What I’m about to describe is a variation on the movie technique that I have used to great effect. I call it the Bundled Movie Technique. It builds on the invaluable original.

In the original form we take one clear incident that troubles the client, create a movie that at most is a few minutes long, tap on the title and each scene of the movie to neutralise each specific element of it. I regularly use it to help work through deeply distressing incidents.

The twist I’ve used with success is when there are too many memories of the same type of event happening over time. With this type of history the similar memories tend to blend into one another. As a result, it’s often hard for a client to pick out one memory to deal with at a time. I call this variation the “Bundled Movie” Technique.

To use the Bundled Movie Technique I ask the client to create a two minute movie drawing on elements of what they’ve experienced. This seems to have the effect of neatly gathering together many similar memories, whilst still giving the focus and specificity we need to neutralise their emotional distress using EFT.

I found this variation so helpful when working with long term physical and sexual abuse cases as it achieves such rapid gentle results. Here’s an example of how I helped one client.

“Louise” came to me distressed at not being able to sleep much. She was suffering from nightmares, and felt close to a nervous breakdown. She’d suffered intense nightmares since leaving home at age of 18 and would wake every night screaming with terror. She’s now in her mid 30s. She’d been introduced to EFT by friends but together they were not making sufficient headway and so she decided to get help from a practitioner.

In the first two sessions we relieved heavy guilt over a pregnancy termination, intense grief at losing her beloved grandfather when she was a child, and guilt at not being able to help her dying grandmother more than she did. We used plenty of reframing. For example, she felt guilty at not being able to save her grandmother. Once her SUDs levels were greatly reduced we reframed that even the skilled and experienced medical doctors were unable to diagnose what was wrong with her grandmother, so how could she have done more. The negative feelings for each issue were swiftly resolved. These were issues that naturally came up in conversation and helped her gain strength of mind before turning to an issue that has tormented her since childhood.

We came to her relationship with her abusive mother. Since early childhood Louise had been subject to repeated physical violence and daily mental torment. She could not easily pick out a few incidents. They merged into each other. The abuse had started more than 30 years before, but she still felt it on a daily basis.

I asked her to create her own two minute movie based on elements of what she experienced. First I asked her to create her own title. She called the movie ‘Rejection’ and we took a rating: 10+. She was visibly terror stricken. I tend to use a stream of consciousness style of wordplay. I prefer this style of work as I can follow the flow of my intuition whilst staying alert to how the client is responding. What follows are elements of the wordplay that I used at the time.

Even though I feel this dread in my chest at this movie title . . . my body feels the turmoil of that movie . . . this dreaded fear for my life . . . my being is in panic mode . . . this movie brings heavy panic

Even though I can feel the panic in my whole being at what I experienced in this movie . . . there’s a sick feeling in my stomach . . . this heavy panic that smothers me

Even though I’m furious that she did this to me . . . how dare she . . . she was my mother . . . she had no right to reject me . . . she should have been there for me . . . and yet she rejected me

Even though I’m saddened at the treatment I received at her hands . . . I thought she would love me . . . but she didn’t . . . I’m sad I had to go through that hell . . . sad that I remember the torment every night

Even though this rejection hurts . . . it pains me . . . I was so alone . . . no one to care for this little girl . . . just rejection

We gently tapped all those negative emotions down to zero. She looked and felt calmer.

I then asked her to talk through the movie scene by scene. I watched her face for emotional intensity, and used my intuition to check for distress. Anytime negative feelings came up we stopped to clear it. We tapped through many scenes of being physically assaulted by her mother.

Even though my mother and brothers encircled me to hurl abuse . . . she encouraged them . . . egged them on . . . they said appalling things . . . there was no escape . . . they had me circled . . . penned in . . . those foul words . . . .that venom

Even though it hurt that my own flesh and blood could do that . . . didn’t my brothers know better? . . . I guess if it wasn’t me it would be them . . . they were grateful it was me and not them . . . . poor them . . . still living with her nastiness . . . . they’re adults but not yet free

Even though part of me hears her tread on the stair . . . . there’s a heavy uncomfortable feeling in my chest . . .

Even though my mother is coming into my bedroom whilst I’m half asleep . . . . I can feel the fear in my throat . . . I can’t breathe . . . I daren’t breathe . . . please ignore me . . . . don’t come in

Even though I feel sick at the change of light in my darkened room as she opened the door . . . the desperate whisper of her breath on me . . .her eyes boring in to me . . . I’ll pretend I’m asleep . . . she doesn’t care

Even though she took such pleasure in hissing abuse at me . . . she’s telling me I’m not good enough . . . I can’t escape her . . . there’s poison pouring out of her mouth . . . she’s full of evil . . . thank God I’m far away from her

Even though she was a nasty person and still is . . . at least I’ve left that behind . . . I’m free . . . I don’t have to accept that anymore . . .

Once we had calmed down all the elements that were causing her terror, I asked Louise to go through the movie again in her mind to test for any remaining fears. We tapped through a few more that were at much lower levels until she could feel completely calm about what used to happen to her. Upon further testing it became clear that the other times she experienced abuse were no longer troubling her.

We switched to tapping on the present, and replaced the nightmares with choosing to experience peaceful rest at night from now on. We also brought in divine peace and love to support her in her life going forward.

She felt much lighter at the end as if a weight has been lifted. In the weeks after the appointment she noticed an improvement in her sleep. She woke up much less and no longer was she screaming in her sleep. When she does wake up at night she finds it easy to get back to sleep within a few minutes. We’re working on the remaining factors behind this – none of these are connected to the abuse she suffered at her mother’s hands. However, it’s clear from what Louise says that the one movie we tapped through a month ago has brought about a significant improvement in her quality of life.

