EFT for Fibromyalgia, page 11
Sue, who suffered from fibromyalgia, tapped on the emotions connected to a car accident that had occurred twelve years before. Here’s what happened after EFT: All Sue could do was laugh. She said she felt so light and happy. What a relief to lay down a pain she had carried for twelve years. Checking in one month later, Sue said that she has had no shoulder pain and that her life is changing for the better every day.
Past Trauma
As discussed throughout this book, the reason that certain people or situations bother you today is almost always because they remind your brain of a similar situation that occurred early in your life. Childhood traumas are like templates. When a current event fits the template, your brain’s stress machinery springs to life. Unless you reduce the emotional intensity of the childhood memory, you will continue to respond with emotional upset to events in the present.
Old childhood memories may even be at the root of your fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue itself. According to the National Institutes of Health, “Many people associate the development of fibromyalgia with a physically or emotionally stressful or traumatic event, such as an automobile accident.” Best-selling author and natural health advocate Joseph Mercola, DO, has discovered the same in his medical practice: “In my experience fibromyalgia is nearly always related to some severe emotional trauma that establishes a series of potentially devastating physical processes, which frequently incapacitate the person.”
Looking for childhood templates for current upsets and tapping on those childhood memories to heal them can improve or even resolve your fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue.
In another fibromyalgia success story, after tapping on an intense emotional memory, Sharon was enjoying her thirteenth night and counting of falling asleep without pain. “This is a phenomenal record for me,” she said. Her days were free of pain as well.
Hopelessness and Helplessness
Living with the limitations that a chronic illness imposes is highly frustrating, to say the least! It often raises feelings of hopelessness about the future and helplessness in the face of the accompanying physical restrictions and medical needs and procedures. As you become increasingly pessimistic about the future and your prognosis, it is easy to fall into a disaster mentality, a tendency to catastrophize everything, for example, “Oh no, my leg is hurting. It’s going to get so bad that I won’t be able to walk and I’ll have to be in a wheelchair for the rest of my life.” Catastrophizing can cause you to limit your physical movement and effort more than you need to as you anticipate that the worst will happen. In response, your sense of hopelessness and helplessness increases. With EFT, you can extricate yourself from this vicious cycle. Research demonstrates that EFT can reduce anxiety and “pain catastrophizing measures” (helplessness, rumination, and magnification) in people with fibromyalgia.
When tuning into the thoughts running through their brains, most people are surprised to discover how many of these thoughts are negative. Examples of this negative self-talk are “I’ll never be healthy” or “Pain is my middle name” or “What’s the use?” Even without you tuning in, such negative thoughts about yourself and your situation exert their negative effects on your physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Your negative self-talk feeds your sense of helplessness and hopelessness.
Tapping directly on the feelings of helplessness and hopelessness will leave you feeling more positive. EFT can also help you reverse your negative self-talk, so it no longer undermines your health.
Low Self-Esteem
When you are chronically ill, it’s difficult not to begin to suffer from low self-esteem. You may not be able to engage in the activities from which you used to derive a sense of accomplishment, and the roles on which you used to base your identity may now be severely limited or even gone. As with the other challenges discussed here, a vicious cycle is often set in motion: feeling bad about yourself results in you limiting your activity, which in turn worsens your self-image, which leads to doing less, and so on.
Many of the symptoms and emotions associated with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue are also signs of low self-esteem, including anxiety, depression, fear, shame, guilt, and focus on your limits (or what you perceive to be your limits). Another vicious circle is created: the lower your self-image, the easier it is to get upset and the more intense become your emotional responses.
You can actually tap for self-esteem and, as noted previously, tap away your negative self-talk, a big contributor to poor self-image. Improving your view of yourself is vital to healing. With healthy self-esteem, you are more resilient and better able to weather stress and setbacks, and less likely to experience feelings such as hopelessness, worthlessness, guilt, and shame.
In the success story of another fibromyalgia sufferer, one of Lisette’s stepping-stones was the work she did on her core issue: her guilt and responsibility for her mother’s suffering with the attendant belief “I must suffer in my life.” Her EFT practitioner suggested that Lisette tap on: “I believe that I must suffer a lot in my life” and “I don’t deserve to be healthy and happy.” She also tapped frequently on the affirmations “I’m willing to open my heart to myself” and “I love being healthy.” Now she says, “I am not a victim of fibromyalgia anymore. I took ownership for whatever happened in my life. I experience pain at some level, but it doesn’t bother me. I know that I can take good care of myself and I am going to be completely healed.”
Secondary Gain
Sometimes there are benefits in keeping an illness, detrimental behaviors, and negative thoughts in place. These benefits, known as secondary gain, may be blocking you from getting better. And you may not even be aware of them.
A common secondary gain is the benefit to be had from victimhood. Being a victim gives you a certain status and earns you a lot of attention. If you got well, you might lose that attention. Other examples of secondary gain in the case of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue might be the constant companionship of caregivers, help from friends and family, disability compensation, or the ability to keep denying the original cause of the pain.
