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Applying EFT in Clinical
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EFT in Clinical
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Alcoholic
EFT with an
Adult Child of an Alcoholic
By
Dr. Patricia Carrington
Gary Craig's
Introduction:
EFT
Master Dr. Patricia Carrington unravels a complicated case using
both The Tearless Trauma Technique and her own Choices
phrase.
__________________________________________
Sometimes intense
emotion can block progress to therapy and can make EFT almost
impossible to conduct with its usual effectiveness. This is
where special strategies can be used to lessen the emotional pain
and facilitate the therapy. Gary has given us an excellent
strategy to use in such instances (one I often use with great
effect) the
Tearless Trauma Technique, and the Choices Method, which I
call upon in these kinds of situations. I’d like to
describe now how I recently used both of these techniques within
the same session with a client, “Doris,” who had been
in therapy with me for close to two years.
A
large portion of Doris’s therapy has involved using EFT to
deal with multiple personality problems ranging from phobias of
being far from home to deep seated self-worth issues. These have
stemmed in large part from her sense of over-responsibility for
her alcoholic father whom she cared for after her mother died,
until his own death from alcoholism some years later. One by one
we have cut down multitudes of trees in her “forest”
(to use Gary’s “forest-trees” metaphor) and she
had been doing so well in her marriage and at work and with her
social life that we reduced her therapy sessions to once every
other week.
It
seemed as though we were just tying up some final loose ends in
preparation for ending her therapy when along came one of those
“last minute wonders” that sometimes occur just when
a client is ready to leave for good. It’s as though the
person has held back from facing a certain problem all along but
when they know they are about to leave they finally decide to
face the issue before it’s too late. The information that
a client can come up as they approach this transition is often a
surprise, as it was with Doris.
After several
triumphant and constructive sessions, she arrived at my office
that day quite upset. She had been dealing with a friend of hers
when she had found herself feeling painfully over-responsible for
her friend’s problem behavior. She was furious at herself
for still being caught in what she called “wimpy”
behavior toward others “where I’m not really being
myself”.
She quickly came
to the conclusion that this stemmed from her feelings of being
responsible for her father’s death from alcoholism, and
began to tell me details about his addiction and death that she
had never told me before — it was as if she just had to get
them out before it was too late.
As
she was relating these facts she stopped in mid-sentence, her
face flushed and her eyes fearful. “Tell me!” she
cried, “Do I drink too much? Do I?” Since this was
the first time Doris had ever mentioned anything about herself
drinking I could only ask her to tell me about it.
She
couldn’t answer my question however without feeling that
she was choking, and her breathing became labored (Doris
doesn’t have asthma but on several occasions has had to go
to the emergency room with breathing problems induced by severe
anxiety attacks). When this happened I immediately “backed
up” as I tend to do when a client runs into trouble, and
asked her to tap on:
“Even
though I can’t say that without
choking…”
After one round
of this she could breathe normally again, although she was still
agitated. She wanted to tell me more details of her
father’s alcoholism and death. She was breathless as she
described the fact that his alcoholism was the “worst
I’ve ever seen”. She remembers that he would drink
so many bottles of straight Vodka a day that he didn’t even
have time to wash the glass between drinks and for days that
glass would remain smelling of stale liquor as he kept pouring
bottle after bottle into it. He would alternate the Vodka with
Seagram’s whiskey and would, she says, keep drinking for 24
hours, never sleeping, until he finally fell into a dead
stupor.
Toward the end of
his life, as his liver began failing, he was rarely lucent. This
man, who was so brilliant when sober, could only slur his words
and look at the world blurrily. She described all of this as a
scene of horror that had made her wish he would die to get it
over with.
As
she talked about this, Doris became extremely upset and actually
began to re-live the trauma. She was trembling and became almost
incoherent as the tears streamed down her face. Because she was
obviously in so much pain I stepped in to help her. Instead of
marshaling positive forces or “getting things out of her
system” she was actually re-traumatizing herself right
before my eyes.
I
decided to use the Tearless Trauma technique to lessen the pain
so she could work productively on the issue. To do this, I
instructed her to tap on the issue without deliberately thinking
of the original situation (the scenes about her father), but to
merely ESTIMATE how she would feel if she DID think about
them.
She estimated her
distress level as being a “10++” on the SUDS (1 to
10) intensity scale for this issue, and the EFT reminder phrase
she used was from her own words “When I think about it
it’s horrifying”. She tapped on “Even
though it’s horrifying” and was able to get
through one round.
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