Let go of stuck stories with Emotional Freedom Technique

This week I want to speak about Emotional Freedom Technique or Tapping, one of my favourite techniques for bringing balance to mind, body & soul. This technique involves tapping on the meridian points of our body to create energetic shifts that allow us to let go of held discomfort & distress. It can offer meaningful support to those suffering psychological, emotional & physical pain & distress.

I first became interested in EFT in 2013 when I found a book called Tapping the Amazing Self-Help Technique by Sue Beer & Emma Roberts. I had always been interested in alternative therapies & I got the book during a period when I’d been facing a period of toxic bullying at work. My self-esteem was destroyed; my mind was overrun with overthinking about all that was happening & what I could do next & I was off sick from work & struggling to manage a range of physical & psychological symptoms that ranged from anxiety & panic attacks to irritable bowel syndrome, pervasive & toxic insomnia & persistent skin rashes.

Although I was so overwhelmed by circumstances that I found it hard to fully grasp the theory behind the technique (even though the book is so easy to read) I found that following the tapping technique did help me to come back into the moment & somehow it filled me with feelings of hope that eased my overwhelming sense of despair. To be honest I didn’t really need to know how it worked, I was just grateful that in the moment tapping gave me some moments of respite from how bad I was feeling.

In the end I went back to work & I stored Tapping into my toolbox for coping with overwhelm. In my role overwork was an occupational hazard & so I would pull out my Tapping tool in those moments when overwhelm was triggering my anxiety, insomnia & IBS.

But when I faced redundancy in the midst of Covid my mind turned to Tapping & in the context of this sudden & unexpected freedom I found I had time & space to really explore what lies behind the technique, & so I chose to train in Emotional Freedom Technique.

Like acupuncture, EFT Tapping follows the Meridian Points in our body to support the freeing of our body's natural energy flow. Points are tapped in a certain order can enable the release of issues or emotions.

Our Meridian Points are a complex system of energy pathways in our bodies that deliver essential energy or ‘chi’ to our organs & our body systems including our circulatory & respiratory systems, our digestive, nervous & immune systems & our skeletal & muscular systems.

Because they help support the flow of chi or energy through our body our Meridian Pathways help to stabilise energy within each of our body systems, regulating our metabolism & helping remove blockages allowing our body to function smoothly & efficiently. If we develop blockages or imbalances of energy at any of these systemic levels, we can develop an array of unpleasant physical & emotional symptoms.

I have always been interested & the relationship between mind, body & soul & for years I’d had the feeling that my body aches & back issues seemed to have a strong emotional feature because flares would come whenever I was beginning to get pressured at work or at home. Emotional Freedom Technique offered me a framework to understand why what I felt psychologically might corelate to what I experienced physically, helping me understand the ways that trapped energies from my emotions might be sitting in my muscular & skeletal systems.

Along with EFT my redundancy allowed me to delve deeper into my interest in somatic therapies & a form of mindset work that is based in narrative therapy & I found that these two seemed just seemed to sit very well together with EFT.

Somatic therapy explores the ways our feelings are expressed & held within our bodies. Every time we experience an emotion our body is flooded with a surge of chemicals & we describe the sensations we feel – the butterflies in our stomach when we are excited or anxious; the sinking feeling in our bellies when we are scared – & give meaning to these sensations not just according to what is happening in the moment but according to our memories of when we've experienced these emotions previously.

I felt drawn to Narrative Therapy when I learned it in my old role because I loved the way that it speaks of our stories told & our stories lived. We develop our sense of ourselves we unconsciously draw in information on who we are & how we should respond from our parents, school, society etc. These unconsciously absorbed ideas then begin to create a story of who we are & how we react to life’s unfolding events. As children we might be told we are for example the loud one or the quiet one or that we are a natural coper or a drama queen & this story of who we are begins to define us, interacting with our actual lived experience & influencing the ways we view ourselves & our capacity to respond to our lived experience. This will bias us towards prioritising particular events & stories of ourselves that seem to fit our narrative & downplaying other events that just don’t fit our dominant story of who we tell ourselves we are.

