Tapping Q & A with Gene Monterastelli - Get the most out of tapping and EFT

Physical Therapy/Range of Motion

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After an accident I have had physical therapy and I’m doing better. As part of my therapy I am supposed to do sit-ups/leg raises, but the strain on my lower back is too much and the next day I can barely stand up or bend over. I know as I do more therapy it will get better, but I was wondering if I could use EFT to do the sit-ups/leg raises to build my muscles?


photo by Matthew Fang

Here is a similar experience I had with a client which I think will shed light on what you’re doing. I was working with a dancer who had a hip injury and was having trouble doing a turning dance move.

I had her visualize herself doing the move. I then asked her how much of the move she was doing. 100% was the move at full speed and flawless. Anything less than full speed or full movement was rated less than that. We then tapped on the aspect of the trouble she was having. These ranged from feeling too stiff in the visualization to worrying that the move was too fast and she was going to fall. We tapped on whatever was short of 100%. Then she visualized herself doing the move again. We repeated the process until she got to 100%.

She was then able to repeat the process on her own, but she didn’t need to do this many times as the hip issues went away very quickly after we started doing this work.

I would have you do a similar visualization. Imagine you are doing the sit-ups/leg raises. Tune in to how easy or hard it is for you. What are the worries you have about doing the exercise? Is it going to hurt, take too long, or ache in the morning? Then tap on these issues.

[Note: This question came in a few weeks ago.  I answered the question directly and this is part of the e-mail received back.

After a week of tapping and visualizations I am able to reach to my knees — which is more than I've been able to do in almost one year. My stretches aren't painful and (oddly or not) the soreness that should be there due to inactivity is far far less. Say a 5 on a scale of 1-10, ten being I'm not moving out of this bed, heating pad or not. Thanks again!]

How long to tap, how many session to tap, getting 100% clear

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How long should I use EFT on an issue? Is it important that I tap on an issue until it is 100% clear? How many sessions should I work on the same issue?

There are a number of things to consider when approaching these questions. Let’s take these questions one at a time.

How Much Work In One Session?

When it comes to how long to tap in one session it is good let our bodies be our guide. When tapping we are doing energy work. We’re clearing energetic blocks, causing energy to move around and through the body. This can be draining. Typically people can tap for about an hour before they need to take a break, but if you’re working on something very emotional, you might need to tap for less time to avoid a state of exhaustion.

Each person is going to react to EFT in a different way. I have clients who will have lots of energy one minute and the next minute they are completely exhausted. Other clients will slowly become more and more tired. Listen to your body. It will tell you when you need to stop.

As a side note, if you do find yourself particularly tired after a tapping session, make sure that you keep your system hydrated. When your body is tired you know you’ve moved a lot of energy, and water is essential for your body to re-energizing.

Do I need to get 100% clear?

The amount of time you should spend tapping on an issue is going to depend on your purpose. Let’s look at the examples of killing a craving and getting over the fear of public speaking to examine the different objectives we can have with tapping.

When I deal with a craving my goal is not necessarily to be completely free of the craving, but to be free to make a good choice. My comfort food is Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. I often crave them at about 9:30 p.m. as I’m getting ready for bed. The craving peaks at about an 8 on the SUDs scale. My goal is to be sure I can make good choices about what I eat. Just one or two rounds of tapping reduces my craving to a 1 or 2. The craving still exists, but I won’t give in to a craving that weak.

Again, my goal was not to eat the candy. Therefore I’ve reached that goal. Because I am going to easily make the choice I want to make, I don’t need to do any more tapping.

In comparison, when I’ll be speaking in public my goal is to be anxiety-free when I speak so I can do my absolute best. It is 10 minutes before I am to step to the microphone and my level of anxiety is at an 8 on the SUDs scale. After a few round of tapping my anxiety is down to a 2, but it’s still there. Since my goal is to be completely free of anxiety and I am still at a 2, I’ll keep tapping until I’m at 0.

Ultimately, the goal of EFT is to feel or act differently. Sometimes this will require us to be completely 100% clear to make that change. There are going to be other times where we don’t need a 100% clearance to change our state or choices.

I’ve been working on pain management with a client. For her it’s enough to get the chronic headache that is a 7 or 8 down to a 2 or 3. At that level it’s a manageable amount of pain because she no longer feels it all the time.

How many sessions do I need to tap on one issue?

Again, this is going to depend on the issue and your goal for that issue.

The rule of thumb I use is, “Keep coming back until you know it’s gone.”

