about specifics, Sally and I, when we were speaking. But you might go to a time when -- and I'm going to make this up -- not something like, "I always felt helpless around my father,'' but more like, "My father refused to help me when I was eight in the Girl Scouts." That's a specific thing. Okay?

Laurie:  Right.

Gary:  Or, even more specific. "He refused to help me do some specific project when I was in the Girl Scouts at age eight." Or, "the time my father yelled at me when I was nine in front of my friends and I couldn't do anything about it."

Laurie:  Yes.

Gary:  Or "the time my father hit me when so-and-so ... And I felt so helpless." It may not be just father. It may be others as well. I also talked to her. There was some issue of abandonment--feelings of abandonment--in this recent romantic partner of hers when they parted ways. She had a heavy feeling of abandonment or loss, she called it. And that to me is just a trigger from something in the past. When we lose a romantic partner it doesn't always feel that good. But there's a certain level of it you don't have to go beyond. And she was going well beyond that. So anyway, what I had done, I had asked her what happened three months ... since she had this vertigo for three months ... what happened emotionally three months ago that might have been a problem. She said she visited her family and all she got was a heavy sense of loss. She started to remember things about her father and her recent romantic breakup and things like that. So that gave me the trigger to go the other direction. You know much more about her than I do. Does that make sense?

Laurie:  That trip certainly did tap into things. There's a lot of stuff there, for sure. And you know, I hadn't made the connection with the dizziness. Or the helplessness or the loss. She did talk about those, but, of course, the dizziness didn't come until later.

Gary:  In our conversation, the phrase, "My life is out of balance," came up, which is an interesting phrase for someone who has vertigo and dizziness and so on and so forth. "My life is out of balance." Cause here she was with a father whom she had never connected with and he died a while back. And she had a romantic partner, the leaving of the romantic partner left a hole, a sense of loss, if you will. And then going to the family triggered a bunch of other stuff. I guess what I'm saying is that when someone has physical issues, I always look for emotional causes. In fact, I always assume there's an emotional cause. I just assume it. Whether that's right or wrong, I don't know. But I've made a lot of headway doing that.

Laurie:  Okay. Well, I had not even thought to do that. I hadn't, in terms of the tapping.

Gary:  To me, that's where the cause is. In fact, the tapping works so well so often that whenever it doesn't appear to work I say, "What's in the way here? What haven't I done right?" I don't blame the tapping. I don't say the tapping didn't work.

Laurie:  Okay.

Gary:  I might say something like that. But what I'm really thinking is, "Have I gotten to a core issue yet? What am I missing? Something's blocking this. I'm not able to bring up the real issue, or something like that." You can go back to lots of stuff with her father.

Laurie:  Oh, there's a lot of stuff there.

Gary: Lots of stuff was there. And somehow or other, it all got triggered, or it appears to ... got triggered on that one trip back home. And next thing you know it wasn't long after that, she was telling me, she was driving and she turned to the left and all of a sudden had this one minute of vertigo. And then it faded. And then a week or two or three later, she had another one. And then it faded. Then it became more pronounced. The medical fraternity, or establishment, tends to consider vertigo as a chemical kind of thing. Cause there are chemicals that go on in the brain. I always ask what caused the chemical change in the brain. I always come from the place there's something emotional going on. Anyway, so I just kind of rambled a little bit, Laurie. What might you do next with her?

Laurie:  I think what I would probably do is look over my notes for the session that we had around her visit at home and see what pops out. That we could tap on, I guess, because there were a lot of emotions around that visit. And she has a ton of issues from childhood. So I'm sure there's plenty we can find.

Gary:  We can with almost everyone, as a matter of fact. But hers may be a little bit stronger than some others. I would take the vertigo, the Meniere's Disease, or whatever other label that has been given this, and I would consider it as symptom. Since you're tapping on the physical symptoms and getting nowhere, that's a big clue to me, in my experience, that there are some emotional drivers behind that that you've got to get to.

Laurie:  I've seen you do that on the tape, and it's quite impressive how well you do that to get down to the core issue. So compassionately and so accurately.

Gary:  It's interesting. If you just ask the client questions as you're doing this tapping, they'll tell you. It's like the tapping takes the layers off the onion.

Laurie:  I have found that's true. Somehow it clears their mind and they're talking about things you haven't heard before. I've noticed that.

Gary:  And they hadn't even thought to talk about those things before. Because other stuff, presumably, is covering them up. So it's really not difficult. It's only a matter of experience in all of that. You just ask the client: "You know, if there was some other issue here that we're not touching on yet, what might it be?" That's a simple question. They'll either give you a clue or say, "I don't know." In that case I'll usually say something like, "Well, just guess." And, they're very good guessers, let me tell you. They'll say something like, "Well, maybe it was this thing when I ... da da da da..". And the next thing you know, we're off into something really quite useful. Anyway, it must be awful to have that vertigo.

Laurie:  I can't imagine. It's so awful to feel dizzy. And then to have it all the time. Oh, this is very exciting.

Gary:  Give that a shot. We never know for sure. We're just sitting here shooting the breeze for the moment about what might work. But that's just my experience. And my guess is if you just did it and kept being persistent about it and just kept drilling. ... . If you don't do something with the vertigo, you're going to do something with a lot of other things. But my guess is you'll get to the vertigo. Ask her the question, "If there was an emotional cause to this vertigo, what would it be? If there was an emotional reason why you're dizzy right now, what might it be?" And just wait for an answer. Prod her until you get some answer and then just go. Always try to be as specific as you can.

Laurie:  All right. Thanks for your thoughts.

Gary:   Any time.

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