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General

Feeling and observing emotions

Important Note: This article was written prior to 2010 and is now outdated.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

Hi Everyone,

Michelle Leuschen discusses another approach to using EFT for emotions. It is in direct contrast to the standard EFT approach and may be useful for some clients. She also adds a way to "sneak up" on the emotion and says, "For clients who continue to have a difficult time feeling their emotions, the practitioner can ask, Can you allow yourself to feel it 2%?  You can help the client tap on 2% of the emotion and then bring in another 2%.  Working on bite-sized chunks can help the client to feel safer and makes the emotion more manageable."

Hugs, Gary


By Michelle Leuschen, MS

Hi Gary,

Sometimes we can use EFT to feel, experience and explore the emotion.  The main focus is to feel and accept, rather than to get rid of the emotion.  Eliminating the emotion can be the result, without being the goal.

Example: Josh was tapping on anger in order to GET RID OF his anger.  This produced limited results (at least for him).  Things began to change when I had Josh experience his anger in its entirety while tapping.  I even suggested that we agree NOT to get rid of the anger, to learn to live peacefully with the anger instead.  Accept the anger.  Perhaps even see the anger as an ally. 

Josh was extremely hesitant to feel his anger, he was used to suppressing, denying and fighting it.  Like many people, Josh has the irrational belief that if he openly felt his anger, it would destroy or overwhelm him.  To address these feelings, we used the following setup statements:

Even though I have this anger, I am not the anger, and I can still love myself. 

Even though I feel this anger, it is not bigger than me.  It is not more powerful than me and I can trust myself to feel it. 

Even though I am a person who experiences anger, I can still fully love and accept myself.

For clients who continue to have a difficult time feeling their emotions, the practitioner can ask, Can you allow yourself to feel it 2%?  You can help the client tap on 2% of the emotion and then bring in another 2%.  Working on bite-sized chunks can help the client to feel safer and makes the emotion more manageable.

The practitioner can also incorporate the principles of helping the client to experience the emotion as an observer.  The client should observe the emotion versus believing they are the emotion.  For instance, if there is sadness in you, first you need to acknowledge that it is there and then to view the sadness accurately.  There is a difference between saying I am sad and there is sadness in me..  Sad is not who you are.  You are simply experiencing the emotion or feeling, or most accurately, the vibration, of sadness. 

Help the client to recognize that unhappiness, anger, grief or any other emotion is simply an energy body - not them.  Understanding this concept helps your client to separate from, and observe, the emotion.  Bringing such awareness to an emotion will help it to dissolve.  Bringing such awareness to an emotion while tapping, will help it dissolve even faster and with farther reaching positive effects!

Michelle Leuschen, MS

FOR MORE EFT HELP ...

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