The issue we’re working on can have varied and deep roots. Just because we feel clear on an issue after one session doesn’t mean it’s gone for good. Instead we may have just cleared enough for this moment. When it comes to working on big issues (self-esteem, trauma, chronic pain) it will normally take a number of sessions.

Any issue worth spending time on is also worth coming back to until you’re sure it’s gone. This is one of the reasons I encourage my clients to take notes when they tap. When you have notes on the issues you’ve worked on and the phrases you’ve used, you know you can come back to it and be sure it’s cleared.

I would keep revisiting an issue until you can revisit three separate times with no reaction at all.

Summary

Remember, there are no cut and dried rules for how much and how long you should tap on a specific issue. The most important thing to understand is why you want to clear the issue. When you know why you are doing the work, then you can more accurately gauge when you’re ready to move on to something else.

Facts of the Situation v. Emotions We Feel – AKA – I don’t know what to say (Part 5)

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I’m very effective at using EFT for physical pain and small frustrations, but when it comes to the big emotional issues, I just don’t know where to start. I tap on all of the issues and emotions I can think of, but it doesn’t feel like I’m making any progress. Is there a way that I can break down an issue so it’s more manageable?

One of the reasons I love Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) so much is because it is very effective at dealing with the emotions we feel, right as we are feeling them. However, when we are feeling an unpleasant emotion deeply, we are less likely to have the presence of mind to do EFT. If we do have the presence of mind to tap, we are so emotionally wrapped up in those feelings, we struggle to see clearly what is happening.

One of the main reasons we take our problems to friends, family members, therapists, and counselors is to gain some objective perspective. Someone who is not as emotionally involved as we are will be able to help us see the forest from the trees. They are able to help us see past our emotional blind spots.

Unfortunately, we don’t always have an external sounding board to help us gain perspective. When I’m in this situation I take the following steps.

First, I gain a little space and distance form the emotions I’m feeling. Emotions are very like a snowball rolling down a hill. The more we engage and feel the emotions, the more the emotions tend to build. I close my eyes and take a few deep breaths to gain a little space. Sometimes I do a round or two of tapping where I tune into nothing more than what I feel in my body. I notice any strain or pain. I tap this away. I find that when I relax my physical body, I also relax my emotional state, giving me a clearer head to assess what I’m dealing with.

The second step is the most difficult. In this step I separate the facts as I perceive them from the assumptions I am making in light of these facts, and the emotions I feel about these facts. This is very difficult because of the way we process information. The genius of our brain is its ability to take a small number of facts and fill in the rest of the picture. Because of this we are able to quickly assess new situations and respond to them. To do this we make assumptions. This can be problematic if we make wrong assumptions or if we treat our assumptions as facts. Here is an example, to make this easier to understand.

One of my clients, “Linda”, has a very trying relationship with her father. For the first time in months he e-mailed her out of the blue. The e-mail was eighteen words long, asking how she was doing. As Linda described the e-mail she said, “When my father sent me an e-mail attacking me I felt…” Nowhere in the e-mail was there an attack, but Linda had read the e-mail as, “You’re only asking me how I’m doing because you think I’m doing poorly and I need your help. I told you that you couldn’t do this on your own.” In Linda’s mind it was a fact that the e-mail was an attack.

It is very possible in this case that Linda’s assumptions are 100% true. It is possible that Linda’s father had sent her this e-mail in a very passive-aggressive fashion. But we don’t know that for sure.

In this case the only thing we can treat as fact is that her father sent her an e-mail eighteen words long, asking how she is. Everything else is an assumption.

When we take the time to break down a circumstance like this we find that in most cases our emotional response is to the assumptions we’ve made. We are not responding to the facts; we are instead responding to our assumptions about the motivations of the actors who created the facts.

Remember, our minds are built to fill in the gaps to make the circumstance easier to understand. As we can see, this can create problems. To gain clarity we need to separate the facts from the assumptions. As hard as this step is, there is a very simple way to do this.
The assumptions we make when it comes to others are generally about motivation. We take the facts of another’s actions, i.e., sending an e-mail, and we try to read the other person’s mind to assign a motivation as to why they took a certain action.

We get ourselves into emotional trouble when we start assigning motivations to other people’s actions. We have feelings such as hurt, anger and suspicion to protect us. They motivate us to stand up for ourselves or leave. But these emotions take a toll when we have them at times that we don’t need to have them. This happens most often when we assign motivation for other’s actions.

The third step is to start clearing the emotions that have arisen because of the assumptions and motivations we’ve assigned to the circumstance. Here is another example to help illustrate.

