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Other Ways to Use EFT
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► Using EFT to Create Desirable Behaviors
Using EFT to Create Desirable Behaviors
By
Dr. Patricia Carrington
In
addition to its use for handling specific problems (by far its most common
use) EFT can be extremely effective in helping you rid yourself of repetitive
behaviors that don’t serve you well and replacing them with new
behaviors that you’d love to have.
In
essence, you create these new desirable ways of acting into habits, so that
without even thinking of what you are doing you just naturally find yourself
doing the things you want to do. Actually, the only way to change
behavior that you don’t want is to replace self-defeating habits with
self-enhancing ones, and this is exactly what EFT can do if you let it.
An example
of this is my client “Emily”, who had not addressed a certain
annoying tendency of hers in her therapy sessions because she considered it
too trivial. During one of our meetings, however, she spontaneously
commented to me that she was “sick and tired” of misplacing her
many pairs of reading glasses and repeatedly having to buy replacements at
her local pharmacy.
I
understood her dilemma only too well because, like so many other people who
started using glasses as an adult and therefore were not trained as a child
to consider glasses as “part of them,” I too had misplaced my
glasses all too frequently, much to my annoyance.
Certainly,
this is not the kind of problem that one goes to an EFT practitioner for help
in correcting. Emily only mentioned it to me in passing, with an embarrassed
laugh. However, I took her seriously, and asked her, “How would you
like EFT to take away your tendency to misplace your glasses?”
“What
an idea!” she said, and we embarked upon an interesting journey of
changing this habit of hers. A simple everyday undesirable behavior can
have many aspects to it, just as a serious life problem can, and we addressed
these aspects one by one.
Emily
started by exploring possible solutions to her difficulty in locating her
glasses, such as wearing a necklace with her glasses attached to it, but the
latter had not worked in the past for Emily for various reasons, as it
doesn’t for many people. She finally came up with what she
thought would be a “real solution,” although she was quick to say
that she didn’t want to use it. The solution was to create
designated “parking places” for her glasses in her house, and
never place them down anywhere but in those designated places.
She
thought this would work “if only I would do it, but of course I
won’t!”
I then
asked her this pointed question, “What would be the downside of this
plan if you put it into effect? What would you find unpleasant about
it?”
Emily knew
the answer right away. “It would make me feel imposed
upon.” She said. “I would resent being forced to place my glasses
in a particular spot. When I’m in my own house I want to feel
free!”
Emily had
hit upon an important reason why many people refuse to change undesirable
ways of doing things even when a part of them recognizes a distinct advantage
in doing these things differently. Nobody likes feeling pushed or
forced to do something, even if that something is for their own good!
The
trouble with most attempts to change behavior is the fact that most people
tend to treat themselves in an authoritarian and over-severe manner when they
go about changing one of their habits. They are all too apt to adopt a
stern “Do it or else!” attitude toward themselves. Their
inner dialogue resembles that of a severe teacher chastising a recalcitrant
child, rather than that of one adult talking to another with understanding
and respect.
Adopting a
harsh and unfriendly attitude toward oneself when trying to change your own
behavior is guaranteed to create rebellion in you against any new regimen, so
this is often the first issue that needs to be addressed by EFT.
For this
issue, Emily chose the EFT statement, “Even though I don’t
want to be forced to put my glasses in any one place, I choose to be flexible
and understanding with myself in this.”
Tapping on
this statement made a great deal of difference in Emily’s attitude
toward her proposed plan and she was soon ready for the next step
––introducing a sense of real pleasure into the process of
change.
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