·       If we have absorbed a story of ourselves as a survivor, we will notice all the moments & experiences where we faced a challenge & managed to thrive & these will add detail to our story of ourselves as a survivor.

·       If we have absorbed a story of ourselves as a victim, we will notice all the times & all the ways that people have let us down & this will build on our story of ourselves as being at the mercy of others.

Drawing these two together – understanding that we feel our emotions in our body & we absorb & learn to live a story of ourselves – helped me to reflect on the ways that our lived experiences can get lodged in our emotional responses & begin to influence & bias our emotional range.

If our stories of lived experiences cause our body to be repeatedly activated by particular emotions, it makes sense that we will become sensitised & begin to become very aware of this emotion & even blur the sensation of other emotions to the point that it will be hard for us to distinguish the rising sensation of butterfly excitement from the sinking feeling of fear & both these experiences of activation in our digestive system may alert us to our more familiar emotional pattern & if we are living in a climate of challenging circumstances & relationships & fear is our dominant emotion, it’s easy to understand why even a moment of excitement may lead to sensations that we associate with feelings of dread.

Somatically we can say that our story of ourselves is not one that is only being told in our mind, expressed in our words; it is also a story being told in our bodies because the words we use to describe our emotions as we experience our lives & live our stories are actually operating on an emotional level through the chemical & hormonal surges we experience within our bodies.

So if both our mind & our body can become accustomed to our familiar story loop & if we have a story of ourselves as a person who faces adversity we will become accustomed to feeling & reacting to negative experiences. Over time the powerful rush of flight or flight stress hormones will have activated heart rate, blood pressure & all the body systems  to such an extent that these emotional surges will have left imprints on a cellular level within all the systems of our body - a well-trod pathway that leaves our body systems increasingly impacted by overuse, Our emotions then affect us on at a cellular level, sitting deep in our bodily system.

This just made sense to me & the ways my body expressed pain physically.

I loved the ways that somatic work focuses on the idea that emotion is energy in motion & we can shift each emotions through somatic practice making sure that they don't pool & stagnate within us.

I loved the ways that EFT utilises an ordered tapping of Meridian Points in our body to release blockages that may have emerged in the context of stuck emotions so we can free our body's natural energy flow.

I loved the way that Narrative therapy helps us to become aware of the stories we may be holding about ourselves & the ways we that we bias our understanding or our lived experience to fit these stories & this very awareness creates space so we can explore other less dominant stories that help us to challenge this story & create a new story of ourselves & our potential.

With this passion for somatic work, narrative therapy & Emotional Freedom Technique & my personal love for blending ideas I began to experiment with ways that I could combine the three to bring depth to my mindset work.  

When I began to train in holistic therapies I was really frustrated by a lot of toxic positivity that’s all too prevalent in lot’s mindset work, All that rather superficial ‘seek the positives, you can choose to reject the negatives & manifest from your highest vibration’ mindset stuff that's fine if you're bounding with confidence & just need a little tweaks to get you back on track but is really undermining to those who struggle to ‘find the positives’.

Low self-esteem can so often be the reason people are seeking mindset support so feeling like you just can't just choose to change your mood & reach your highest vibration really begins to erode at already fragile confidence & so being told ‘well maybe you’re just vibrating at a lower level so that’s why you are attracting all of this to you’ can leave us feeling absolutely rubbish.

Most of us would be bright & peppy & choose joy if we could & the feeling of being ensnared in low mood - that low vibration stuff - is so draining & so often it has deep roots. Its grounded not just in what's happening in the here & now but in the ways that we have learned to process challenges & understand our emotions. This so-called 'low vibration' isn't just in our mindset, its sitting in our mind, body & soul so letting it go needed support that worked on each of these, separately & together.

I felt that working in a blend of EFT & somatic & narrative work could help with exploring & letting go of the trapped emotion around stuck stories. Somatic & narrative therapies is  grounded in our energetic & psychological experience of our emotions & EFT with its focus on the energetic highroad of our Meridian system offered a way to understand the ways that stuck energies - the physical & emotional traces of the toxic stories we might be holding about ourselves  – could become lodged, creating blockages within our energies leading to the range of emotional & physical symptoms we might be experiencing.

