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FREE SPECIAL REPORT

Emotional Freedom Techniques

Acupressure stress release system

12 Tapping Turnarounds

EFT Case Examples: Results with Annie O’Grady

Copyright Annie O’Grady 2016

Have the life you want…

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Greetings from Annie O’Grady!

Hello dear reader, I hope you’re well and feeling over the moon – but I

suspect you’re not quite there, if you’re reading this.

In the 25 years or so that I’ve been a natural health therapist, I’ve helped

thousands of people to feel better, to dissolve specific parts of their

unique stress load, often permanently.

There are reasons that stress is a buzzword for millions if not billions of

us humans. Stress not only upsets us emotionally, it’s also proving to be

a health hazard, even a killer, because it opens the door to serious

illness.

Feel stuck, held back?

While I’m not a mechanic, I know that the word ‘governor’ refers to a

device that limits the speed of an engine. You can see your stress load

as a governor. It governs your daily life, and it holds back your big vision

for your life – whether you want it to or not.

Whatever you do, if you’re stressed you can’t go full speed ahead.

And you might be so used to your stress load that you think it’s normal!

You just don’t know why you can’t move on.

Stress operates in many ways, and some of those effects could surprise

you.

Do you feel stressed about family matters or your business or your

work, about your health or your pain levels or your fears and

phobias?

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Other people do too, and their stories comprise this Special Report.

Now these folk are free of that particular worry, they’re enjoying a new

level of peace. They’re able to move on, with abundant new energy –

and as a bonus, with a new view of far more possibilities for themselves

than they had before the change.

Plus, a new self-help tool to help achieve them.

How exciting is that?

A proven system

Ten years ago I discovered a young but already proven system of stress

release -- that I could hardly believe until I tried it. It’s called Emotional

Freedom Techniques, or EFT tapping.

EFT tapping is a meridian-based system of techniques where you

tap on a series of acupoints on your head and upper body to

release specific stresses, which you typically target with a few

words.

At the time I first tried it, I was upset, recalling a flash of a traumatic

event that had happened to me as a child. I was feeling thick-headed,

nauseous, and full of fear. I followed the Internet EFT instructions for

tapping on myself – and about three minutes later, I felt relief. The

trauma sensations were going away (I hadn’t even known they were

there, secretly stressing me for years.)

Ever since then, that bad memory has been about as powerful for me as

remembering yesterday’s breakfast. It no longer has any emotional

charge. I wish the event hadn’t happened, but it doesn’t bother or

influence me anymore.

By now this proven system, Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT

tapping), has been the object of more than sixty scientific studies,

including reports in prestigious science journals such as the psychiatric

Journal of Nervous and Mental Disorders. It has also been rated as an

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‘evidence-based’ method by the conservative American Psychological

Association.

Lowers stress hormones

A clinical study has demonstrated that one hour of EFT tapping lowers

the body’s stress hormone cortisol by a whopping 24%. No wonder so

many of my clients spontaneously say at the end of a session, ‘I feel so

much lighter!’

Harvard Medical School researchers have found that acupressure

(tapping on specific meridian points on the body) calms the brain’s fight-

flight-freeze response.

No wonder so many people say at the end of an EFT session, ‘I feel

lighter!’

Being an EFT tapping coach and trainer fills me with delight, because I

constantly see people getting freer and happier and opening up to bigger

dreams for themselves.

Why go to a life coach?

We do this when we need a new perspective on our ‘insoluble’

difficulties - to turn these into opportunities.

A skilled Emotional Freedom Techniques tapping coach has an amazing

facility to guide you to make even longstanding problem emotions and

blocking attitudes not just feel better, but vanish… typically permanently.

This can also happen for chronic physical pain, and a host of other inner

difficulties.

Life gets easier and easier!

I’ve gathered a few highlights from my client and student files, to give

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you a glimpse into some of the many and varied results The method

dissolves all kinds of stress, gently and often fast.

While dealing with their problems, my clients are also learning to use

tapping to feel better for the rest of their lives -- for themselves, also to

share with family, friends, strangers and pets – and even for first aid if

necessary.

The people quoted here are pleased to have their stories told, to help

others. Their names have been changed for privacy.

