Our life is what our thoughts make it.
– UNKNOWN
Exploring the nuances and intricacies of the body, the mind, and the energy system raises fundamental questions about the nature of life and the healing journey. In this regard, we still have a few more ideas that can help you to understand yourself and others, and opti-mize your effectiveness with EFT.
Before we go into specifics, here are a few points to keep in mind:
• You cannot heal anyone. If you are helping others, it is important to recognize that you cannot heal anyone. Even doctors do not heal their patients; they simply aim to optimize conditions for their patients’ bodies to heal themselves. The responsibility for healing ultimately lies within.
• You will not be able to help everyone. Sometimes personalities conflict. Possible reasons for the difficulties might be because you have similar issues to the person you are helping, or the other person is not open to your approach. Don’t take such cases as a personal rejection or failure. If you are in the process of healing yourself, maybe you need more familiarity with the techniques, or could benefit from outside assistance. Addressing deep core issues can be challenging.
• Timing is a factor. Each person heals and awakens to new possibilities in his or her own time. Sometimes the wounded ego has the upper hand and the individual is just not ready or fully committed to doing what it takes to overcome an obstacle.
For instance, a person will quit smoking only if he or she is fully committed to it, and only the individual can provide that commitment. EFT is a big help, but not a substitute for taking personal responsibility.
If you are helping others, an affirmation to use is “Everything has its own tim-ing. I respect each person and attract those who are the right people for my journey of awakening.” Using EFT, you can tap in this affirmation, or one of your choosing.
For helping others, you can find more information on maintaining a healthy perspective in Appendix A, which focuses on fostering healthy therapeutic relationships.
Ì COMPARTMENTALIZING
As the Levels of PR and the Holistic Process showed, you can usually pinpoint unconscious aspects of issues that need to be addressed for EFT to be effective. Both methods also show that you never know where the healing journey is going to lead when you set out on an ex-ploration of the deeper recesses of the mind. One time, Jane worked with a woman we will call Eva who had two issues she wanted to address: her negative reaction to her husband’s messiness and her sexuality. By the end of their session, Eva and Jane realized that these issues were connected, though they never would have guessed it when they started.
Many issues are like this, seemingly unrelated, while underneath it all, they may be one and the same. Uncovering these connections and releasing related limitations is exciting, like piecing together a cosmic puzzle. It also shows why using a holistic approach that rec-ognizes the myriad of connections within our energetic makeup is so important.
Connections like Eva’s defy logic and can, in some cases, create barriers to healing that are difficult to identify, particularly when a person is compartmentalizing. An individual who is compartmentalizing prevents the organic healing process from occurring by setting areas off limits. This is usually done unconsciously or with the assumption that doing so will not affect the potential for healing in other areas. From our experience, it is generally unwise to impose such limits.
Here are some common examples of compartmentalizing:
• A person may avoid talking about something seemingly unrelated to the issue at hand that is upsetting, like a sister with whom there is conflict and emotional pain.
Thoughts go through the mind so quickly that the subject of the sister may just go through and be unwittingly edited out in a second.
• An individual who is working with a marriage counselor to address disagreements with her husband and an EFT practitioner to address other challenges may avoid discussing anything related to her marriage with the EFT Practitioner, thinking that the issues are separate, and her marriage is already being addressed.
• A person who has an intestinal condition that is being treated by a physician may similarly edit out mentioning the abdominal pain that flares up when he starts to talk about his job in an EFT Session.
• A person who is dealing with growing anger related to driving in rush hour traffic may not think it is relevant and edit out mentioning it.
• A woman seeking help with losing weight who is embarrassed by her childish be-havior when someone took the last package of her favorite candies at the grocery store may edit out speaking about it.
Any of these edited symptoms may be a key to resolving a seemingly unrelated prob-lem. The situation that first brought compartmentalizing to our attention was one time when Jane was working with a client we will call Paul who was seeing a marriage counselor for problems with his wife and seeing Jane to address issues related to his self-esteem. During one of their first sessions, Paul experienced a tremendous awakening of the realization that
he was perfect just as he was. His awareness of the shift was profound and he headed home in a state of elated amazement.
Jane was pleased that he was feeling so good about himself, knowing that we all need to recognize how special we are. She was equally surprised that the next time he came for a session, Paul had completely forgotten what had transpired the last time they met. He was back at the beginning again. After repeating the same pattern several more times, Jane realized that Paul was clearing his problem when he came for a session, then recreating it when he went home. His self-esteem was deeply tied in to his relationship with his wife.
One could not be addressed without the other.
So if, for instance, a person wants to address fears she has related to money, but is unwilling to address discomfort related to her spiritual beliefs, in some cases, healing may be limited, if not impossible. The issues may seem to be completely unrelated, but there is no way of knowing ahead of time.
Take the example of a person we will call Georgia. She comes to you because she feels stuck in her spiritual development and isn’t enjoying her life. Georgia is having problems with her sister, but she doesn’t want to discuss these issues.
After several sessions dealing unsuccessfully with Georgia’s feeling of being stuck, it be-comes obvious that she is not making any progress. Something else must be happening, and you have no way of knowing what it is. You have tested the Levels of PR and done the Holistic Process, with little result. While you are trying to figure out what is happening, Georgia is still not talking about her sister, hoping the problem will work itself out somehow and not realizing that the issues overlap.
Though we feel that it is always the client’s right not to reveal anything that he or she doesn’t want to, holding back can block the healing process. We explain to our clients that their stuff is not real, meaning that they are just misunderstandings, rather than representa-tions of their true identities, so they don’t have to take them seriously or feel bad about them in any way. We also ask them to open to whatever comes into their awareness in our discussion, because for optimal success, all relevant information needs to be addressed.
In some cases, a person may be compartmentalizing without being aware of it. A per-son who is ashamed or embarrassed by a habit or behavior may be reluctant to mention it and simply edit it from his or her thinking. Or a person who has done inner work before may think that a certain issue has been cleared when it hasn’t.
Other instances of compartmentalizing can include:
• Splits between one’s health issues and one’s lifestyle
• Dividing family and friends, or work and family
• Compartmentalizing religious/spiritual teachings with the rest of one’s life
• Dealing with addictions (such as food, alcohol, drugs) as isolated issues and avoid-ing how they affect other areas of one’s life
In such cases, the person’s conscious mind might not easily make the connections needed for healing. To a degree, compartmentalizing is unavoidable, but it can help to be aware of it. Sometimes, if you sense that a piece of the puzzle is missing, you can speak
openly about it, or if you are addressing an issue of your own, open your mind to making new connections.