I loved the ways that EFT supports the clearing of these blockages, allowing energies to flow freely. I felt that the very order & repetition of the tapping sequences & the ways that this encourages the opening up of our mind & body to receive new emotional & energetic information could really be a really powerful tool that could help to release old patterns & stifling stories that we tell ourselves about who we are & what we can achieve.

As EFT allows the body to shift & release old toxic energies, it can create space to feel new sensations & absorb different messages regarding these sensations. Each repetition allows a powerful message repeated & tapped through the body & I felt that this opening up of energetic pathways could create space to embed new messages & pathways - each repetition could become a way of embedding new neural & energetic pathways within our meridian system allowing us to also embed new stories of ourselves that could bring healing on a physical emotional & spiritual level.

With all of this in mind I began to develop & practice version of EFT that takes a long-held story that we may hold about ourselves & looks at the times & spaces that this story may have become embedded  - through relationships & experiences - into our very sense of self & then looks at all the emotions that we may have developed around this story before opening up a new story of ourselves that can challenge our stifling version of ourselves

For example if we have a story of ourselves as disempowered I would with a client how they were feeling in the moment towards this story of feeling disempowered & rate this on a scale of 1- 10.

We would then explore when this feeling of disempowerment first emerged – their first memory of feeling powerless & then build a timeline of significant moments & significant relationships where this feeling of disempowerment showed itself. I would bring specific focus to the ways that feeling disempowered shows up in the words we use both internally & externally & the ways that this sits within our very sense of self so we could create a narrative history around this this story of disempowerment.

We would then look at the emotions that are aroused because of this feeling of disempowerment – perhaps anger or frustration; humiliation or fear, hopelessness, shame or fear & notice the way specific emotions may have become attached to specific moments where we may have felt disempowered, or a cacophony of emotions is attached to every moment of the story of disempowerment.

We would then explore a different story around feeling empowered & begin to build a different story that integrated a history all the moments & experiences – however fleeting- where we have felt empowered & exploring all of the ways that his made us feel – perhaps joy, pride, hope, elation or optimism - creating a new story of ourselves holding our ground as an empowered woman. This might be based on moments in our history, moments in our present or moments when we aspire & set the intention to behave in an empowered way in the future. The key is to create an alternative narrative that opens space & challenges our dominant story of ourselves.

With a story & counternarrative fully fleshed out in rich emotional detail we would work together to tap through the EFT points as we narrated this story of disempowerment.

We would then tap through the EFT points as we narrated this story of all the emotional wounds around disempowerment, allowing ourselves to grieve for all the ways that this story has hurt us – physically, emotionally & spiritually.

We would then we would tap through the EFT points as we narrated this story new of empowerment & with a rich tapestry of powerful & joyful emotions – allowing these to rest within us physically emotionally & spiritually.

It can feel a little daunting to try to remember the narratives & the steps of the Tapping routine & so I create an ebook of the tapping sequence, personalising each one with the story that the client is working through. I generally I find that as with advocacy work  - when it is our own story we are telling, the more we practice the more we become very fluent & fluid in our ability to tell our story & as we tell our story to ourselves the more we narrate the more we open up new avenues & details, becoming ever more attuned to the depth & array of emotions we have felt & still feel.

I have found that consistent work using this EFT Narrative technique can support our processing of the impact of old stories that we may hold about ourselves that are affecting us in  ways that are detrimental to our very wellbeing, allowing us to release these on a physical emotional & energetic level so we can embrace & embed a newer story of ourselves & prime ourselves seek out new evidence  to back up our new story strengthening a deeper sense of wellbeing within.

When it comes to my EFT support, I offer various sessions including blocks of support where we explore a story & design a bespoke EFT sequence to explore & release personal stories that may be affecting physical emotional & psychological health & EFT forms an integral part of the coaching packages I offer through lbrucetherapies.

Warm wordy hugs

Laura xx