Perhaps you’ll find similarities between their problems and yours.

(In all of these accounts, the term ‘tapping on’ whatever topic refers to

the application of any of EFT’s 48-plus techniques.)

Note: Please consult your doctor for medical problems.

EFT is not a cure. It releases stress, enabling natural energies

to operate more freely.

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Contents

✰ 2 major cases

1. Biologist Marilyn: Procrastination and clutter

2. Massage therapist Delrae: Bone-on-bone arthritic knee pain

✰ Single issues

3. Office manager Valerie: Performance problem

4. Accountant Audrey: Elevator terror

5. Farmer Jody: Heart palpitations

6. Counsellor Rosalind: Public speaking

7. Library officer Claire: Snake phobia

8. Researcher Rilla: Family problem

9. Business Owner Larraine: Neck pain

10. Teacher: Driving phobia

11. Retiree Marigold: Body pain

12. Nurse Janice: Bereavement

Note:

In these accounts, ‘tapped on’ refers to any of EFT’s 48-plus techniques.

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1. Biologist Marilyn: Procrastination and Clutter

Marilyn had a good job as a biologist, a house of her own, a car,

friends, pets – and a shameful secret.

Every room of her house was permanently cluttered up with

papers, books, and other things out of place.

Before any (rare) visitors were due, she would hurriedly scoop up the

clutter in one room and put it in another, telling herself she would clear

away later. Somehow, ‘later’ never arrived. And the bigger the mess,

the more paralysed she became to do anything about it.

Marilyn lived this way for a couple of years.

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One day, picking her way along the central passage of her home among

piles of papers, she came to a stop and shuddered. Suddenly she

recognised that something was seriously wrong. She simply could not

bring herself to clear up, or even to have someone come in and help her

do it.

She started worrying that she might be on her way to joining the packrat

brigade. She had read about old people living among so many piles of

saved newspapers throughout their homes, that when they became ill,

rescuers had to fight their way in.

This wakeup shook her so much that, bewildered and overwhelmed, she

came to me for help for her state of mind. She had previously learned

basic EFT but had forgotten about it.

She told me, ‘I used to be quite neat. I can’t understand this, but it’s

seriously getting me down.’

Was ‘Just do it!’ the answer?

Was Marilyn’s clutter problem a lack of willpower? Or a late version of

teenage rebellion? No. There was more to it.

EFT Master Lindsay Kenny writes, ‘Clutter is often triggered by an event

or a series of events that left the victim feeling traumatised, fearful and

powerless. Hanging on to things gives some people a sense of

commanding or controlling at least a portion of their lives.’

I asked Marilyn to list any traumas she had suffered. She told me of:

several physical accidents

having had to leave a country that she loved to settle in Australia

her father’s death

a painful split with her brother

several broken primary relationships.

As we talked, other more urgent problems came to light.

Marilyn’s workload was steadily rising

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her energy was so low that her busy daily life was feeling like a

struggle

a thyroid problem made her anxious.

She complained, ‘Ten years ago I could do four things at once, I had

heaps of energy.’

While EFT does not diagnose, her condition appeared obviously to be

an unrecognised mild depression, perhaps burnout, of which clutter was

a symptom.

Procrastination

Then she ‘just happened to mention’ another problem.

On top of her daily practical tasks as a biologist, which she loved, she

was expected to create 30 technical reports within a timeframe. These

required her to summarise research, some of which was new to her.

She had felt so daunted that although more than half the allotted time

had elapsed, she hadn’t begun. Failure in this could threaten her job.

As this was the most pressing difficulty, we began tapping about it, first

with the protocol for overwhelm -- which is simply tapping rounds of

EFT’s acupoint sequence without words -- until she felt calmer.

I recommended this daily during her treatment. I suggested she could

tap during the four hours a day she spent driving to and from her

workplace, as lots of people find solitary driving a good opportunity to

tap on what’s worrying them.

(Tip for tappers – instead of using both hands to tap the

karate chop point on your hand, tap the side of one hand

gently on the steering wheel.)

Feeling ‘caged’

When I asked Marilyn what happened in her body when she thought of

the reports she needed to write, she said she felt ‘caged’, and her whole

body tensed.

