All Entries in the "Resistance" Category

You Should Be Done By Now

You should be done with that by now! Ever tell yourself that? Most of us do at one time or another. Sometimes it’s because we’ve been procrastinating. Or maybe we started something without the skills or information we really need to get it done.

How It Shows Up

I hear different versions of this from clients all the time. See if you recognize any of these real life scenarios as something you might do:

• a coach was mad at himself for missing a networking event for the third month in a row
• a consultant was annoyed because she hadn’t resolved details of her mother’s estate
• a healing practitioner scolded herself for stalling on creating a separate business phone line
• a teacher ridiculed himself for still being interested in his ex-wife’s dating activities

So here’s what happens when you have something like this going on. You can see a logical solution to the problem. Right? Something you can DO. And you keep trying to get yourself to do that thing. That’s what logic tells you is the answer.

Wrong! The root of the problem is an emotional one – not a logical one. So it needs to be addressed with an emotional tool. And EFT is perfect for that. Great! There’s hope for a solution.

Tapping Slow-Down

Once you’re tapping, this self-blame can slow you down. I know I’ve written about this anger at yourself before. But this “shouldn’t I be done” anger is in a special zone all its own. I see it again and again. It can create big resistance to releasing the core issue.

Sometimes the release is slow right from the beginning. But often, clients get off to a good start — their emotional intensity is dropping at a good rate. Then they stall out about halfway through the session. The culprit? This special flavor of self-blame.

Here are some subconscious forms it can take:

• If I could get over this, I would have by now. I obviously can’t get over it, so I’m not going to release it.
• I should be punished because this has gone on for so long, so hanging onto this issue is my punishment.
• I put off getting help for this when I knew I needed it, so this is the price I have to pay – holding onto my problem.
• I know logically what I should have done a long time ago. I didn’t do it, so I need to suffer.

What To Do

You can tap directly on the issue of blaming yourself for not being done yet. Or just work the phrasing into your setup statements. For example:

• Even though I’m reluctant to let go of this divorce grief because I should be over it by now, I want to love myself anyway.
• Even though I’m resistant to clearing any more of this networking fear because I should have taken care of it 3 months ago, I want to respect myself and accept my feelings.
• Even though it feels impossible to clear this issue, and maybe I’ve gone as far as I deserve to because I’m a procrastinator, I want to love all parts of me anyway.

Let us know how this works for you — leave a comment below.

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Keeping Your Edge While Keeping Calm

With EFT, it’s totally possible to stay sharp and stay cool simultaneously. Is this hard for you to believe? If so, you’re surely not alone. Many people are concerned that they’ll lose their edge if they tap away tension.

What’s Your Version?

This misconception shows up over and over again in several ways. Maybe one of these has a ring of familiarity:

• If I release this tension, I’ll lose my competitive drive.
• If I let go of this tension, my dancing/singing/acting performance will be flat.
• If I don’t have this tension, I’ll lose my motivation to work/sell/whatever.
• I need this tension to make my speaking presentation really lively.

The Real Truth

Tension is constrictive and driven by anxiety or fear at some level. It’s separate from performance energy. Many people believe that losing the tension means losing that good energy, so they hang onto both. This myth is reinforced by teachers in the performing arts, athletic coaches, speech coaches, sales trainers…the list goes on. They just have never experienced anything else.

If you’re in that group of believers, I hope you’ll consider another possibility. With tapping it’s completely possible to release the constricting impact of the fear while maintaining that energetic charge of positive performing or motivational energy.

How You Do It

You can easily split your tapping up into three parts:

1. Tap away your concern or limiting belief that you’ll lose your edge if you release your fears.
2. Tap away your fears regarding the performance or event or speech or sale.
3. Tap in affirmations to strengthen your positive energy – that performance electricity that other people connect with.

Powerful Combination

Calm + performance energy = powerful magnetism. Once you’ve tapped away tension resulting from fears and anxiety, you’re left with a foundational state of calm. There’s no energy drain for you from the adrenaline of fear charging around your body.