I’ve used the Bundled Movie technique with several other clients who have experienced long term physical or emotional abuse and have had success every time. I’ve even found it to work with one client who doesn’t consider herself visually creative. I think this is because she is accessing images she has experienced rather than creating from afresh.

Reprinted from the Emofree Newsletter, April 2009

“Bonnie” came to me with a complex trauma history. In our intake call, she reported having experienced almost every type of therapy available over her lifetime. She indicated that despite the many tools in her healing toolbox, she had recently become aware of a severe physical abuse memory. She knew it was negatively affecting her (giving her symptoms of heightened anxiety and fear, for example), but she did not know what to do with it.

From the beginning, Bonnie was very clear that she was fearful of re-traumatizing herself (this had happened before), although she did surprise me by outlining this trauma on her intake form. Even so, I wanted to honor her wishes by “sneaking up” however we could. After some gentle questioning, which led to some tapping and establishing a rapport together, it was clear that she was experiencing many intense aspects (body shame, feeling unsafe, anger, sadness) which all required slow, systematic attention with EFT.

While we were having good results removing the charge from Bonnie’s many intense feelings (and there were many of these, including newly emerging ones like feeling vulnerable, ungrounded, blowing any direction in the wind, angry, “I lost my childhood” etc.), I intuitively felt that we were ‘dancing’ around something deeper. At this point, I felt that a gentle visual approach may help cut through the Gordian knot or tangle of intense feelings she was presenting and help us get to the core.

A Guided Visualization

When the right moment presented itself, I decided to ask Bonnie if she considered herself to be a highly visual person. She said yes, and I then asked if she would like to do a guided visualization to a safe place – her very own sacred space where she could trust that everything that happened would be for the purposes of gently healing her deepest emotional wounds. She liked this idea, so I asked her to close her eyes and with her “mind’s eye” imagine a hidden doorway located somewhere in her office — a doorway that would lead her to her very own personal healing space.

She immediately described a door that existed very clearly for her in the back of her closet. As she described the door in enthusiastic detail, it became clear that she was truly ready to take a visual healing journey. At this point, I asked her to tap very gently through The Sequence (starting at the Eyebrow Point) as she entered the doorway.

Without hesitation she began describing a patio garden “like Mexico, but different” with a portico and high ivy-covered walls.

The scene was appearing to her without any direction from me, other than my checking in with “what’s happening now?” Or ”What are you feeling now?”

A wrought iron table and and two chairs clearly existed for her in the middle of the room and on the table was a candle surrounded by hurricane glass. She noted that the walls were high enough to allow her to feel protected and private, but also open enough to afford her a clear view of the sky and a Volcano in the distance!

Her mind had now created a scenario where she felt absolutely safe.

The Wobbly Angel

After some gentle tapping around her feelings about being in the garden, I asked her how she felt about inviting the most wounded part of her to join us there in some way. She indicated comfort with this idea and was soon describing a “giant black wobbly angel” moving closer to her through the trees. We tapped specifically (using just the Setup/Sequence shortcut) on her feelings about the angel (sadness, loss) and also for the angel’s feelings. She again brought up ‘blowing any direction in the wind’ and began quoting the angel, saying,

“Do you like me? Is it all right to be here? Have I broken a rule?”

She described that the angel’s form was changing as we were tapping. During this exchange, I was asking that she tune in to both her personal feelings and those of the angel, while tapping both globally and specifically and doing full rounds of EFT (minus the 9-Gamut).

I asked her where the angel was now. She said it was sitting across the table from her. I asked her what it looked like now. She described that it was an outline of herself, but like “Casper the Friendly Ghost” without much definition.

I have found that I can introduce something new to the scene sometimes to help move things along. In this case, I felt a version of the Movie Technique might be of assistance, so I suggested that there might be a giant magic telescreen available across the garden for them both to watch something healing.

Bonnie then indicated that she could see the screen, but there was nothing showing. I took a chance and again did what I call “making an offer,” asking her to notice if there was a remote control nearby. She told me there was. I asked which person was closest to it. She now indicated that it was sitting in front of her on the table “on her side of the candle.” Since I could sense intuitively that she was ok doing this, I asked her to turn on the TV. If she had indicated reluctance, we would have tapped on that!

Bonnie now described a scene on the screen slowly coming to life. Long story short, the scene reminded her of a loving uncle who had passed away. She felt intense sadness mixed with gratitude at this scene. She expressed (while doing a continuous, gentle tapping) that she was experiencing a profound feeling that both she and her daughters had been truly loved by this person in her life, and that a tender gratitude was flooding over her. Once we had tapped through and acknowledged all her feelings around this man (very specifically), the screen went dark, and she indicated that there was nothing to see anymore.

Exploring and Responding

I asked her now to turn and look at the “angel” part of her. As she did so, she reported that the “ghost” had morphed into a black and white vision of herself around the age of 5 years old — surrounded by a green aura. The interplay here becomes very important. I asked her to tell me how the little girl was feeling. Again the quotes “Do you like me? Is it all right to be here? Have I broken a rule?” came back, although I could tell from her voice that the feelings behind the words had become less intense. We did several full rounds of tapping just repeating those words, until the emotion subsided and more information bubbled into her awareness. [Note: I’ve found that tapping with these visuals in the narrative seldom requires me to take any kind of Intensity level and that ‘jumping aspects’ seems to slow down. In my experience, the next part of the journey will not be easily apparent if there is too much intensity remaining.] At this point, the black and white girl became a real little girl, in full color. This realization prompted Bonnie to break down in tears of appreciation mixed with a tender sadness for how beautiful this child part of her appeared.