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She burst out with, ‘I hate study!’

I asked, ‘What does this body sensation remind you of?’ I asked.

It reminded her of her five years of intense study to gain her Master’s

degree, while holding down a day job as well, with overtime. In those

last years she had averaged only four hours sleep a night.

While we tapped together, we said:

Setup Statements:

Even though I feel caged and tense when I think of writing reports, I

accept and love myself deeply and completely.

Even though I hated and loathed those years with all that study, and I

never want to do anything like that again, I love myself anyway.

Even though I loathe study, and why shouldn’t I, I’m now bringing

healing to this.

Reminder words: Study makes me tense and I hate it.

Marilyn rated this intensity at 10/10, and it went to 14 as she

remembered more about being trapped in that grind, then went back to

10.

As we continued the gentle, fast, basic EFT process, her body relaxed,

she started to look brighter, and her intensity dropped. But she still

loathed study.

She said, ‘Thinking about those reports I have to do, I feel overwhelmed

by the information I’ll have to deal with,’ she said. ‘And “study” is

connected with lots of horrible experiences at Uni, and constant fears

that I would fail. My back feels sore, I feel slightly sick.’

Even though my back is sore and I feel sick at the thought of having to

write those reports, I accept myself.

Tapping took her intensity number down to zero, demonstrating that this

specific stress had now vanished, typically permanently. She said she

felt a little more hopeful.

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I asked Marilyn what else got in the way of her doing the reports at

home. She said, ‘It’s easy to create interruptions, like thinking I should

try and tidy the room.

‘But part of me feels really reluctant to work at home. Home is for

relaxing. I shouldn’t be working when I’m at home.’

We took this opinion as a personal rule she would like to waive in this

instance. She agreed that, logically, at home she became her own boss,

choosing when and where she would work, and that felt better than

being a victim of overwork.

We sketched out a time frame, requiring her to start tackling the reports

the next night. But although that made good sense, she doubted she

would break through her reluctance barrier.

More tapping

So we continued with the process: EFT requires that we tune into the

negative briefly, so we can release it and make room for the positive.

Setup Statements

Even though I can‘t be responsible for being my own boss at home

because I shouldn’t bring work home with me, I am ready to let this go.

Even though working at home reminds me of the grind of studying for my

Master’s degree at night after work for five years, and that was so

horrible I never want to go there again, I accept myself and I’m willing to

change and have a whole new deal.

(Now it was time to insert a little hope.)

Even though I shouldn’t bring work home with me, maybe it could be

safe now to be my own boss and organise my own working hours at

home.

Reminder: I don’t want to do work at home.

Marilyn’s body was now feeling easier, but the reports still loomed

threateningly.

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Even though I still think that project’s too hard for me, I love and accept

myself anyway.

We kept on tapping away her fears and doubts, and reinforcing how

good she would feel when the job was done.

We uncovered and released a lot of residual anger at that Masters

system. She said, ‘I once had to do 14 stupid exams in two weeks, on

stuff that anyone could look up in a book!’

Even though I hate that unfair Masters system, I’m OK.

Finally, I saw a new gleam in her eye. ‘Hey, I feel lighter,’ she said,

‘Would you believe I’m actually looking forward to doing reports

tomorrow night?’

She was now relieved – and vitalised. She said, ‘When I was twenty I

used to feel curious and excited every day, about “What’s life going to

bring today?” Life was an adventure!

‘Just now I felt that again, briefly! That’s where I want to be.’

‘Everything was up off the floor!’

Ten days later, Marilyn rang me with an excited report on progress with

the clutter issue. ‘My family came over yesterday, and I had got

everything up off the floor!

‘I’m so far ahead of where I have been. It’s just terrific. I feel more like I

used to, when I could just rip through jobs. This is certainly working!’

And her next day’s email: ‘Even better! I have been working on the

hardest of the reports, and it just seems simple. I am dumbfounded.

Going through the research was straightforward, I could pick out useful

stuff easily. And it was no stress. Yay…’

She even had a health bonus: ‘Last night in bed I counted my heartbeat,

and it had improved! The only thing different is EFT.’