If you do not first clear the obstacles to your healing—your subconscious attachments to being ill—tapping on your pain, other symptoms, or emotional issues associated with your illness may not be effective. You need to clear the blockage to allow tapping to work optimally. To accomplish this, EFT can help you uncover the direct and indirect benefits you receive from being ill. Keep in mind during this process, however, that just because a part of you appreciates some benefits from being ill doesn’t mean another part of you doesn’t want to get well. Leaving victimhood behind doesn’t mean blaming the victim. Be gentle and kind to yourself.
Significant healing work occurs outside as well as within your tapping scripts. The self-inquiry process that gives you specific material for tapping is as important as the tapping. There is much to learn from turning within and exploring all aspects of your illness.
Once you’ve identified how your illness serves you, you can tap on those secondary gains and dispel them, which removes obstacles to your healing.
Fears about Your Future
Fear is another obstacle to healing. Fear about the future is understandably one of the most common fears among fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue sufferers, as in “I’m afraid that I’ll never be well again” or “I’m afraid that I’ll be in this terrible pain forever.” In order to envision the best that you can be, you will need to tap away your fear. Then the images of what you really want and all the possibilities awaiting you can emerge.
You can use the process of self-inquiry to make a list of your fears about the future. The nature of fear is that it loses some of its hold on you when you state it out loud or write it down on paper. The more you state your fear or look at it, the less potent it becomes. Fear likes the dark. Making a list shines some light on your fears and helps dispel them. Tapping does the rest. You can tap through your list of fears and then tap on other fears about the future, as they arise.
Paula’s symptoms at first disappeared with EFT, but then: “After a couple of weeks, some of the fibromyalgia symptoms started to reappear. I started to get worried [fear of the future], so I contacted Clay [her EFT practitioner]. He wanted me to know that just because some symptoms started to return, it didn’t mean that EFT hadn’t worked for me. It was simply that more issues from my past needed to be addressed. So, over the next few months, I resolved these issues. Once again, my symptoms disappeared.”
Accepting the Unacceptable
How can we make peace with having fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, or with having undergone terrible traumas? It is about “accepting the unacceptable,” says Swedish researcher Gunilla Brattberg, MD, authority on fibromyalgia and CFS. There are strategies you can use to facilitate acceptance. These include some of the approaches to the challenges we’re discussing here, such as stress and pain management, letting go of victimhood, and processing trauma. And you can tap directly on accepting the unacceptable and tap away “unforgivable” events.
One person with fibromyalgia said she felt she had let God down by being so ill that she could not do the work she was supposed to do. She tapped on: “I accept myself even though I have this disease.” The pain in both arms disappeared immediately!
The Mother Wound
Some of the emotional traumas stored within you come from events or incidents involving your mother or another important female figure from your childhood, such as a grandmother, sister, aunt, or teacher. There are many kinds of wounding. The very person you most needed care from might have neglected or abused you. You may have lost your mother at a young age. You may have been given up for adoption. Your mother may have shamed, ridiculed, or criticized you. Your mother may have been sweet and loving most of the time but criticized you in a moment of frustration or impatience that had nothing to do with you. That event may have left a wound that causes you to react in the present to a person or circumstance that your brain sees as similar to the wounding experience with your mother—that childhood template again.
An unresolved mother wound can underlie a wide range of physical and psychological ailments. Though you may not be able to draw a causal link between your fibromyalgia/CFS and stored trauma relating to your mother, you only increase your chances of reducing your pain and fatigue by tapping away the upset that produces tension, depletes your energy, and negatively impacts how you look at the world and yourself.
In Barbara’s success story, the morning after she tapped away crucial wounding events associated with her mother, all of her fibromyalgia pain was gone, or maybe at a rating of 1, and it has not returned. She was sleeping better, was able to work more, her nose was less runny, and her irritable bowel syndrome was mostly gone.
The Father Wound
As with the mother wound, there are many kinds of wounding associated with fathers or other significant males from your childhood. Your wound may have involved abuse, a physically absent or emotionally distant father, a longing for approval never received, or shaming and ridicule. A common form of the father wound is from the angry, authoritarian father. The wounding from the anger, which is terrifying to a child (made even more frightening by the physical size of the father, often much bigger and stronger than the child’s mother), has far-reaching effects. Growing up in fear produces fearful adults with low self-esteem.
Like an unhealed mother wound, an unresolved father wound can contribute to or exacerbate a wide range of physical and psychological problems. In addition, as long as you carry that father wound, your ability to approach the world in the present, instead of as a reaction to the past, is compromised. You can tap to heal your father wound and tap to heal father issues as they arise.