I assume she was continuing to gently tap. The scene was so moving; I had forgotten to remind her to do so!

I’ve noticed in other sessions that as the child part becomes heard (and cleared of negative feelings with EFT), the child can tap for the adult and each can heal the other as if both are agreeing to naturally work towards wholeness and resolution.

Making Peace

Long story short, Bonnie was able to make peace with that “little girl” part of her during the next 15 minutes of taking turns tapping back and forth. As we were winding things down, I asked her if she would feel comfortable leaving behind a gift of some kind in appreciation of her sacred space and all that had happened. She decided to leave behind a small, white handkerchief, which she left deliberately folded on her chair. It was clear to both of us that Bonnie had made peace with a part of herself here in the garden.

A few days later, Bonnie reported that she had listened to the whole session and could not find “much intensity at all” around anything we had covered. Six weeks later, she reports that she remains “a lot better” than before our session:

“Before our session I could not leave the house. I was embarrassed. Now I am no longer stuck on just remembering. I am much more able to be functional. That session helped me put myself back together.”

I was not surprised to hear of her progress – the quality and breadth of emotional content that surfaced in the visual part of our session was pretty phenomenal. Thank you Bonnie for allowing me to assist you and to share this amazing session.

“Melanie” came to me because she wanted to work on the emotional abandonment by her father. Although she was 34 years old, smart and attractive, none of her relationships with men ever went anywhere. She saw a connection there. Even before her father gambled away all money and left the family in poverty when she was 9 years old, he had no regards for her feelings. After his divorce from her mother, she was “kicked to the curb.”

He was a man of big promises – and he never delivered. For example, he told Melanie that she could spend the summer with him, and then he casually called it off. So we first tapped on a tsunami of pain and grief and frustration:

Even though my father always, always let me down…
Even though my father said: “I don’t know what you are talking about” when I reminded him that he had promised me to spend the summer with him…
Even though there is this deep pain in my heart because my father never noticed me, never paid attention to me…
Even though I have been waiting my whole life for my father…

Getting Specific

When I asked Melanie for a specific memory, she came up with a scene when she was 7 years old: She was standing in her father’s bedroom at his bed, watching him while he was asleep, “dead to the world.” She was waiting for him to wake up, and there was nothing she could do to get his attention.

Intense feelings of sadness, being lost and utter defeat came to the surface, trapped in her thighs and pelvis.

(This memory shows that it is not always active abuse or severe trauma that hurt a child. If a static scene, an image contains the whole painful essence of a relationship, that is enough to cause deep wounding.)

When the emotional intensity came down from a 10 to a 5, I got the intuitive hunch to do a memory enrichment rather than continue tapping, and Melanie loved the idea.

A memory enrichment is an act of creative imagination that changes a painful memory into something beautiful and profoundly satisfying. This is not just turning it into its opposite, but lifting it to a higher, often metaphysical level.

Now Melanie is standing at her father’s bed, but he is waking up. He tells her how happy he is that she is there, and that he can’t wait to play with her. That feels good, but what the little girl really wants is that this lasts forever. So a Fairy Godmother shows up, waves her magic wand and asks the little girl what she wants.

“I want that the happiness with my dad lasts forever!”

“Granted,” says the Fairy Godmother.

Melanie was very happy with this and exclaimed: “I can actually have what I want! That is so strange.”

In the second session we worked on a deeper layer of the father issue that had come up during the week: the anger, the rage.

Melanie: “It was all about making himself comfortable; he never considered other people’s feelings. I wasn’t even allowed to have feelings.” The intensity was at a 10, and a memory came up.

Even though I feel this intense rage and anger, and I am infuriated when I think of my father….
Even though he promised to buy me these special sneakers, he sent me some discount brand…
Even though I am not worth it…

The intensity had dropped to a 6, and I asked her what the remaining anger was about.

Even though I always got the bare minimum, but I needed so much more…
Even though I am deeply disappointed that my father never made any effort to build me up…
Even though this remaining anger is stuck in my neck and shoulders…

Melanie was feeling much better.

The Energy Changes

At the beginning of the third session Melanie reported that she had experienced a car accident. No injuries, but the car needed minor repair. She had told her father about it in a phone call – and there something surprising happened.

“He was caring and concerned! He has never been like that before. And then, can you believe it, he just sent me a check for $1000! I am floored. That was more than the bill for the repair. He never, ever has been generous in the past.”

(I love it when things like that happen. It shows that changing the energy of one person changes the whole energy field around her.)

Kicked to the Curb

In the fourth session, we worked on a very painful father memory that Melanie titled “Kicked to the curb.”

Right after the divorce, her father picked her up from school. There was a lady sitting in the front seat, and Melanie crawled into the back. This was obviously “his lady”, but the father had never prepared her for this. Thinking of this scene, intense grief, sadness and anger were coming up for Melanie, and she felt it as heaviness in her thighs.

Even though my father just walked away from his family after the divorce, and my heart it torn…
Even though I could sense his love for this woman and he never really loved us, and that hurts so much…
Even though I was no longer daddy’s little girl, he just kicked me to the curb…

After this tapping round, Melanie had a big, though crushing revelation: “My father had no attachment to me! He probably loved me in his own way, but there was no sense of personal responsibility, emotional care, or concern. I have tried to fix myself my whole life so attachment can happen – and I am still doing exactly that with my boyfriends!”