Marilyn is continuing her sessions for a while, to dissolve more of her

stored stresses, because she really wants to get back her youthful zest.

She knows this requires that we will be gently neutralising painful

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events: traumas, and a list of unresolved emotional situations, that

have been covertly draining her energy over the years.

But she’s no longer worried about clutter taking over, because now she

happily clears it up as it happens – mostly. (She hasn’t gone OCD.)

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2. Massage Therapist Delrae:

Bone-on-bone arthritic knee pain (This article previously appeared in the ACEP Journal September 2012)

A new client, Delrae, an attractive woman in mid-life, walked slowly

into my office. She was limping and a little bent over, because of

severe pain in her left knee. She later rated this pain at 10/10 ‘most

of the time’, so that she was constantly holding back tears.

Because of the pain, she had not been able to bend that knee for six

months. Arthritis had robbed the knee of cartilage, so she was walking,

or limping, ‘bone-on-bone’. Her normal life had literally come to a

standstill.

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Delrae assumed that the lack of cartilage meant that she would always

have to be in pain. She was exploring her options around knee

replacement, visiting physiotherapists and doctors. She had done some

tapping years ago, and wondered if EFT could help her now.

An hour later she walked normally around my room -- without that left

knee pain. She easily bent the knee to a right angle. She was standing

upright.

Six weeks later Delrae emailed me. She was jubilant that, not only was

the knee still free of pain, but the improvement in her posture had

apparently freed a trapped nerve that had been creating a sciatica-type

pain in her lower back, so she was now free of that too.

She added, ‘I still need to do exercises for the knee, but it’s all good.’

How did this happen?

Here is how this new freedom happened so quickly for her.

I first told her that, as unlikely as it seems, I had read of cases where

people with a similar knee problem had become pain-free, although

there was no guarantee this would happen for her.

I shortened my client intake process with her as I was keen to start

tapping, because she was in such pain. Even so, gathering information

took up a third of this one-hour session time.

I asked basic health questions. She had been diagnosed with

depression recently, had a weight issue, and suffered from various other

aches and pains. She quoted a recent X-ray on her left knee as

showing ‘L4/5 and L5/S1 disc height is lost, and Grade 1 anterolisthesis

at L4/5’.

I next asked her to list traumas she’d experienced throughout her life,

especially up to age 18.

I gave her a 1-page questionnaire from the U.S. Adverse Childhood

Experiences (ACE) major scientific study of how trauma in early life is

likely to result in serious illness or behavioural problems later in life.

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This includes arthritis, as well as cancer, heart disease, bone fracture,

diabetes and more.

Delrae briefly identified traumas from her upbringing, including physical

violence in her childhood home, lack of emotional support, often

watching her mother being physically attacked, and having a mentally ill

family member. She also included trauma caused through her church

upbringing.

Simply listing these memories brought tears -- and she had not even

thought about any traumas beyond age eighteen.

Where to start?

Delrae now said that she constantly felt angry and tense. So to me that

was the place to start. I was of course looking for the fastest way to

relieve her suffering in the knee. If this ‘doorway’ did not lower the pain,

I would try another.

Her left knee pain was 10. Her anger about having it was 10. I asked her

to imagine the color of the pain, and she said red. ‘Even though I have

this terrible red pain always in my left knee, and I am so angry about it, I

love and accept myself deeply and completely.’

I tap along with my clients, to guide them. Our first round took both the

anger and the pain from 10 to 9. So we continued with this, and over the

rest of this one-hour session her intensity slowly crept down by ones. In

her mind, the color of the pain started to fade.

Along the way Delrae went into overwhelm a couple of times, and I

taught her the overwhelm protocol of tapping silent rounds to swiftly

restore calm.

As we tapped away the current stress, her anger focus shifted between

anger about the knee pain to anger about her remembered childhood

situations. We were still working generally about her anger.

Occasionally another aspect would intrude, especially sadness, and we

would tap that down before returning to the anger.

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When both anger and pain had reduced to 1, we did the Choices

process: ‘Even though I still have some pain in my left knee, I choose

instead to have total peace in my left knee (her words)’ She reached 0.