The excitement energy that propels you forward in any type of performance is pure and strong. People just gravitate towards it. And your energy is strengthened because it’s all coming from a positive center.

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What’s Love Got To Do With It?

Resentment and hurt and love are often tangled up together. So when you tap on an issue with these ingredients, you might struggle. Sometimes it’s a challenge to release old pain and anger. Examining the love connection can bring the solution.

The Irony Of It All

When you love someone, their actions and words have a bigger impact on you. So it’s easier to feel hurt or angry with a loved one than with someone you don’t care about. Right? It’s much simpler to just blow off a difficult interaction with a person who doesn’t mean much to you.

But when your heart is connected to someone, hurt and anger can result more often. And they can hang around longer, too. That’s why you’re tapping on them – because you’re still carrying them around. So it’s a little ironic that the people you care about the most can contribute heavily to your list of tapping issues.

Hard To Release

Over and over again, clients show resistance to letting go of old issues with loved ones. It can be a spouse, a kid, a parent, a sibling, a close friend – the kind of love doesn’t matter. Let me be clear – the resistance is not a conscious thing. You can be eager to let go of an old grudge. You can be excited at the prospect of healing some old wound. And STILL have a hard time releasing it.

It’s The Love

Love is the reason for the hidden resistance. A fear of losing that love, or losing your connection to someone can slow EFT down. Some part of you can be afraid that to let the problem go is to let your whole connection go. And you’re not about to do that!

Even if it’s always been a rocky relationship. Even if your brother was always mean to you. Even if a parent was abusive to you. Your heart doesn’t want to lose the core love you have for them, underneath all the negative junk. So your mind-body-energy system can say, “Forget about releasing anything. I don’t want to take a chance. I’m not gonna rock this boat.”

What To Do

It’s so easy to address this when you’re tapping. Just acknowledge it in your setup phrase. For example:

• Even though I’m afraid to let go of this anger because I don’t want to lose my love for Bob, I love and accept myself anyway.
• Even though I’m concerned that if I release this pain, I’ll lose my connection with my mom, and it’s a shaky connection to begin with…..
• Even though it feels risky to let go of this old grudge, I want to trust myself to hold onto the good parts of our relationship.

Secret Tapping Weapon

Just assume there’s some resistance like this lurking in any old issue with a loved one. Make it a habit. Build in a setup phrase like one of the above examples– right from the beginning of your session. It can save you a lot of tapping time and frustration.

Try this yourself and report back to us on how it goes. Just leave a comment below.

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Tapping On Treasures

A treasure hunt — that’s what I call time I spend talking before we begin tapping. A client looked at me like I was really nuts when I called it that. So I thought I’d share my explanation with you below.

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How do you approach your tapping sessions? You probably have some positive outlook to motivate you in the first place — some certainty (or at least hope) that life will improve from tapping. Great! Starting with optimistic expectation is a good place to begin.

How Do You Look At Your Issues?

OK – Your outlook on the issue itself can be a little trickier to keep in the positive realm. Viewpoints I hear from clients include:

• Oh, no — not another one. It’s ridiculous for that to bother me.
• I hate to even go there. I’m an idiot to still be affected by that.
• The details shouldn’t matter. Let’s just get this over with.

Respect Your “Problems”

The tapping concern you bring to your practitioner, or that you tap on yourself, has real value. Yes – really! At one time, it served you well. Recognizing that can actually speed up the tapping process. We’ll get to that in a minute.

But first, look at some examples:

• That fear you’ve brought forward from childhood made perfect sense when you were little. It served as a reminder to keep you safe from some undesired consequence.
• That old resentment protected your heart from feeling the pain of hurt. You didn’t want to feel that hurt, so the anger of the resentment was a good tool at the time.
• That unhelpful old belief was learned from people you loved and looked up to. Holding that belief was a part of belonging and sharing. It made sense to hold it.

Honor These Treasures

Recognizing the former value of feelings and beliefs you want to tap away is helpful for these reasons:

1. You now have one less reason to be critical of yourself. You didn’t just grab your issues for no good reason! They are all responses to something. Your wisest self came up with a good tool to help you best cope with your world.
2. Honoring the concerns as you get ready to tap on them can help you relax. This always decreases subconscious resistance to releasing what you’re tapping on.
3. This more positive perspective raises your energy level, your vibration, or however you want to think of it. And it can actually lower your emotional intensity level.