We tapped on the shock and the devastation of this awareness, and how she has been attracting “fragments of love” over and over again. At the end, she felt profoundly different. “More feminine, more in my body. Love might just show up. I am enough.” What a breakthrough.

In the fifth session, we worked with another very painful memory: the moment when her father told her he was moving out. She was standing at a bus station with him, and he said casually: “Your dad is going away for a while”. That was it.

Even though I froze in shock when he said that…
Even though there was no preparation, I had no idea what was happening, and why…
Even though I still feel that grief and sadness and anger in my solar plexus….

The intensity went somewhat down, but not that much. So I asked her what her feelings were about the words “for a while”. (He had said that he would leave for a while). Melanie had never thought about that, and she reacted strongly to it: “This was cruel, torture. I kept waiting for him to come back, but he never did. And a part of me is still waiting.”

Even though a part of me is still waiting for my father to return…

No Longer Waiting

At the end, Melanie declared that she or any part of her was no longer waiting, and that was a huge relief.

As for the boyfriends, Melanie is no longer putting up with “fragments of love.” Recently, she talked on the phone to a “gorgeous looking” man who had caught her attention at an online dating service. He was nice, smart and charming too. However, when he said that he just wanted “fun” and not a serious relationship, she dropped him. Melanie: “I would not have done that in the past. I always tried hard to get them emotionally involved anyway, but it never worked, and I only got hurt. Stepping out of this pattern feels so good.”

George and I had dated a few times (I was 15). He seemed very loving and tender, always expressing his love for me. No one had ever loved me before. It was quite a new phenomenon for me. I didn’t know quite what to make of it, but I liked it.

This night he said he loved me and wanted to marry me over and over again, but as he said these things he was pushing me down against the seat tugging at my clothes. I struggled against him because this didn’t seem right, but as I struggled he forced my head under and behind the steering wheel. My head was almost to the floor and I remember feeling the pedals. Each time I tried to get up my head was stuck and I couldn’t get in an upright sitting position. But I didn’t scream. I couldn’t fight against him. He did his dirty deed. I didn’t tell anyone. I never saw him again. I was alone. There was no one to help me. Love had come into my life briefly, and love hurt.

This date rape issue is an incident I thought I had dealt with successfully with talk therapy before EFT. When it came up again a few months back, I tapped it down to level of intensity of 0 out of 10 with EFT. Yet there it was again, alive and squeezing at my heart, screaming for release. So I immediately started tapping:

Even though I feel dirty and undeserving…
Even though I couldn’t scream…
Even though I couldn’t fight against him…
Even though I couldn’t scream…
Even though I didn’t expect that…
Even though I was so naive to think he really loved me…
Even though I never dreamed that could happen…
Even though I did nothing to stop him…
Even though I feel so guilty…
Even though I couldn’t scream…
Even though I feel so ashamed…
Even though I was such a wimp…
Even though I couldn’t scream…
Even though I was alone and no one to help me…
Even though I was so naive and didn’t know what to do…
Even though I let that young girl tells me how to feel…
Even though I listened to that young girl all this time…
Even though I couldn’t scream…
I was stuck on screaming. I somehow had to scream. I was in the bathroom so I turned on the fan, and the water full blast, grabbed some towels put them hard on my face and started to scream, and scream into the towels until I couldn’t scream anymore. Then I continued tapping:
Even though I couldn’t scream then I can scream now…
Even though I still feel so ashamed…
Even though I was so stupid to think he really loved me…
Even though I still feel so guilty…
Even though I feel so guilty but I know it wasn’t my fault…
Even though I let him take advantage of me…
Even though I let that event controls much of my adult life…
Even though I’m still alone, it’s not in the way that I was alone before…
Even though I have trouble forgiving myself for being such a wimp…

Even though I let that young girl protect me in the only way she knew how, she doesn’t’ need to protect me anymore … She can stop now … She can rest now … It’s time for her to come in … It’s time for “us” to unite, to be one … I can protect her now … I choose to protect her now … I choose to love her, and give her what she desires … That little girl that was me and I are together now … I choose to love her and protect her, and take care of her, like she tried her best to do with me … She just didn’t know what to do. I know what to do now.

I choose to let go of the guilt and the shame … No more guilt, no more shame … Letting it go … It wasn’t my fault … I did not cause it … I choose to forgive myself … I forgive myself … I am willing to look at forgiving George, the bastard; he really took advantage of me.
I was so naive … I knew nothing … I wonder how many others he date-raped like he did me … He knew what he was doing … Maybe that was the only way he could feel good about himself … George is a sick individual … He needs help … He’s the wimp … I need to forgive him, so I can let this go once and for all.
George, you bastard, I forgive you … George, I don’t want you in my life on any level anymore, so I completely forgive you, and let you go … I forgive myself for hanging on to this for so long … Letting it go … Letting it all go … I am safe, and I am happy … I completely love and accept myself.

At long last, I was free of the date-rape incident. I was able to scream and I feel cleansed. I have also been able to clear several other painful core issues with EFT. I am so grateful to my friend Paul, who sent me the info on EFT. It has taken over my life. I immersed myself in it. I researched it, read about it, ordered and viewed all the DVDs. Studied it at every hour of the day and night. I began to treat myself for physical and emotional ailments, and to bring relief to my friends, their friends, family members, and whoever showed any interest in wanting to try it out. It works! It has become my path, my passion and my life.

D, an American, was having a great deal of emotional reaction to the multiple tragedies unfolding in Japan. He recognized that his reaction to this disaster seemed to be more acute than to other similar situations. For example, it hit him harder than the news from the 2004 earthquake and tsunami in the Indian Ocean.