An EFT practitioner reports the successful resolution of a cluster of fears related to Josie’s alcoholic “monster uncle”: “I am still astounded when I think about how easy it was to clear her affliction with fibromyalgia pain throughout her whole body, which she had suffered from for so many years. Who would have known or ever expected that fibromyalgia could have been related to fear of spiders, men, monsters, or alcoholics?”
Creating a Positive Future
Perhaps the biggest challenge faced by people with fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue is belief in a positive future. In the midst of pain and exhaustion, among a range of other symptoms, it’s difficult to believe that you will ever get better, much less be able to live your dreams. By the time you reach the end of the EFT 12-Week Program for Fibromyalgia and Chronic Fatigue (www.FibroClear.com), you will have cleared many of the obstacles that prevented you from believing in a positive future. You will have addressed all of the challenges we’ve discussed here and you will be feeling much better on all levels—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. You will have freed yourself to dream big and tap on your vision. Tapping on a powerful image creates an emotional charge that will catalyze positive change. As with other tapping statements, the more specific you can be, the better the outcome. So dream big and dream in detail. The workbook will guide you through creating your vision of a positive future and then tapping to catalyze your new life.
When you have fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue, Lyme disease, or another autoimmune disorder, the challenges facing you often feel overwhelming. Being in pain and exhausted makes the challenges even more formidable. EFT is a simple, practical way to begin healing. You can tap when you are in pain. You can tap when you are exhausted. You can tap when you are afraid. You can tap when you feel hopeless. In other words, you can tap anytime and for everything! As your symptoms begin to improve or even disappear, the challenges facing you become less daunting. You know you have a technique that can help you meet any challenge that arises. You have a technique to help you move through that challenge, often quickly. With what you have learned in this book, you have everything you need to begin healing right now.
May you soon be free of pain and fatigue!
EFT Glossary
The following terms have specific meanings in EFT. They are referred to in some of the reports included here and are often mentioned in EFT reports.
Acupoints. Acupuncture points that are sensitive points along the body’s meridians. Acupoints can be stimulated by acupuncture needles or, in acupressure, by massage or tapping. EFT is an acupressure tapping technique.
Art of Delivery. The sophisticated presentation of EFT that uses imagination, intuition, and humor to quickly discover and treat the underlying causes of pain and other problems. The art of delivery goes far beyond basic EFT.
Aspects. “Issues within issues,” or different facets or pieces of a problem that are related but separate. When new aspects appear, EFT can seem to stop working. In truth, the original EFT treatment continues to work while the new aspect triggers a new set of symptoms. In some cases, many aspects of a situation or problem each require their own EFT treatment. In others, only a few do.
Basic Recipe (also known as Mechanical EFT). EFT’s basic protocol, which consists of tapping on the Karate Chop point or Sore Spot while saying three times, “Even though I have this [problem] , I fully and complete accept myself” (Setup Phrase), followed by three rounds of tapping the Sequence of EFT acupoints in order, with an appropriate Reminder Phrase. See also Full Basic Recipe.
Borrowing Benefits. When you tap with or on behalf of another person, your own situation improves, even though you aren’t tapping for your own situation. This happens in one-on-one sessions, in groups, and when you perform surrogate or proxy tapping. The more you tap for others, the more your own life improves.
Chasing the Pain. After applying EFT, physical discomforts can move to other locations and/or change in intensity or quality. A headache described as a sharp pain behind the eyes at an intensity of 8 might shift to a dull throb at the back of the head at an intensity of 7 (or 9, or 3, or any other intensity level). Moving pain is an indication that EFT is working. Keep “chasing the pain” with EFT and it will usually go to 0 or some low number. In the process, emotional issues behind the discomforts are often successfully treated.
Chi. Vital energy that flows through and around every living being. Chi is said to regulate spiritual, emotional, mental, and physical balance and to be influenced by yin (the receptive, feminine force) and yang (the active masculine force). These forces, which are complementary opposites, are in constant motion. When yin and yang are balanced, they work together with the natural flow of chi to help the body achieve and maintain health. Chi moves through the body along invisible pathways, or channels, called meridians. Traditional Chinese medicine identifies twenty meridians through which chi flows or circulates to all parts of the body. Acupoints along the meridians can be stimulated to improve the flow of chi and, in EFT, to resolve emotional issues.
Choices Method. Dr. Patricia Carrington’s method for inserting positive statements and solutions into Setup and Reminder Phrases.
Core Issues. Deep, important underlying emotional imbalances, usually created in response to traumatic events. A core issue is truly the crux of the problem, its root or heart. Core issues are not always obvious but careful detective work can often uncover them and, once discovered, they can be broken down into specific events and handled routinely with EFT.
Full Basic Recipe. A four-step treatment consisting of Setup phrase, Sequence (tapping on acupoints in order), 9-Gamut Procedure, and Sequence. This was the original EFT protocol.
Generalization Effect. When related issues are neutralized with EFT, they often take with them issues that are related in the person’s mind. In this way, several issues can be resolved even though only one is directly treated.