All of these things can reduce the amount of time it takes to clear your issue. So consider a different point of view when you think of your issues.

Real Gems

So you’ve seen that your issues had value in the past — that’s one way that they’re real gems. Another way is that each is a crystallized focus point for healing. If you know what the issue is, you know that releasing it will create good change. Now that’s a gem!

What do you think? Leave a comment below and let us all know.

Losing Your Witness – Why Trauma Tapping Can Be Slow

EFT can really work miracles in clearing the effects of traumatic events. But sometimes you can run into a snag in the process, often when your intensity level gets low — after you’ve been tapping for awhile. I call it “losing the witness” resistance. It can be hard to recognize, but is easy to clear once you see it.

What Exactly Is Trauma

What we’re talking about here is anything perceived by you to be a trauma. One person’s trauma can be another person’s no-big-deal event.

For instance, one child could get separated from his mom in a store for a half hour and not even notice. He’s happily entertaining himself in a corner with something. His friend, however, might react by being really upset – crying and frantic. Clearly, the first boy wasn’t traumatized. But the second boy experienced his separation as trauma.

So it’s your reaction to something that determines whether it’s traumatic or not. Somebody else’s assessment of it doesn’t really matter here. It’s you who experienced it as really upsetting in the first place, and you who has crummy after-effects from it today.

Your Unique Witness

The response to the event you’re tapping on was uniquely yours. Even if others were present, nobody experienced it exactly the way you did. Your viewpoint and your feelings and your prior experiences add up to a one-of-a-kind reaction to the event. That’s just a fact.

So you experienced the event in a way that only you could. You also witnessed that event — and the feelings it triggered — from your unique position. Think about it:

• Nobody else knows exactly how it felt to see that other car coming.
• Nobody else felt that awful feeling of losing her forever.
• Nobody else knows what it took to hide your feelings and buck up.
• Nobody else knows how hard it was to talk about what happened.

Losing The Witness

It’s this “nobody else knows” element that can really slow down the EFT release process. I’ve seen it over and over again with clients and experienced it myself.

Some subconscious part of you feels like you’re abandoning yourself and losing the only true witness by completely letting go of the trauma. You feel like you’re dishonoring your experience of suffering, struggle, recovery, expense of whatever kind, etc. So you resist releasing all of it — just want to hang onto a little part of it. This often shows up when the intensity level is down to a 1 or 2. You just can’t get that last little bit to budge.

Now What?

Simply tap a few rounds on this very subject. Here’s an example of how it might go. Start with your setup:

• Even though I don’t want to let go of this last little bit because I feel like I’m dishonoring myself, I still want to love and accept myself.
• Even though I don’t want to release the rest of this because I don’t want to abandon my child self who suffered through that, I love myself anyway and respect my feelings.
• Even though I’m afraid to let go of all of this trauma because it was a big deal and I can’t acknowledge that AND let go of it, I deeply and completely love and accept myself anyway.

And now move on to some tapping rounds:

• I’m afraid to let go.
• It was a huge deal.
• I had to go through so much.
• Nobody will ever know how hard it was.
• I refuse to abandon myself.
• I don’t want to let go.
• I won’t dishonor myself that way.

Then shift to the positive:

• I would never abandon myself.
• I know that I’m here for myself.
• I respect all that I went through.
• That will never change.
• Tapping can’t touch that.
• So I choose to let go of this fear.
• I choose to honor my experience and allow myself to heal now.
• I give myself permission to release the rest of this trauma so that I CAN heal.
• I’m amazing and resilient.
• I’m so thankful for this opportunity to heal now.
• So I’m relaxing and releasing the last remeains of this trauma now.

Then check back in with your intensity level on the trauma issue itself. Chances are good that it has gone down. If there’s still a little bit left, continue tapping until it’s down to a zero.

Keep tapping and let us know how this works for you.