G'day, my name is Rod Sherwin from Tap4Health and welcome to another EFT Advanced Approaches
video. My goal in working with clients is always to make it as gentle and tearless as
possible and I'm never really sure what a client has come to see me with.
They might sit down and say, "Well I've got this really intense issue," and I don't know
if they kicked their leg coming up the stairs and it still hurts or whether it was 10 years
of child abuse. So, my goal is always to make it as gentle and tearless as possible and
I've touched on some other videos in this series, such as the Movie Technique and the
Tell the Story technique, but another one I liked to use is pattern interrupts, which
is a concept from Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP).
A pattern interrupt is anything that changes your emotional state; it can be a visual interrupt,
an audio interrupt or a kinaesthetic interrupt - just something that changes your focus
that will change your emotional state. If I know I'm going to work with a very intense
issue for a client I like to set up an interrupt that we can use in case the emotion gets too
intense for them. Sometimes they'll start to tell me about a horrendous issue and it
can overpower them.
I worked with one client with severe child abuse and whenever they actually started to
talk about the issue, they were down on the floor in the foetal position and I could not
reach in to tap on them and they could not break out of that position. So I actually
had to come up with another way of making sure that they would just brush against a
memory, we would figure out what the emotion is and we could then use EFT - the Emotional
Freedom Techniques of tapping on the acupressure points - to clear that issue but we didn't
have to keep her there.
One of the things you can use for a pattern interrupt is a happy memory that you have,
a happy place. My favourite question when I start with this is, "Do you have a dog?
Do you have a pet?" Pets are always really good for happy thoughts. A dog that is laughing
and playing with you, it's pretty hard to stay upset when you remember a really happy
time with your dog. Or it could be your child, or a holiday or just some happy memory. You
ask the client, or the person you are working with before you get started, "Do you have
a dog? Do you have kids? Is there a happy memory we can use?" And they'll give you one.
For one of my clients it was singing in a choir, "I really enjoyed that day."
So what you would do then is ask them, "Now just briefly think about the intense emotional
experience you have," and they might go "Well when I think about it I'm very scared," and
you go, "That's great, let go of that. Now what was your dog doing yesterday? Chasing
that bone?" So you're using that memory to shift their focus away from that intense memory
because you don't want them to stay there - in fact, you don't need them to stay there.
That's one of the beauties of EFT. Once you've got that top emotion from that event - it
could be fear - "Even though I still have some fear around that event, I choose to feel
safe and secure." You do a bunch of tapping around that top emotion and then you might
talk about their dog some more.
You may need to explain to the client why you are actually talking about this horrendous
event and then talking about their dog, but just explain to them, "We don't need you to
live there. We don't need to have it that intense the whole time. This is not traditional
talk therapy where you need to relive the event again and again and again and possibly
only make it worse. We're not into that - that's not what this is about. This is about identifying
the emotion for an intense event and then shifting the focus away from it using some
happy memory."
Once you've identified the emotion in that event, then you tap through it and check in
- how are they doing? Have them think about the issue again - "What's the emotion you
think of off the top of the event?" They'll tell you that emotion just check if it's not
too intense. Maybe it's feeling helpless. I'd use this technique with somebody who was
tied down in bed and tortured for hours. We're able to just brush against the memory, get
the emotion of the top of it, think of something else but then do a round of tapping on whatever
that emotion was. As we continue to just brush against the memory, think about something
else, do a couple of rounds of tapping, brush against the memory again - what's the emotion?
Then think about some happy thing.
Any time you see that emotion starting to grab them, shift their focus. Do a pattern
interrupt to get them away from that emotion and then do some rounds of tapping. You've
got to do this with rapport, with being in connection with the client and you don't have
to just use pets - you can use all sorts of completely unrelated things. An example is
'where is your car parked?' Here you are talking about this intense event and you ask them
where their car is parked. You're changing their focus. One that you really have to be
in rapport with to do is 'what colour underwear are you using?' You cannot ask that question
and not interrupt somebody's pattern. Please remember, you have to be in rapport and have
a good connection with the client or the person that you are working with.
Thanks for watching and I look forward to sharing more of these EFT Advanced Approaches
in the future.