We mused on reasons why this might be the case, but none of them seemed to account for the deep level of identification D seemed to be feeling with the disaster victims, especially in the early days of the nuclear reactor crisis.

We tapped on the disaster together, including how the people of Japan might be feeling: the devastation, fear, and helplessness. He stated his belief that we all live with an illusion of control of the world around us, which a natural disaster challenges, and we worked on that. Although these produced energy shifts, they did not seem to reach the source of his anxiety.

About a week after the tsunami he told me that while virtual tapping in his mind at 2 AM, unable to sleep from worrying about the Japanese, he’d had a crucial insight.

D’s father was a career Air Force officer, commanding base hospitals across the country. During the 1962 Cuban Missile crisis, when D was seven, his family was living on a SAC (Strategic Air Command) base, with 12 Intercontinental Ballistic Missile sites nearby. As America came to the brink of what it assumed would be nuclear war, these nuclear warheads were made operational.

As the crisis intensified, the families on the base were prepared for evacuation. Although thankfully the crisis was over before D’s family had to leave, his memory was of the anxiety of those days, and the fear that he and his family would have to leave his father behind to face a nuclear attack.

This particular incident wasn’t one of those ‘top of mind’ stories of emotional turmoil that we tend to carry and recount frequently. The disaster in Japan, and in particular the danger from the reactors, had shaken loose an old and buried memory for him.

Insights

This incident illustrated two effects of EFT, and also gave us insight into the world of childhood.

It demonstrates how EFT works underground, or in the background, to keep opening up the areas of blocked energy in our mind and memory banks. If we keep using it, the insights will come.

Additionally, it is a wonderful testimonial to how we can mentally visualize a tapping round, with the same benefits as physically tapping on ourselves.

And it reminds us that adults frequently underestimate the sensitivity of children to the events unfolding in their lives, and overestimate their resiliency. Although children may seem to shake off crises quickly, they bear the scars—sometimes unknown or unacknowledged. In EFT we have a tool to use with and teach our kids, rather than assuming or hoping that the storms of life will pass over and leave them unscathed.

A lady from Mumbai, Menaka (name changed) approached me to get help with her childhood sexual abuse memories. Previously, she had one EFT session with another practitioner and had severe abreactions after working on abuse. She told me that she howled after that and was very scared to deal with abuse again in the EFT sessions even though she felt that she needed to heal from abuse. Usually the “body memory” of the abuse makes a person feel unsafe and thereby they are afraid to work on it as it unleashes overwhelming emotions.

I consider it to be an important part of sexual trauma work and therefore the focus of this article is to show how the unsafe abuse memories can be dealt with EFT.

I told Menaka that we can deal with abuse only when she feels comfortable enough to do so. It is important not to introduce trauma work in the beginning of the session itself unless the client is ready. I started working with her on general family issues.

During one of the sessions while working on her anger at her mother, Menaka said that she hated reliving the traumatic incidents from the past. She said,“it shouldn’t have happened. I still feel ashamed and the rage is there. That fear lives in my body. If only I could close my eyes and escape. I try to shove it aside.”
She further revealed, when I probed her gently, that the abuse started at the age of 2 by her caretaker’s relative and continued till she started going to school. In her mind, some memories were fuzzy and some were crystal clear. She felt anxious as she spoke about it.

So we tapped on:

Even though I am anxious now as I speak about my past and it makes me feel unsafe, I deeply and completely love and accept myself. I am safe now as that was then and this is now.

Her anxiety went down but she was reluctant to go further. She said, “I don’t want to face this. I still don’t want to talk about it. I can already feel my heart pounding now.”

So we tapped on:

Even though my heart is pounding as I am about to say certain things that I haven’t spoken to anyone, I want to accept this pounding and feel calm.

Her anxiety decreased and she went on to recount the whole incident. I did the Movie Technique on her and asked her to put a pause to her narration whenever she felt anxiety or any other emotion. She said that the abuser had locked the door. He emotionally blackmailed her into obeying him and asked her not to tell anyone.

She started feeling a burning sensation in her solar plexus. This was a sign of anxiety so we tapped on:

Even though I’m anxious right now as I remember what happened when was 5 years old…

I introduced the following reframe to tackle the possible presence of guilt, as it is always present in such cases, even though she hadn’t voiced it.

Even though I’m angry with my caretaker’s relative because he asked me to touch him, and he took advantage of me, I deeply and completely love and accept myself.

I was really too young to understand all this and I didn’t know how to prevent it, I love and accept myself despite what happened.

After this her burning sensation went down completely and we focused on tapping on the anger and releasing it. Tapping was also done on other details of this abuse memory.

In the next session, we dealt with another school memory that haunted her.

She narrated the incident and started feeling the same fear in her body as she had felt on the day that unforgettable school incident took place. This usually happens in trauma as the fear gets trapped in the body and any time the traumatic incident is remembered the same frozen response of fear comes back to the surface.

During this incident, she was told by her parents that the abuser would drop her to school. Her parents were not aware of the abuse. So we tapped on:

Even though I’m afraid right now as I can feel that fear when my parents said that he will drop me to school, I deeply and completely love and accept myself and I want to remind myself that I’m safe right now, and this happened in the past and it’s not happening right now.

Her fear went down from 8 to 3.

I asked her to continue with the narration. She said that he dropped her to the school. He said something that made her fearful that the abuse could happen to someone else too; he could hurt someone else too. She suddenly garnered her strength and told him to end the abuse. She told him that she would tell everyone about his vile behavior if he did not stop the abuse immediately. She felt a shiver in her body as she was narrating this.

