One of the biggest reasons EFT doesn't work

You need to be tuned in for EFT to work well. What that means is feeling the energetic charge on something (a memory, person, anything at all), and that can be painful. Because pain feels painful, we often avoid it.

So for EFT to work as well as it can, you need to be tuned in, to be feeling whatever it is as best as you can. This is why working with others can provide the safety and container that we need in order to be able to connect with our hurt. We often "won't go there" on our own.

We need others. We need others to love and we need to be loved by them. There is no doubt that without it, we too, like the infant left alone, would cease to grow, cease to develop, choose madness and even death ~ Leo Buscaglia

You can start anywhere with EFT

The beauty of EFT is you can start tapping anywhere. If you feel for example that,

1. EFT is not working for you

2. You don’t know what to say while tapping

3. Things aren’t happening fast enough

4. You can’t tune in to what you’re feeling

5. You get overwhelmed by what you’re feeling

6. You hold beliefs such as “I’m unhelpable” or “I’m difficult or a special case”

You can start by tapping on all the points with (You can include the set up or not, try it without and see does the issue shift, if it doesn’t, try it with the set up. Not making any shifts can mean you have unconscious blocks to getting better, for the moment you don’t have to figure out why, or you can always decide to work with a practitioner who can help you tease them out):

I don’t feel EFT is working for me 

I don’t know what to say (try tapping on how you feel, or how you know you have an issue, if you find it too difficult to say something)

I don’t feel things are happening fast enough and that makes feel … and that makes me feel about myself ….

I can’t tune in to what I’m feeling

I’m overwhelmed by all this

I am/feel unhelpable

I am/feel difficult

I don't know where to start

Another great advantage to working with EFT is that it nearly always leads you to where you want/need to go, just by beginning to tap. There’s a stream of consciousness that follows tapping and issues will daisy chain together with all the seemingly different associations and connections so we can make sense of it all. Again, if aspects feel overwhelming, we can seek the help of a practitioner or a tapping buddy.

In that respect, EFT is very similar in process to EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing). In her book, Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing (EMDR): Basic Principles, Protocols, and Procedures, Francine Shapiro talks of a client who did EMDR for freezing on stage. Throughout the session she was asked what body sensations she felt. At one stage, she felt a strange sensation in her back, and it unfolded that she had been molested by her uncle. He had held her down on that spot. The association between the two incidents was her ‘performing’, even though on the surface, the issues did not seem related at all and she had completely forgotten about the abuse.

A journey of a thousand miles, begins with a single step ~ Lao-tzu

Why you can't just bypass your feelings

Well, you can, but you pay the price. What you don't (or can't because you're too young or don't have the resources) feel catches up with you eventually.

This is actually a good thing, because it makes you take whatever it is that is hurting you, seriously. It makes you take your feelings seriously and what happened to you seriously, no matter what anyone else says. It usually catches up with us in the form of symptoms, whether they be physical, mental or otherwise. These symptoms, frustrating and excruciating as they may be, are the witnesses and testimonies to our hurts.

If you take a look at the majority of theories and treatments for trauma, they have one common theme: and that is to feel, metabolise, digest or experience what has been, or still is, unbearable. It really is quite simple. But not so simple to do. Because one of the things that we are most afraid of is our feelings. And our emotions/feelings are the only way we can digest the unbearable, whatever technique or tool we use. That is how important they are.

When it comes to being specific, there is no greater gift to give ourselves than to be specific about what we feel, and then to feel those emotions. That is how trauma gets digested and becomes experienced instead of remaining unexperienced or frozen. EFT only works when we tune in to how we feel. We can get lost in our stories and beliefs, and while they are important, we can sometimes bypass how we feel in the telling. Nothing has the power to hurt us, unless we feel it is true. And why do we think it is true, because we feel it, inside. That is what we need to connect with and be specific about. Feelings, or more specifically, feeling our feelings is our pathway towards resolving trauma and healing.