by Dr Tam Llewellyn-Edwards

This is a report on a case where I used EFT on a blind patient. It shows that being blind does not prevent EFT from working and it also demonstrates that the presenting problem is not always the 'real' one. Always watch for the patient's second (and often main) problem, which may not always be presented at the first contact.

The patient (I will call him George - not his real name) had been blind since a child. However, he came to see me complaining of intermittent pains in the lower back. These had been investigated, but no organic cause had been found.

At the time of the consultation the pains were bothering George greatly and he reported a discomfort of 9 on a scale from 0 to 10. I decided that it would be best to simply use the basic EFT formula on the pain. As the patient was blind I tapped on him and omitted the 9-gamut procedure (but did tap on the gamut point).

Using one round with the set up.....

"Even though I have this lower back pain, which is intermittent, I am OK"

.....immediately brought the intensity reading down to 2.

As the problem had been investigated, and no organic cause had been found, I felt safe in continuing to reduce the level of pain and another round reduced it to 0.

This could have been the end of the matter, but I thought it worthwhile to go through the procedure again, carefully explaining each point and ensuring that my blind client understood the procedure well enough to apply it to himself.

Then, when I explained that the same procedure could be used to help with all sorts of different problems, George disclosed another problem - one that was much more pressing than the back pain. He had recently developed a close relationship with a blind girl and was unable to maintain his erection during intercourse.

We discussed the origins of the problem, and he became very emotional when mentioning how a previous girl friend had belittled him. We never fully discussed the details of the incident but, since George was clearly distressed and emotional about mentioning it, I led him through a round of tapping for this distress. We used the set up......

"Even though she did those things and they upset me, I choose to be OK about it"

After the first round George reported that, "It was not really much of an incident now that I come to think about it". When asked to discuss it again with more detail, he admitted to still being a little upset by it, but thought it really was not of much consequence.

I did not pursue the matter or the detail, but led him in another round of tapping with the set up......

"Even though I still feel a little upset by the incident, I am OK and respect myself"

After this round, George had a quiet laugh to himself about the incident and wondered why it had upset him so much. We had not use the 0-10 measure of discomfort during this part of the session, but he clearly had a load lifted from his mind

Sometime later he reported that sexual dysfunction of maintaining an erection was no longer a problem and that he had had some private laughs about what he then saw as a rather silly incident. The back problem (which may well have been emotionally linked to the sexual problem) had also cleared completely.

Dr Tam Llewellyn-Edwards