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Articles & Ideas

Core Issues

A clever way to find core issues

Important Note: This article was written prior to 2010 and is now outdated. Please use my newest advancement, Optimal EFT. It is more efficient, more powerful and clearly explained in my free e-book, The Unseen Therapist™.  Best wishes, Gary

Note: This article assumes you have a working knowledge of EFT. Newcomers can still learn from it but are advised to peruse our Free Gold Standard (Official) EFT Tutorial™ for a more complete understanding.

Hi Everyone,

I really like this idea by Marian Mills of the UK. She hooks into the idea that we often project our own stuff onto others, thereby seeing them as being the problem rather than ourselves. Read this one carefully. It can make the difference between success and failure for some clients.

Hugs, Gary


By Marian Mills

EFT works really well when we are able to be highly specific, as is demonstrated time and time again in the cases presented in Gary's DVDs and in the EFT Newsletter.  However, there are times when issues either don’t seem to have any specific cause, or we have tapped on all the specific events or memories that have come up, yet the problem persists.  

With these kinds of issues, I have often found the belief or characteristic that the person is trying to change has been adopted from somebody else, usually a parent.  This might help to explain why there are no memories of events surfacing through the application of EFT.  We start with a normal setup phrase:

Even though I feel the need to be perfect…  Halfway through tapping the points I change the reminder phrase from I need to be perfect to Mum needs to be perfect (or whomever the behaviour seems to have been learned from).  I’ve uncovered many deeply emotional issues with this one, sometimes surprising the client who had never before even considered that the problem hadn’t originated with them.

Child psychology theories say that children up to age 7 believe themselves to be at the centre of their universes.  They think that they are responsible for making everything around them happen the way it does.  Only later do they begin to learn that other people operate independently of them.  Mum being in a bad mood one day might be because of a bad day at work and not because of the child.  Emotional states can be absorbed whilst still in the womb, and there are many documented cases where a core issue has been picked up in this way too.  The other side to this is where we attribute our own characteristics to other people.

This approach uses the method of looking at people who annoy or upset us, or possibly people whom we envy.  I call it the “pointy finger syndrome” where we get so busy looking at what they are doing, that we manage to avoid our own behaviours and feelings.  I’ve worked with clients who come into the room and spend the first few minutes talking heatedly about what somebody else has done or said.  The very fact that the other person’s behaviour has kindled this strong emotional response indicates that there is something in the client that is causing a disruption.  So we start tapping with the list of what is bothering the client about the other person.

Even though he is just so stubborn…

About half way through a second round of tapping with the reminder phrase, he’s so stubborn I throw in, I’m so stubborn.  It invariably stops the client in their tracks as they realize this previously denied aspect of themselves.

Using this technique with a client, I changed the phrase from He’s so arrogant to I’m so arrogant. She sat bolt upright in her chair, glared directly at me and said “I am so, but nobody has ever known it.”  Then she burst into tears.  She had felt so aggrieved with the other person for being able to be arrogant – or, what she later saw as being assertive - when she had rejected this behaviour in herself.  She had always operated from a strong belief that keeping everybody else happy was the number one priority in life, denying her own needs in order to do so.  The other person’s ability to state his own needs, seemingly at the expense of everyone else’s happiness, irritated her beyond belief.

With this one out of the bag, so to speak, she was able to recognize how keeping others happy was no longer serving her and the belief quickly crumbled.  We had tackled the belief head on several times before with very little shift, but it quickly became something that had no validity for her any longer.

Marian Mills

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