We tapped on:

Even though I feel this shiver now as I felt at that time when he said that “______”, and I thought that it may happen to someone else too, I deeply and completely love and accept myself.

I am glad that I decided to stand up against him and face him and told him to stop. I choose to appreciate the fact that I confronted him and asked him to back off.

After this round of tapping she had a thought that she will start feeling better soon. Shifting her perspective about that incident worked!

Now she felt anger at her parents that they were careless and they should have looked after her. We dealt with her parent anger and her particular belief that things would have been different had the abuse not happened:

Even though I believe that things would have been different had those things not happened in the past, I choose to accept the fact that it did happen and no matter how bad it was, I choose to overcome it and feel better.

Even though it impacted my life, it is over, and I can overcome the side effects.

After a few days in the next session she said that the past didn’t bother her at all. But she felt a little fear coming up again when I tested her response by narrating that first incident again:

Even though I still feel fear when he said that he will lock the door, I choose to release this fear and feel safe.

Even though it was unpleasant, I choose to release this memory.

This took away her fear completely.

She also blamed herself for being cute as a child and for spending time with the abuser, and so we tapped:

Even though I blame myself for being cute, I deeply and completely love and accept myself. I know that it wasn’t my fault.

Even though I blame myself because I spent time with him as I was lonely & I didn’t have any friends, and I blame myself for this, I love and forgive myself.

After this she has not re-experienced the trauma again. It has been 2 months.

EFT is a wonderful tool to help Adult survivors of Child Sexual Abuse (CSA). CSA survivors battle with the trauma throughout their lives. Traditional therapy doesn’t help much in these cases. EFT can release the trauma without re-traumatizing the individual. Lori Lorenz M.A, says, “We form our perceptions of ourselves and the world so early in life that the violation of sexual abuse can change the core assumptions of our lives.” This is precisely what EFT can help with – the assumptions formed due to abuse.

This article first appeared in the November 2010 issue of Psychotherapy Networker. It was published together with Energy Psychology on the Front Lines. Used here with kind permission from the author and Psychotherapy Networker.

Newly appointed to the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins in 1970, I wasn’t sure what to expect when the department chair called me into his office to discuss a special assignment. “I keep hearing about these ‘new’ therapies coming from the West Coast,” he told me. “Are they just more California fluff or developments worth knowing about? Go find out.” As a young therapist-researcher who was already pursuing personal improvement with the passion of someone convinced he needs a lot of it, I approached the assignment with the zeal of a young knight in search of the Holy Grail.

At the time, traditional psychoanalysis and behaviorism had been rapidly losing their “market share.” More than 200 new brands of therapy were popping up on the workshop circuit, promoted in the alluring new language of “peak experiences,” “personal growth,” and “self-actualization.” During the next seven months, I investigated 46 of these new therapies, studying their uneven literatures, conducting extensive telephone or in-person interviews with their primary proponents, and directly experiencing more than a dozen in weekend workshops or other formats. I focused on some of the brightest stars in the pop psychology firmament of the day–Transactional Analysis, Bioenergetics, Gestalt, breathwork, sensitivity training, Rolfing, Reevaluation Counseling, LSD-assisted psychotherapy, and even a memorable nude encounter group. Many of the approaches have now faded or disappeared, some leaving a lasting mark on clinical practice, others just embarrassing memories.

The more closely I examined these therapies, the more apparent it became that doing something that feels like it’s bringing about lasting therapeutic change is much easier than actually producing such change. I didn’t conduct formal outcome research, but I did do dozens of follow-up interviews with my fellow participants after the immediate excitement of the workshops had subsided. Their reports were sobering. Just as years of psychoanalytic insights don’t necessarily lead to greater happiness or success, I found that dramatic interventions and intense experiences didn’t necessarily lead to lasting change. Participant enthusiasm during a workshop didn’t guarantee clinical benefits following the workshop. A fervent “primal scream” might feel like a powerful emotional breakthrough, and it might indeed provide a deep release, but evidence that it produced enduring psychological change was hard to find. Despite my hope for wonder cures, I had to admit that utopian clinical models, unshakeable therapist conviction, and even emotionally thrilling experiences didn’t necessarily yield better ways of processing emotions or experience.

I did, nonetheless, witness therapeutic moments that seemed absolutely brilliant and saw positive changes that people were still describing months later. While I wasn’t able to connect such results to a particular method, theory, or type of client, I came to some conclusions about what increased the odds for fortuitous therapeutic outcomes. The roots of enduring therapeutic change seemed grounded in strong emotional, interpersonal, or somatic engagement, shifts in self-understanding and behavior that extended beyond the clinical context, and a readiness in the client to approach life differently. Although none of these observations was remarkable in itself, together they gave me a much clearer appreciation of the complexity of change and the difficulty of the therapist’s task. This awareness stood me in good stead for much of the next 40 years.

Beginning about a decade ago, however, something came along to challenge some of these bedrock beliefs. Energy Psychology, a method based on tapping on selected acupuncture points to address psychological problems, called into question some of the more cautious conclusions I’d drawn from the Hopkins study. In fact, having built a career around a depth-oriented clinical approach, for a long time I introduced classes I taught about Energy Psychology by saying something apologetic like: “I can’t fully express how surprised I am to find myself standing here telling you that the key to successful treatment, even with extremely tough cases, can be a mechanical, superficial, ridiculously speedy physical technique that doesn’t require a sustained therapeutic relationship, the acquisition of deep insight, or even a serious commitment to personal transformation. Yet, strange as it looks to be tapping on your skin while humming ‘Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah,’ it works!”

