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Increasing Self-Acceptance through EFT Page 2

“Dena,” a former client of mine, recently made an appointment reporting considerable distress. She is an excellent grade school teacher, creative, compassionate, and innovative, but has always dreaded evaluations where the school authorities observe her behavior in the classroom. After much EFT work on this issue she now does well when she knows that a supervisor is coming to evaluate on a certain date, but if it is a surprise visit it can still throw her. Recently she received some criticism from the principal of her school in response to a surprise visit and was emotionally crushed by it. It triggered off a self-recriminatory response in her which was an all too familiar pattern.

Dena is a highly experienced EFTer who works with the technique frequently at home, but this time she was so down on herself and discouraged that she had to come in for an urgently needed session. Here is how we handled this problem using the two new strategies for the self acceptance phrase which I have outlined above.

It was easy to formulate the negative portion of her setup phrase — “Even though I am run down and goofed up” is a phrase she really liked because it described her confusion and feeling of ineptness at the moment. When we began formulating the positive part of her set-up phrase it seemed obvious to both of us that what was needed here was not a Choice, which she often uses, but the default self acceptance phrase, because she was blaming herself profoundly and ruthlessly for what was actually a mild transgression (which I was certain the school would overlook in the light of her excellent teaching record). We decided to use, “I deeply and completely accept myself” with the addition of the words “without judgment” at the end. She immediately liked this sentence, and we proceeded.

Dena did two rounds using the Reminder Phrase, “I’m run down and goofed up” at each acupoint —the typical EFT protocol. Then she did one complete round using JUST the phrase, “I deeply and completely accept myself without judgment” at each acupoint. She then followed this by a third round using the Alternate Phrase technique, repeating “I’m run down and goofed up” at the first acupoint, and “I deeply and completely accept myself without judgment” at the next — and back and forth for the complete round.

She was at a 10 (on a zero to 10 distress scale) to start with and had been feeling extremely down on herself. But after one set of the Trio she felt much lighter. She then did another Trio using exactly the same wording, and when she had finished this one she said, “I feel totally different about this evaluation.” And she looked totally different. There was lightness in her demeanor which had not been there before. She still had a seeming virus infection to deal with which was depleting her physically, but her mental self-battering had ended.

Dena took home with her what I usually call a Choices Card, but in this case it had no Choice on it but instead the statement “Even though I’m run down and goofed up, I deeply and completely accept myself without judgment”. As usual, her instructions were to read it aloud to herself before she went to bed each night and again when she woke up each morning, and the rest of the time to just “forget about it”. It worked excellently. Dena was relieved of this issue and one more step was taken in increasing her already mounting self esteem.

These are just a few of the ways you can use the default self acceptance phrase in a flexible fashion that can often bring new life and strength to the time-honored phrase. You may decide to use these variations or invent some others for yourself, but the default self acceptance phrase plays a key role in combating low self esteem and the more we can help it along the way, the better!

EFT Master, Dr. Patricia Carrington

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