Let’s suppose that a husband spends hours cooking a special dinner for his wife. Three hours after their appointed meeting time she is still not home. She hasn’t called and isn’t answering her cell phone. As each moment passes he gets more and more angry because once again she has chosen her career over time for them to be together.

Now it is possible that she had a flat tire on the way home and her cell phone isn’t working. It is also possible that she really does value her career over time together. But it does him no good to get into a lather until he knows the facts. If he can take a few breaths and separate the facts from the assumptions he’s making, he’s more likely to have better emotional balance. He will be able to tap his anger away by looking at multiple points of view.

The common struggle my clients have at a time like this is coming up with the phrases to say. There is a very easy formula.

1) Tap on all of the self-talk that is going on in your head.
As your emotions build, there is a running commentary of what you’re thinking. Tap and say these thoughts out loud.

2) What would you say to the person if they were standing before you right now?
What would you accuse them of? Are they selfish, mean, inconsiderate, using you? Tap on the phrase, “They are so [insert adjective] and it makes me feel [your emotion]”

3) As hard as it is, give them the benefit of the doubt.
Tap on all of the possible reasons that things are happening as they are. Tap on the best possible reason why this is happening. This is called reframing. Assume the best for now. If the facts prove otherwise then you can take the appropriate action, but save your emotional energy until that time. It might look something like this:

I am really angry she didn’t show up on time…I worked really hard on this meal…My work isn’t appreciated…Whenever I do something nice it turns out like this…Her career always comes first…She is so selfish, and it makes me feel worthless…She only cares about herself, and it makes me feel like I’m wasting my time…But I choose to recognize that I don’t know why she’s late…There might be a problem I don’t know about…If she is choosing her career over time together I have the right to be mad and we will need to talk about that…But I give myself permission not to be mad until I know the facts of the circumstance…I love my wife. and I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt until I know the facts.

In summary the process is very simple:

  • Take a deep breath, literally and figuratively. Take a step back to get a clear head. It’s going to be very hard to tap on any emotion when you’re so engaged in that emotion it’s all you can think of. Don’t stop counting at ten, count to one hundred or one thousand.
  • Once you have created a little space, assess what is really going on. Name the facts of the situation, and identify the assumptions you ‘ve made that you are treating as facts. Look especially for the assumed motivations. We get ourselves in the most trouble when we create motivations for others.
  • Tap on how you feel, why you feel that way, and on the other possible reasons and motivations for what’s going on.

Why do I have to tap? (part 3 of 3)

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Why is it that fretting, stewing, or worrying about an issue consciously doesn’t dissolve the emotions, but tapping while expressing it does?


photo by Mike

In part one of this series we looked at how the human mind creates models of information from our experiences which enable us to quickly assess the situation we are in. We also looked at the way these inaccurate and/or incomplete models can cause us problems. In part two of this series we looked at how Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) can be used to update and change these models to be more accurate and therefore serve us better.

In this third part of the series we are going to look at how our disposition affects our ability to use EFT to change these models. At the end of part two we showed that EFT is a mechanical process. If EFT is done correctly it will work. It does not require you to believe that EFT will work, and it does not require you to have the intention for healing to happen.

But there are two ideas that must be kept in mind for the statements of the last paragraph to be true and for EFT to be an effective tool in our lives.

First, EFT must be done correctly. When I say “done correctly” I’m not merely talking about the mechanics of the tapping on the body or saying the reminder phrase just perfectly. Yes, it is important that we tap on the right points, but we can only say that we are doing EFT correctly when we are pulling the emotion or model into our energy system so we can work on it. Simply saying a phrase out loud does not guarantee that we have brought the emotion into focus.

I can say “This pain in my neck. This pain in my neck. This pain in my neck.” and be thinking about what I want to have for dinner tonight. It might appear that I’m doing EFT correctly, but in reality I’m just going through the motions.

This cannot be stressed enough, especially to those who are just starting with EFT. The words we use are not magic. They don’t have to be prefect. They don’t have to be said in just one way. The phrases we say are only important in the way they help us to stay tuned in to our problem.

When a client is crying (having a SUDs level of 9 or 10) we don’t need to say anything out loud. They are completely tuned into the issue. As the issue comes down, we will then start using the phrases to make sure the client stays focused on the issue.
EFT is a mechanical process that works — “when we do it correctly.”

Second, if we believe EFT works we are more likely to DO it than if we don’t believe.