So, you may well be asking, what could possibly have possessed a wizened, seen-it-all therapist like me to embrace an approach that much of the world of orthodox psychology considers the latest incarnation of snake oil? Well, what follows is the answer.

Read the Complete Article →

Dr. David Feinstein’s original article, Energy Psychology: Snake Oil or Designer Tool for Neural Change? included this account, reprinted with kind permission from the November 2010 issue of the Psychotherapy Networker.

In 2006, psychologist Caroline Sakai conducted a study of Energy Psychology treatments with 50 Rwandan orphans. The outcomes, recently reported in The International Journal of Emergency Mental Health and summarized in the article, vastly exceed those of any previous peer-reviewed study of a PTSD treatment in terms of speed, degree of effectiveness, and percentage of subjects who were helped. Here, Sakai describes the experience of one of the study’s participants, a 15-year-old girl who was 3 at the time of the 1994 genocide:

She’d been hiding with her family and other villagers inside the local church. The church was stormed by men with machetes, who started a massacre. The girl’s father told her and other children to run and to not look back for any reason. She obeyed and was running as fast as she could, but then she heard her father ‘screaming like a crazy man.’ She remembered what her father had said, but his screams were so compelling that she did turn back and, in horror, watched as a group of men with machetes murdered him.

A day didn’t pass in the ensuing 12 years without her experiencing flashbacks to that scene. Her sleep was plagued by nightmares tracing to the memory. In her treatment session, I asked her to bring the flashbacks to mind and to imitate me as I tapped on a selected set of acupuncture points while she told the story of the flashbacks. After a few minutes, her heart-wrenching sobbing and depressed affect suddenly transformed into smiles. When I asked her what happened, she reported having accessed fond memories. For the first time, she could remember her father and family playing together. She said that until then, she had no childhood memories from before the genocide.

We might have stopped there, but I instead directed her back to what happened in the church. The interpreter shot me a look, as if to ask, “Why are you bringing it back up again when she was doing fine?” But I was going for a complete treatment. The girl started crying again. She told of seeing other people being killed. She reflected that she was alive because of her father’s quick thinking, distracting the men’s attention while telling the children to run.

The girl cried again when she reexperienced the horrors she witnessed while hiding outside with another young child–the two of them were to be the only survivors from their entire village. Again, the tapping allowed her to have the memory without having to relive the terror of the experience.

After about 15 or 20 minutes addressing one scene after another, the girl smiled and began to talk about her family. Her mother didn’t allow the children to eat sweet fruits because they weren’t good for their teeth. But her father would sneak them home in his pockets and, when her mother wasn’t looking, he’d give them to the children. She was laughing wholeheartedly as she relayed this, and the translator and I were laughing with her.

We then went on to work through a number of additional scenes. Finally, when she was asked, “What comes up now as you remember what happened at the church,” she reflected, without tears, that she could still remember what happened, but that it was no longer vivid like it was still happening. It had now faded into the distance, like something from long ago. Then she started to talk about other fond memories. Her depressed countenance and posture were no longer evident.

Over the following days, she described how, for the first time, she had no flashbacks or nightmares, and was able to sleep well. She looked cheerful and told me how elated she was about having happy memories about her family. Her test scores had gone from well above the PTSD cutoff to well below it after this single treatment session, and remained there on the follow-up assessment a year later.

Read the original article, “Energy Psychology: Snake Oil or Designer Tool for Neural Change?”

Due to the sensitive nature of this issue, I have withheld specific details.

A gentleman in his late 30’s, from US, called me in January this year. He wanted phone counseling and EFT therapy for CSA (Childhood Sexual Abuse).

When we began the sessions he revealed that he had been sexually abused at the age of 10 by strangers. He had very low confidence in high school and got into alcohol and drug abuse in his college. For the past 20 years he had been caught in this addiction cycle. Due to the addictions he was laid off from his job recently. He had been to a rehabilitation centre and also for psychotherapy but that didn’t help much with addiction and CSA. The clean phase lasted only for a few weeks. It was leading to enormous tension and stress within his family and impacting his relationship with his girl friend as well. He had difficulty in concentration, anger management issues and difficulty in remaining faithful.

He had been clean for the past 2 weeks when he contacted me and was fighting the temptation to go back to alcohol and drugs. We worked on the anxiety that led to the craving and simultaneously took up CSA. The following are details from the CSA sessions.

When he was 10 years old he was asked by his friend to visit another man’s house where the abuse took place.
I did the movie technique on him. While he was narrating the story, the anxiety started building up. I immediately asked him to stop and tap on it. He could remember going up the stairs to the room. After tapping on the anxiety about telling the story, I made him tap on all the details that he could remember. Some of the aspects taken up were –

Feeling of being trapped
Feeling of tightness in my stomach as I think about it
Anger for taking advantage of a 10 year old
Anger as the perpetrator didn’t stop the abuse
I understand that it was not my fault

Later the anger changed to sadness. He said he had seen his perpetrator a few years back and had felt like beating him to pulp but now after tapping he felt differently. He said maybe that person would have changed now. This was a cognitive shift.

In the next session I ran the entire incident by him and asked him to stop me whenever he felt any anxiety. He said he felt anxiety but that was for another incident. His anxiety for the first one was negligible.

In this incident, he was asked by another stranger, an elder man, to get into a car. he was taken to an unknown place. This became a routine that lasted for awhile. He said that it had felt more like an adventure for him at that time and he had enjoyed it but it was always laced with fear. Tapping was done on-

Anger for being manipulated
Fear while it was taken to that place
Guilt for enjoying the adventure
Guilt for continuing to experiment
Even though the experiences may have impacted my life, I choose to start afresh.

