By JoAnn SkyWatcher

JoAnn,

Recently I participated in a 3-day workshop and really got to know the participants.  It was truly an amazing weekend, and one of the highlights is that we would quickly come to miss the presence of someone if they weren't there.

One day we were startled to hear that “Sarah,” one of the participants, had been in a car accident on her way home from the workshop the day before.  Her car had been hit by a drunk driver, and she was in the hospital.  Fortunately she had not been seriously injured, and was able to make it to the end of the workshop that afternoon.  I decided to volunteer my EFT services and we worked by telephone the next day.

Before the call I went to the archives of the EFT website and searched for "car accident" in order to get a sense of what other practitioners had done (because I hadn't dealt with the particular trauma of a recent car accident).

I asked Sarah to describe what she saw, heard and felt during the accident.  I also asked her about her fears and other feelings.  I also asked her to give the accident a name - like the name of a movie.  I then asked her about the pain she was having in her neck: the color (red); shape (triangular); texture (striated muscle); sound (Ahhh!!!-screaming); temperature (hot) … and a rating of the level of intensity of the pain which was 7 on a scale of 0 to 10.

I bundled together all of the aspects of the car accident and Sarah titled it “sucks”.  So, I asked her to tap on her karate chop point while she said her set-up phrase.

Even though I was in a sucky car accident…

Even though I was really scared by being in this sucky car accident…

Even though it was really scary being in this sucky car accident…

Then we did one round of tapping through the different points, saying, Sucky car accident!  The next couple of rounds she repeated the following phrases that described what she had sensed while tapping on each point:

I was driving through the intersection
I heard tires squealing
And thought that was not a good noise
I saw the teal blur coming at me
I first thought nothing would happen
I felt the impact of the car hitting the back left wheel
I'm getting hit and the car is spinning
I smell the airbag going off
It smells like gunpowder
I hear the sound of braking glass
I hear the sound of the impact
The squealing tires and the smack
Like a smack across the face
The car is spinning around 180 degrees
My glasses get knocked off
My vision is blurry
I see him drive off
I heard my neighbors talking
I am pissed that he drove off.

The tapping brought her level of intensity down from 7 out of 10 to 3 for the trauma of the car accident.  I then asked her about the pain in her neck, which dropped from 7 to 5 out of 10 (without directly working on the pain in her neck).  We tapped on he trauma of the accident, and when the level of intensity dropped for that, I checked to see how the pain in the neck was doing.The pain dropped right along with the level of intensity of the trauma.

We continued tapping for the trauma of the sucky car accident.  Her level of intensity went to 2 out of 10 and then almost to zero.  However, the pain in her neck only dropped to 4 out of 10.  I asked Sarah to look inside and see if there was something that she had overlooked.  She realized that she was feeling angry and embarrassed.

So, we tapped on her anger and embarrassment for a couple of rounds, and her level of intensity remained the same.  I asked if there was anything else that she was feeling.  She reported feeling some guilt about the accident, even though it wasn't her fault.  So, I tried using humor, and had her yell loudly about how guilty she was for driving the car.  At each point, I asked her to yell louder.  

I think the yelling helped because her level of intensity dropped to 1 out of 10 for the trauma of the sucky accident, and the pain in her neck dropped to 2 out of 10.  Next, I asked her to do the 9-gamut and it brought her level of intensity to 0 out of 10 for the trauma, though the pain in her neck remained at 2 out of 10.  It only took two more rounds of tapping directly for the pain in her neck bring it to zero.

The first twenty minutes of the session I used to learn about all aspects of the accident, and how she felt about it, and to describe the pain in her neck.  Then we tapped for about thirty minutes to dissolve the trauma of the accident itself.  We only spent five minutes directly tapping for the pain in her neck, and in less than one hour, both the trauma of the accident and the pain in her neck were completely gone.

It has been a month since Sarah was in the accident.  We communicated by email today.  I asked how she is doing, and she responded, "I'm feeling pretty good.  My body still gets tired very easily but better each week.  I'm having pain now (when I do have it) right behind my heart, at my sacrum and sometimes also in my neck.  One good thing is that in my last visit to my chiropractor I had no upper cervical stuff to be worked on, which was the first time probably ever!"

JoAnn SkyWatcher