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Other Ways to Use EFT
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► How to Use Role Playing in EFT
How to Use Role Playing in EFT
By Dr. Patricia Carrington
Gary Craig's Introduction:
One of the flexibilities of EFT is the ability to blend it with
other useful techniques. This EFT feature has been put to good use with
hypnotherapy, Reiki, massage, EMDR, NLP, talk therapy and a long list of
other procedures. In each case, the previous success ratios have improved
substantially.
Patricia Carrington, PhD gives us yet another example of this
blending concept by using EFT to give added life to Role Playing--a standard
therapeutic technique that has proven helpful in creating insights and
perspective.
In this case, Pat's client has a difficult time saying
"no" to her boss (a common problem). Please note the skill with
which Pat administers this blend to create poise for her client in a very
short period of time. We can all take a lesson here as this Role Playing
blend can be adapted to many forms of "confrontation fear" as well
as other issues.
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Role
playing is an accepted strategy that can be used in therapy sessions to help
clients learn how to handle a feared situation in a more constructive way.
The therapist will ad lib the role of the antagonist (although later he/she
sometimes reverses roles and enacts the role of the client), and the client
usually plays their own selves. Traditionally, it’s a form of emotional
re-education, but when used along with EFT (I’ve been using it this way),
it can often change actual behavior in a dramatic manner and affords the
therapist a superb opportunity to assess the effectiveness of the tapping
right there and then. Here’s an example of how this works:
“Janet”
who works as an executive secretary, came into a recent therapy session
extremely agitated because her boss was demanding that she spend a good deal
of overtime preparing a presentation for him to use at a national conference.
She was capable of doing this job extremely well, but he had also just
assigned to her another important project which was already taking more than
her full time. It was quite clear that she couldn’t do both and that
she was going to have to refuse the new assignment. But she dreaded doing
this because saying “no”, even to unreasonable requests, had
always been painful for her. She did not know how to present dissent in an
acceptable and gracious manner.
There were
many historical incidents in Janet’s background which had set the stage
for her fear of speaking up for her own rights, including sexual abuse in
childhood and a prolonged childhood illness. Further, she had repeatedly been
forced to defer silently to alarming demands when growing up. However, there
was now an immediate need to clarify the issue with her boss, and therefore
we turned to the situation itself rather than its historical antecedents in
this case.
Janet
would have to tell him this coming week that she was unable to do the new
assignment, so I asked her to role play the scene, with me enacting the role
of her boss. She agreed and I assumed the role of her boss who was busy
looking over his papers when she entered his office. “What is it,
Janet,” I asked abruptly (as boss). She said, “I want to tell you
something. I’m awfully sorry but I just don’t see any way I can
do that new assignment. I’m going to have to tell you that I
can’t do it.” As she said this she had an absolutely crushed look
on her face and her voice dropped nearly to a whisper as she ended her
declaration. There was an unreal rehearsed quality to her words which told me
(as boss) that she had no conviction in back of her statement.
I used the
role playing to experience how the boss would react to her words. I
immediately knew he would be thinking to himself something like,
“She’ll do it because she’s scared. She doesn’t mean
a word that she’s saying.”
I shared
this reaction with Janet, and she sheepishly nodded and said my appraisal was
correct.. Rather than let her talk about it further, I suggested that we do
EFT right away and she came up with the following setup phrase, “Even
though I’m afraid to say no to my boss, I choose to feel OK about
it.” The first part of her setup phrase (statement of her fear) was
appropriate; but the last part seemed weak and wishy-washy to me. I just
didn’t think it could do the job. Just feeling “ok”?
That’s not a very upbeat emotion. I felt she needed something stronger
than that to counteract her fear.
On
questioning, she was able to tell me that she was afraid of being rude,
ungracious, and too aggressive if she refused the boss’s request. This
was clearly a “tail-ender” (see Gary Craig’s description of
“tail-enders” — unexpressed conflicts and reservations that
can undermine an affirmation). The tail-ender prevented her from
wholeheartedly choosing to confront her boss effectively. We therefore
quickly built this tail-ender into a Choice Set-Up phrase (see Choices for a
description of the use of Choices in the Set-Up phrase).
I asked
her how she would really LIKE to act in this situation, and she said she
would like to be “firm” — the concept of being
“firm” seemed very desirable to her. I suggested she also add the
word “gracious” to the set-up phrase to take care of her fear of
being over-aggressive, unpleasant and unacceptable in the way she would confront
him (her tail-ender). The wording we settled on went, “I choose to be
gracious but firm with him.”
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