Surprisingly his intensity went down pretty fast after tapping on the guilt. Somehow the guilt was holding that abuse in place and after the guilt was gone, the abuse too lost its significance. It was, as if a heavy load had been lifted off his shoulders.

In the next session, I asked him how he felt during the week post session and he said that he was fine and was concentrating on his career. I asked him how he felt about the abuse and he said that it didn’t bother him and he didn’t know why. I asked him to guess why. He said – ‘It was in the past which is over and I want to move on’. After that we never tapped on CSA again as it didn’t bother him.

With the tapping on addiction, low confidence, fear of upcoming job related tests etc along with counseling for remaining faithful, stress and anger management, he was able to remain clean and there was an increase in his confidence. The last I heard from him was 2 months back and there had been no relapse and he had passed the exam with flying colors and was trying to work on his future goals.

I strongly feel that one has to be very careful in approaching CSA with EFT because if not handled properly, it can unleash overwhelming emotions that are difficult to control. The survivor is afraid to re-visit the ‘forbidden’ part of his/her life as it causes trauma and therefore it is important to handle each incident in totality but also not run the incidents again and again unnecessarily. Re-testing is an important part of EFT but in abuse cases I feel that it should be done less. Also, I never ask my clients to forgive their perpetrators unless they are ready to do so. In my opinion, it is possible to let go of the incident, be unaffected by it without forgiving the perpetrator. It’s more important that the person forgives oneself for the experience, forgives oneself for being seduced, or enjoying it (in some cases) , releases the anger, hurt , vulnerability, does not feel responsible for the abuse and does not feel emotionally scarred or damaged for the rest of one\’s life. A person who has been abused may take time to get over the scars of abuse and rebuild his confidence and feel better overall, but the time that is taken in reducing intensity for each specific incident is actually very less.

The feeling of peace that comes after releasing these incidents is very liberating.

34-year old Vivian (not her real name) wanted to get rid of her intense craving for sweets. Not only did she need to lose weight, but all that sugary stuff made her stomach feel bad. As a habit, she ate four cupcakes every night after dinner, plus lots of cookies in between. The cookies bothered her the most – they just were irresistible.

As with many cravings or addictions, there was a “Guiding Star” experience involved. This term, coined by Silvia Hartmann, describes a blissful peak-experience that is frozen in time. It becomes problematic when a person tries to repeat it, or a part of it, again and again (which, of course, never works).

I suggested doing a Matrix Reimprinting session. For more details about this expanded EFT technique, please go to Karl Dawson’s site www.matrixreimprinting.com. At its core, it is about imagining tapping on a younger self. This is different from inner child work insofar as the younger self (Karl calls it “echo”) is not a part of the currently present person, but a separate entity stuck “out there” in the Matrix – the universal energy field. (Actually, more often than not, MR works directly with trauma.)

I asked Vivian to look for an event that could be the origin of her infatuation with cookies. She knew immediately what is was. When she was 8 or 9 years old, her mother worked at a bakery. This particular day, Vivian went there and helped the lady who ran the bakery to carry out some big buckets. She worked hard, and she was proud of herself. The lady complimented her and gave her cookies. Her mother said: “Vivian is the good one, she always does what she is told. She is such a good girl.”

Now, this might not sound like an outstanding experience to somebody who grew up in a normal family. However, several of Vivian’s family members were physically abusive, and her mother, overwhelmed and sickly, never protected her. So this bakery was like heaven for Vivian. She felt safe, appreciated, useful, and loved by her mother. And it all was tied to cookies.

Following the MR protocol, I had Vivian as her current self step into this bakery, introduce herself to the younger self and ask if we could work with her. The girl was very happy to see Vivian, but she told her that she really wanted to keep the cookies. We assured her that nothing was going to happen against her will.

Then Vivian imagined tapping on her younger self while tapping on her present self at the same time. (I have to say, while other people have no problem doing that, it fries my brain. I imagine tapping only on my younger self when I work on myself).

Addressing her in the second person, we tapped a round on:

Even though you believe that cookies and happiness are one and the same and cannot be separated, you are a great little girl.

Immediately, a huge wave of sadness, fear, and hopelessness flooded the younger self. Vivian was close to tears: “This is all she has, these happy moments at the bakery. She has nothing else to hold on to, she doesn’t think she can make it.”

We tapped several more rounds on these feelings (I knew what was going on since we had worked on the family trauma in earlier sessions).

Change of Memory

Then Vivian was ready for the Change of Memory. The point of this is to show the younger self that she still can have the same experience of happiness and belonging, but in a different situation – in our case without cookies.

After our EFT rounds, the younger self was ready to leave the bakery. Vivian told me that she wanted to go to a new house. Only the grown-up Vivian and her three younger siblings were with her, the ones she felt safe with. In this new, enriched memory, they are all sitting in the front yard of their new house, playing with toys. Vivian assured the younger self that she would not leave, and that it was o.k. to be happy, not to worry, and to just be a kid. This was the perfect picture of happiness for Vivian, and we did the MR procedure to send the new memory into her body and out into the Matrix.

As a test, I asked Vivian how cookies and happiness are connected for her, and she said, “A cookie is just a cookie.”

Five days later, I inquired about her eating habits. As it turned out, she only had taken a little bite out of one cupcake and had not eaten a single cookie. Zero. Vivian: “It has not been hard at all. I just don’t want them anymore.”

Two weeks later she still has not eaten any cookies.