This is really common sense. It could be 100% true that if you stand on one leg for 23 minutes a night humming “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” that you are going to find your true love. There is no way I am going to believe it. So it doesn’t matter if it’s true or not, because it will have no effect on my life. My belief doesn’t determine whether this action works, but my disbelief is going to prevent me from trying it. In this case it won’t work, because it doesn’t work for me.

EFT is no different. If you don’t believe it will make a difference in your life, you are much less likely to do it. This is the only way belief can affect EFT’s effectiveness. We will be more willing to try it when we are around people who believe in its effectiveness. We might even try it from time to time on our own, but as soon as we find some resistance or the moment the one-minute miracles stop, that is the moment we will stop using EFT.

EFT is a very powerful tool:

  • which works regardless of whether we believe in it or not
  • which we won’t use unless we believe in it, therefore our belief will determine if it is effective in our lives

Why do I have to tap? (part 1 of 3)
Why do I have to tap? (part 2 of 3)

Why do I have to tap? (part 2 of 3)

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Why is it that fretting, stewing, or worrying about an issue consciously doesn’t dissolve the emotions, but tapping while expressing it does?


photo by Sacha Fernandez

In part one of this series we looked at how models of information work. We looked at how these models of information serve us, making it easier for us to function in the world.

We also saw that there can be negative consequences when these models are inaccurate or incomplete.
In the last part of this series we demonstrated how these inaccurate models can be detrimental by looking at a fear of mice where a past experience contains the model that mice are very dangerous and that when we encounter them we must escape.

Now let’s take a look at how we use EFT to change these inaccurate models.

Changing Models with EFT
If I were to use EFT to work with my fear of mice the first step is to tune in to my fear of mice. I could just picture a mouse running under my chair and my heart would start to race. When I tune in to an issue, I am accessing a model of information. I think, “mouse under my chair,” and the model is applied. This is what we do when we are worrying about some issue. We are just accessing the models we hold. But, we aren’t making any changes to the model itself. When we access the model in the future we will have the same feelings.

The next step in EFT is to start tapping on the issue. According to the theory of EFT, when we are thinking a thought that is not in line with health and well-being, the energy system of the body is in some way out of balance or disrupted. Every time we apply an inaccurate model to a scenario we are creating this state of energetic imbalance. By tapping we are bringing the system back to balance. This is the reason we feel better about the issue after tapping.

The amazing part of EFT is that we bring the energy system back into balance as we tap, and we also make a change to the model. We are taking the inaccurate information in the model, and we are replacing it with information of health and well-being.

By changing the model, the next time the model is applied I respond more appropriately. In our example:

  • I think about my fear of mice.
  • I tap on the system with EFT to bring it back to balance, my natural state.
  • As the system comes back to balance the model is corrected.
  • The next time I see a mouse I apply the updated model and I am less afraid or not scared at all.

EFT is a mechanical process. If you tune into a model and then tap while tuned into the model, you will correct some or all of the inaccurate parts of the model. Since EFT is a mechanical process, if you do the steps correctly, improvement will occur.

This brings us to the third part of the question. How is intention involved in the healing process with EFT? As we have just shown, if the protocol is applied correctly, it doesn’t matter if you have the intention for release. I have done EFT with a number of skeptical people. They didn’t believe EFT was going to work and it did. But it did because they fully engaged in the process. This is not a small point.

If you don’t have the intention for release and health it’s more likely you will do the protocol incorrectly. Remember the words we use are not magic. The words help us to tune into an issue, but it is possible to say words, “this fear of mice, this fear of mice, this fear of mice” and to be thinking about what is on TV tonight and not mice. Even though it looks like I’m doing EFT correctly, I am not — I am just tapping on my body in some random fashion. Successful EFT requires tapping as well as tuning into the issue!

Therefore intention is not a prerequisite for EFT to work, but I encourage all my clients to have the intention of health because it will help them to stay focused and on task.

A few thoughts to keep in mind:

  • We hold models of how the world works to make the world easier to navigate.
  • It is possible to have inaccurate or incomplete models of the world.
  • Simply activating these models will not change them.
  • If we are tuning in to our inaccurate or incomplete models of the world while tapping we can correct the models.
  • Intention is not a requirement for EFT to work but it helps us to do the process correctly.

We have now examined how we model information, how this affects our current choices, and how we can use EFT to clean up inaccurate models. It has been shown that we don’t have to have the intention to heal for EFT to work, but in the third and final part of this series we will look at how our point of view and disposition can affect our ability to do EFT effectively.

Why do I have to tap? (part 1 of 3)
 Why do I have to tap? (part 3 of 3)