EFT and Metaphor Create a Transformational Healing Experience

Masha Bennett
www.practicalhappiness.co.uk
Glossop, UK

I would like to share this example of how work with EFT has helped one of my students to transform a long-term fear and hurt through a series of powerful metaphorical images. I always make an emphasis on using any symbols or metaphors that come up during tapping, as these can encompass so much more than ordinary words describing an event or situation. A metaphor could contains a range of emotions and thoughts, memories of specific events, beliefs – all encoded in an image – and when we tap on a metaphor we are likely to be working on a large number of linked aspects simultaneously – something that would be considered challenging or even undesirable within standard EFT protocols, where we would normally focus on one specific aspect at a time. Work with metaphor allows to break that rule and can lead to profound changes rapidly and safely.

You may note that I am not quoting any specific set-up phrases in this article – but the symbolic imagery speaks for itself, and to me this is yet another wonderful example how EFT and metaphor combine to create a significant and transformational healing experience.

Theresa (who kindly gave me her permission to share her story in this article) had recently attended one of my EFT training courses. On Monday evening following the weekend event, she was tapping with another fellow student on the fear of her mother, which she felt as a “tight silver ball in the stomach”, that slowly dispersed with tapping, but still left her shaking and feeling sick.

Tuesday morning Theresa still felt shaky and sick. In the afternoon she tapped on these feelings which produced a picture of an archery target in the middle of a field with a stream at the far end:

“There was no-one around but then a child appeared behind it. All I could see/feel was pain and hurt. She wanted the target moving but was too small to do it. The target had a feeling of being immovable and I thought – if only it had legs. The target got bigger and then all I could see was the red circle. Both of us (me and child) wanted the target moving peacefully, not kicked over. The target returned to its normal size in the field and then a young woman appeared in a suit and tucked the target under one arm and the easel part under the other. The young woman walked away side by side with the child to the stream at the end of the field. The young woman used the easel part to paint a picture on.”

Theresa couldn’t remember the words she used while tapping during this.

Later in the evening (while Theresa was eating ice cream and mince pie), she had a vivid picture of the child waving goodbye just in front of her eyes. She says,

“I couldn’t stop crying, it came up and out of my stomach, gut wrenching. I started tapping… The child was happy, skipping away down the field with her back to me, turning round to look and waving, and also waving as she went. The target was left there in the field and then became smaller into a child’s blackboard and easel, with white chalk. The child was sitting in front of it, a blackboard duster was perched on the ledge of the blackboard. There was nothing on the blackboard.

This image was replaced by another picture of the target, which then became fluid and had arms and legs. It started jumping backwards and forwards and then from side to side, it then started hopping around. Slowly it then changed into a beautiful young woman with her back to me, then back to the target and then back to the young woman, who was now dancing free in the field, flowy dress and very small flowers in her hair, daises, carefree. The target was now gone. I can’t remember the words used during this tapping either, but finished by saying I wanted to keep this image.”

A few days later Theresa emailed me about the impact of this tapping experience on her feelings about her mother:

“It feels as though I’ve had a huge emotional shift, just a massive release of something that I find difficult at the moment to put into words (years of early childhood hurt and pain that I didn’t know was so deep).

Before this I couldn’t speak, or think about my mother without some kind of negative reaction, either physically, mentally or hidden emotionally, and the worst sensation I’ve had was of a complete inability to speak, as though I was choking/blocked in the upper chest… I feel wonderful.”

Masha Bennett
www.practicalhappiness.co.uk