Aspects are the various facets, features, portions, and pieces of a situation. Although EFT resolves many problems in a straightforward manner, different aspects can complicate just about any problem you address with EFT. Fortunately, they can be handled easily.
Consider all the aspects of back pain. In addition to having underlying emotional
causes, which can be many, the pain you experience while lying down may be different from the pain you experience while standing up. The pain you experience while walking can be different from the pain you feel while bending or stretching. Other aspects include your location, companions, activities, surroundings, sights, sounds, smells, and experiences. The pain is probably linked to past events that are linked to other past events, creating a daisy chain of things that happened. The links that tie the events together exist only in your mind, but linked they are, from the present moment back to childhood.
Aspects are important in EFT. Each aspect qualifies as a separate problem even when they all relate to the same pain or the same larger problem. Some problems have so many pieces or aspects that the difficulty will not be completely resolved until all of them – or at least several of them – are addressed.
Experienced EFTers often compare this procedure to peeling an onion. You get rid of one layer only to discover another. When a problem has many layers or aspects, neutralizing them with EFT can seem like a daunting project. But considering how quickly those layers can be dealt with and how beneficial the results are, the project is more exciting than intimidating. And the rewards are priceless.
Be specific
If you want fast, impressive results with EFT, be specific. Vague statements generate vague outcomes. The biggest mistake made by newcomers is using EFT on issues that are too global. Global problems are broad and hazy. They aren’t well defined. Even with perseverance, which can almost always make a difference, global statements are less likely to produce results than specific statements about specific events.
I have been beating the drum for many years about being specific with EFT, urging EFTers to break emotional issues into the events that underlie them. When we do this, we address true causes and not just symptoms. While there is a skill to doing this, those who take this approach have watched their success rates climb impressively. They are also doing deeper, more meaningful work.
I have found, and demonstrated consistently, that applying EFT to the smallest
component of a bothersome memory almost always works. In fact, I have rarely failed to gain success in this way in my last several hundred attempts. This idea has the
potential to substantially improve EFT's success rate and pave the way for healing in areas previously thought difficult or impossible.
Many newcomers to EFT present their emotional issues in very global terms. They say things like:
I feel abandoned. I’m always anxious.
I was an abused child” I hate my father.
I have low self-esteem. I can’t do anything right.
I’m depressed. I feel overwhelmed.
To them, that is the problem and that is what they want EFT to fix.
But, despite the person’s perception, that is not the problem at all. Those feelings are merely symptoms of the problem. The real problem is that unresolved specific events, memories, and emotions cause the larger issue. How can one feel abandoned or abused, for example, unless specific events occurred in one's life to cause those
feelings? The feelings didn’t just appear out of the ether. They must have had a cause.
If we consider the larger issue (such as abandonment) to be a table top, then the table’s legs represent specific events that support the table (my mother died when I was seven;
my father walked out on us when I was eleven; I got lost on a hiking trip in the Sierra mountains; etc.)
Obviously, if we reduce an issue to the specific events supporting it and then collapse its table legs, the table top will fall for lack of support. In this way we address the true causes (specific events and emotions linked to them) rather than just symptoms.
Unfortunately, many EFT practitioners still apply EFT to the table top and not the supporting table legs. Thus they might start with....
Even though I have this feeling of abandonment....
Being too global like this is the number-one error made by new EFTers and some seasoned ones, too. Interestingly, this approach will sometimes get results but it is not nearly as thorough or precise as going for the supporting table legs first.
Also, because this global approach lacks precision, those using it are more likely to report that their issues "come back." What "come back," of course, are unresolved aspects (table legs) that were not previously addressed.
In addition, approaching an issue in a vague or global manner creates an environment in which the person’s attention shifts from event to event. You can be much more accurate and achieve greater success if you reduce those global issues (table tops) to the specific events (table legs) that cause them. Examples for the global issue of "I feel abandoned" could include:
The time my mother left me in the shopping mall when I was in second grade.
The time my father told me to leave home when I was twelve.
The time my third-grade teacher gave me that “I don’t care about you” look.
These specific events are much easier to deal with than the global issues they created.
If you deal with them one at a time without letting your attention shift, it will be easy to clear them – and by clearing the emotions stored in these small specific events, you’ll automatically repair the larger global issue.
Two points about this idea deserve special attention:
1. There can be hundreds or thousands of such specific events underlying a larger issue and thus, theoretically, addressing all of them can be a tedious process. Fortunately, you do not have to address every specific event to collapse the larger issue. You can usually do the job by collapsing somewhere between five and twenty of its table legs. This is because there is usually a commonality or "general theme" among those specific events. After EFT appropriately collapses a few of the table legs, a "Generalization Effect" occurs that serves to collapse the rest.
The Generalization Effect is a fascinating feature of EFT. I call it that because after you address a few related problems with EFT, the process starts to generalize over all of them. For example, someone who has a hundred traumatic memories of being abused usually finds that after using EFT on only five or ten of them, they all vanish.
This is startling to some people because they have so many traumas in their life, they assume they are in for unending sessions with these techniques. Not so – at least, not usually. EFT often clears out a whole forest after cutting down just a few trees. You’ll see an excellent example of this Generalization Effect in our DVD’s session with Rich, the first veteran on the “Six Days at the VA” video in the EFT Course DVD set.
2. Sometimes the specific event is too long and has so many pieces to it that it should be treated as a separate table top. The example given above (The time my mother left me in the shopping mall when I was in second grade) is such a candidate.
Why? Because the event was likely several hours in length and probably contains many pieces such as the fear of being all by myself; the fear of all those big adults walking around me; the "I-don't- care look" in mother's eyes when I arrived home; the guilt I felt for what I might have done to cause this; and so on. Each of those pieces is a specific event all by itself and should be addressed separately.
There is an art to identifying which issues are table tops and which are legs, but that comes with experience and practice. When in doubt, go for the smallest pieces. Your success rates will improve when you do. I've seen entire issues collapse by just addressing a small but important piece such as "the hateful look in my father's
eye." Sometimes the entire global issue can be reduced to a two-second specific event and collapsed in moments with EFT.
When we work with physical symptoms such as severe back pain, the pain itself can be a global issue. After all, if Dr. John Sarno is correct, the reason your back hurts is because you are angry. If you use EFT on the issues you’re angry about, your pain will disappear.
But you can also tap specifically for the pain and enjoy an immediate reduction of symptoms. Being free from pain for even a short while can help you think more clearly and use EFT more effectively. Addressing the emotional issues that underlie the pain can keep it from coming back. Until you have an opportunity to do that, use tapping as a first-aid treatment. The results might not be permanent, but they will help you feel more comfortable.
The Setup Phrases we used while introducing the Basic Recipe and mechanical EFT are specific in that they refer to pain and its location, but they are global compared to the statements we could be using. Here are some questions that will help you define your pain more specifically.