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An 8 year old boy with very strange eating habits finds a new menu with EFT

Important Note: This article was written prior to 2010 and is now outdated.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,

This excellent article by Rehana Webster of New Zealand combines creativity, rapport and the value of tapping on the client while the issue unfolds. She says, "I asked Tom if his mother had tapped on/with him and he said he didn’t want that. So I asked him if I could show him how relaxing it was and before he could come up with an excuse I started tapping gently on him and saw that he immediately relaxed.  I continued tapping on him for the duration of the session which lasted about 40 minutes, while we discussed the intricate aspects of food and vegetables and what he could allow himself to eat or not eat.  He certainly had some very complex rules about food." 

Hugs, Gary


By Rehana Webster, BSc

Note: The names of the people in this article have been changed to preserve their privacy.
Rehana’s comments/notes are in regular type and
Susan’s comments are in italics

SUSAN: I asked Rehana if she could do an EFT session with my son Tom who is 8 and has always been picky with food, which limited what he ate.  As a baby he would never have warm mashed vegetables.  I distinctly remember him retching out a spoonful of custard when he was about 10 months old, which was the first time he’d had something of that texture.  (I only remember being interestingly surprised by that.) The picky-ness continued and it took a long time to work out that it was food texture that was the discriminating variable.  If the food was ‘wrong’ he would retch or vomit, and this occurred even when he put a tiny bit in his mouth, or just even looked at it.

He would eat a limited range of raw or frozen fruit or vegetables.  No cake, no sauce, no sloppy food, no pasta, no rice, no potato unless oven baked to the correct texture.  Meat and fish needed to be the right texture too. No beans, no legumes, no homemade burgers.   It made life a challenge.  Even looking at food of the wrong texture at the dining table would cause him to retch and vomit.  We couldn’t eat at the same time as the rest of the family or we would need to put up screens around our food.

REHANA: Fussy Eater.

A young boy of 8 named Tom was brought to see me by his mother because he was extremely fussy about eating.  His mother Susan was concerned because Tom had limited the number of food stuffs he would eat to such a degree that it had become a real problem trying to get him to get all his nutritional needs met.

Susan brought Tom over and sat on one side of the room and let me do the entire session without interfering.  I quickly recognized that Tom was a highly intelligent little boy.  I asked him to explain to me what this fussy eating was all about.

I asked Tom if his mother had tapped on/with him and he said he didn’t want that. 

So I asked him if I could show him how relaxing it was and before he could come up with an excuse I started tapping gently on him and saw that he immediately relaxed.  I continued tapping on him for the duration of the session which lasted about 40 minutes, while we discussed the intricate aspects of food and vegetables and what he could allow himself to eat or not eat.  He certainly had some very complex rules about food.  Susan was watching from the side lines.  She told me later that he had never been interested in the tapping technique.

SUSAN: Actually I’d never shown him, as he is so sensitive I felt I needed to get myself more sorted out before launching out on him.

REHANA: Tom told me that he could eat nothing that was soft and warm.  Well that takes care of about every thing one can think of in our diet except for perhaps frozen food.  Yes, that is all he would eat.  All vegetables had to be frozen in order for him to eat them without throwing up.  When I asked him what happened if he ate soft warm food he said that he would vomit because his stomach knew it was soft warm food.  Tom had a number of strict rules around eating.

SUSAN: I was interested that he also said that it started after a couple of times where he ate food and vomited it, and so… something like he remembered it and hence repeated it.  He never fails to amaze me, I should have asked him why myself!  But I wonder if he remembers what the incidents were?

REHANA: There were no specific events that I could get Tom to recall so I just continued to tap while we conversed.

I asked Tom how he knew food was soft warm before it even went into his stomach.  Tom said that the taste buds on his tongue told him and the feel buds on the side of his tongue told him as well that the food was warm and soft!  Pretty creative!  I played along with what Tom ‘gave’ me and asked him if his taste/feel buds ever made mistakes.  ‘No’ he responded.  I asked him that I would like to conduct a scientific experiment during which he had to close his eyes and he made me promise not to put anything in his mouth.

Susan had a plate of soft warm food ready and waiting for the experiment.  There was a piece of avocado, broccoli, cake and chickpea dip on it.  I told Tom the experiment involved me putting the items one at a time on his finger and he had to guess with the help of the ‘feel buds’ on his finger what the items were.

I put each item of food on his finger and asked him what he thought it was.  Then I asked him to open his eyes and I asked him how many correct guesses he thought he had made.  He said he had made all four correct guesses.  I told him that the ‘feel buds’ on his finger had been WRONG every time.  Yes, every time!  I was closely watching Tom’s expression and there sure was confusion on his face.  His eyes rolled around as he tried to comprehend what this meant.  How could his ‘feel buds’ be mistaken?

At this point, Tom changed tact.  He suddenly started talking about a part of him that switched on at night and another part that switched on during the day and the parts were getting mixed up and one of the part was wanting to change and he had been thinking of how that would happen.  Really… this from an eight year old?  WOW!

SUSAN: As an aside, after Tom gets angry and hits his brother on occasions he tells me that one part of him says,’ yes, yes go for it, do it, get revenge’, and the other part says’ no it’s not ok’.  I thought that that was showing his immaturity that was slowly developing, but I think I’d better reconsider that, and offer to tap when it happens!

REHANA: So this was an unprecedented opportunity not to miss.  I asked him what Part Number One did.  He said that Part One could eat home made French fries.  I said that French fries are soft and warm and he said that the fries could only be cooked in hot oil for 3 seconds and no more, and therefore they were edible.   Part Number Two would only eat frozen vegetables.  I wanted to introduce a counter example for the French fries and suggested popping frozen vegetables instead of potatoes into the hot oil for 3 seconds, and no more than 3 seconds.    Could Part One also eat them just like the fries??  After all the ‘taste and feel buds’ on his tongue and stomach thought that fries were admissible so why not the frozen fried vegetables?

Then we continued to talk about the merits of the two parts of him.  While we talked I kept tapping on his EFT points and kept him engaged in the conversation about these dissenting parts.

This was an intense session and before we finished I asked Tom if he could try out the vegetables and see how his stomach responded.  He said he would give it a try but he certainly seemed not convinced at all. 

SUSAN: My take on it was that he was very convinced it would work and really, really positive and busting to give it a go.

REHANA: That’s how little I know about Tom!

I also asked him to report back to me the next morning and I can tell you I held little hope that he would do the assignment let alone change his eating habits.  Ah me of little faith!

Next morning the whole family was waiting for me.  Oh no, I thought… didn’t work, it got worse….!  Surprise, surprise… Susan had a grin from ear to ear.  Young Tom had a thank you card he made for me… and Susan said he NEVER made cards for anyone.  However, the best news that really blew me away was ……

When they left after the session, Tom insisted on going to the supermarket and picking out some frozen vegetables.  He proceeded to cook the frozen food (yes this young man cooks most of his own meals) and ate the whole lot.  As if that was not enough of a surprise, the next morning he cooked another heap of vegetable for breakfast!  His parents could not believe their eyes and I could not believe it either.  Persistence and creativity together had achieved such fast and astounding changes for Tom.

That was not all.  That night Tom asked his mother do the tapping on him and again first thing in the morning he wanted some more of that tapping.

I can tell you that I was the most relieved.  I felt like I had passed one of the biggest tests in my EFT career and passed with flying colors!

So, like Gary always says, try EFT on everything and be persistent!

Rehana Webster

 

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