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EFT for Crises

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Enduring Effects of EFT Page 2

I did this realizing that there was no way it can be outwardly acceptable for anyone to be trapped in a disaster with no escape possible.  To be sure, we were seeing her old fears of entrapment reactivated, but there were also fears of a realistic danger that could conceivably face us all in the future.  These are point-of-no-escape situations, and while for some people in some circumstances the knowledge that “I am safe NOW” may suffice (as it often does for a childhood traumatic memory that no longer applies, or may for a child who feels safety no matter what as long as its parent is present) it is not certain that any of us are really THAT safe now.  There are no guarantees that we can offer to our clients (or ourselves) that this kind of terrible thing will not happen again.

So I shared with her my point of view — that life being what it is, we are never really as safe as we like to think we are at any time.  Life is a fragile balance at best (although we don’t think about this much) and just a few degrees of internal heating-up can destroy us — and a meteor hurtling through our atmosphere (and this too could happen) would blot us out in an instant. In a sense, we keep living from moment to moment only by the grace of God.

Since there are no guarantees of safety that we can honestly give to intelligent adults in this present situation, no magic that can make it go away and never come back, we can only point out relative degrees of safety.  I think this is one of the reasons that this incident causes such deep confusion.  It makes us painfully aware of our vulnerability and a danger that is in fact on our doorstep.  To pretend otherwise is to avoid the issue and can actually make us be less effective in our efforts to help.  Those who are ready to and actually need to confront this truth and go beyond it will need to be helped to do so using EFT.

I chose to help Lorraine confront the absolute worst and accept it fully and with peace in her heart.  From this lowest possible point I felt we might be able to build.  I did this to address her present exaggeration of symptoms, but I didn’t expect the result which was a breakthrough for her lifelong fear of entrapment.

Lorraine accepted the word “annihilation” with relief, it clearly expressed what she was feeling,  however she was very familiar with EFT and received great benefit from it over a long period of time — I would not ordinarily suggest such a direct approach for people who have never worked with the method or whom we do not know — although sometimes it might be the best thing for them too, this would be a matter for careful clinical assessment.

I reframed Lorraine’s feared situation by telling her about Etty Hillesum, a young Jewish woman who had lived in Holland at the time of the holocaust.  Etty left behind her (she eventually died in Auschwitz) one of the most extraordinary accounts of the triumph of the human spirit under unspeakable circumstances ever told.  I described Etty, initially a talented young woman with no spiritual or religious background at all who in the beginning of her diaries was living a rather self-absorbed life style, but who during the days of increasing Nazi terror gradually began to sense an extraordinary Presence within her which allowed her often to feel “cradled in the arms of God.” 

As the darkness descended over the world, by contrast she found herself experiencing an increasing sense of beauty in life, in people, and in helping others.  The growth of an inner sense of protection, and the flowering of love within her in direct proportion to the encroaching horror of outside events, is in many ways the ultimate example of our ability to choose the manner in which we will experience ANYTHING.  (Note” The book containing Etty’s moving diaries is entitled “An Interrupted Life”).

Lorraine is not religious but is open to spiritual values, and she visibly changed when I described Etty.  When I asked, “Is there a Choice you can think of that would allow you to have this sense of protection in the face of a disaster?” she was now able to think of one.  It was, “I choose inner freedom and peace.”  To her this simple phrase represented perfectly the inner light we had been talking about.

So, Lorraine did a round of EFT using the Choices Trio — a method I describe elsewhere and her set-up statement was, “Even though I feel terrified and overwhelmed by that scene, I choose inner freedom and peace.”  She ended the complete round of EFT with incredible relief and said excitedly, “I can almost picture myself trapped and feeling that – that “Thing” around me, all around me and it makes all the difference!”  Lorraine, an ordinarily articulate person, could only wave her hands and call the quiet protection she sensed “that Thing,” but we both knew what she meant.

She still needed to do one more round because she was not yet down to a 0 in her distress rating, and since the phrase “terrified and overwhelmed” was no longer appropriate because she was no longer feeling that way, she now used the words, “Even though I don’t want to feel trapped, I choose to feel inner freedom and peace.”

This completed the work.  She left at the end of the hour with a look of amazement on her face.  “This is a sudden major breakthrough for my claustrophobia,” she said “ it’s the breakthrough we could never get.”  And she added; “Now I see that, in any and every situation possible — NONE of that matters.”  She was referring, of course, to outer circumstances.

Since that session her claustrophobia has been strikingly less.  While it is not totally gone she tells me that her symptoms are better now than they have ever been in the entire time we’ve worked together. 

This can be a time of transformation for those who can take advantage of the growth inherent in suffering — and EFT can be a superb help in effecting that change.

EFT Master, Dr. Patricia Carrington

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