Testing the work

Then I asked her to test how her knee felt when she walked on it. That

was when she walked around the room, marvelling at being free of the

pain that had blighted her life, and at her new mobility.

I explained that we could not predict how long freedom from this pain

would last. If it came back, I said, that would probably be a signal that

she needed to clear more of her burden of emotional pain, but she would

need also to consult her doctor.

Modern research suggests that emotional pain can exacerbate physical

pain by at least 65%. Here, we had done a lot better.

Follow- up report

Six weeks after her session Delrae emailed me that the knee was still

free of pain. She also reported that, because her posture was now

upright and she no longer limped, the lower back sciatica-type pain had

also disappeared.

‘Tapping has very much become a regular happening in my life now, and

once again, ever so grateful to you,’ she wrote.

She added, ‘The surgeons are saying yes, go ahead with knee

replacement. But just at the moment I’m doing so well. I will give it

some consideration if I'm in trouble.’

She now had a breathing space to consider her choices for longer-term

care of the knee.

Meanwhile, she had returned part-time to both her own bodywork

practice and a retail job too, both requiring her to stand for up to an hour.

Some of her depression had lifted. She was no longer always on the

verge of tears.

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Single issues

EFT treatment for bigger issues is sprinkled with smaller

victories that often occur along the way.

Here are some examples of stress dissolved from smaller

issues.

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3. Office manager Valerie: ‘I’m a slow learner’

A client, Valerie, was worried about her performance at work. She

told me, ‘I’m a slow learner.’

‘Oh?’ I said, ‘How do you know?’

She said, ‘Because a teacher told me, many years ago. She said that

although I was a slow learner, finally I would really “get it”.’

This woman had years of university study behind her, but had just told

me how much she hated to learn new things. Now her big boss had told

her to learn a new skill – and she kept putting the task off, because it

reminded her of many painful past experiences of trying to absorb

something new.

I asked if she had ever checked out that teacher’s opinion with other

people who had shared her study years, for their opinions. ‘No,’ she

said, looking surprised.

I asked, ‘How do you know you aren’t actually an average or normal

learner? Or even a fast learner?’ She blinked and said she didn’t.

‘Perhaps the teacher was right,’ I said, ‘but would you be willing to

explore this?’ She was.

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Stress of new challenges

We discussed this perception of herself as a slow learner. Obviously it

had put a dampener on her self-image, plus it added big stress to new

writing or reading or practical tasks. We looked at the possibility that

she’d accepted one person’s assessment as truth -- and that perhaps

this had become her own belief, which seemed to be proving itself.

We began to tap on the topic.

Setup Statements

Even though I think I’m a slow learner, I accept myself.

Even though I think it has to take me so long to understand anything

new, I love myself, and I acknowledge that I did succeed in getting my

Master’s degree.

Even though perhaps that teacher was wrong, I still think I’m a slow

learner, and I accept myself without judgment anyway

Reminder: I’m a slow learner.

Tapping along these lines for a few rounds shook her certainty that of

course she was a slow learner.

A new choice

We ended with a Choices tapping process. She was excited as she

chose the words.

Positive:

Even though I’ve loathed new learning for many years, I choose instead

to find new learning exciting, a delight, and it works, and I’m proud of my

work!

Negative

I’m a slow learner

After we’d finished tapping this way -- one round on the negative thought, one round on the positive, and one round alternating the two -- she amazed herself by saying, ‘Wow, I almost can’t wait to get into this new skill!’

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She was so impressed that she asked if she could have another session

right away, for another problem.

We could both see that now there was a good chance her work

performance wouldn’t be hampered any more, by her reluctance to do

anything that looked like new learning.

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4. Accountant Audrey: Elevator Terror

One of my clients who worked in IT made me aware of the plight of business people who suffer with a heights phobia or an elevator phobia. They can only apply for jobs where they work at street level, or one or two floors above. In high rise cities this is severely limiting.

So when a new client, Audrey, contacted me at a friend’s suggestion to try EFT for her terror in elevators (Australians call them ‘lifts’), I expected phobia.

But a phobia is an apparently irrational fear. It turned out that Audrey

had good reason to be too terrified to set foot in an elevator. She had

been traumatized by being in three elevator accidents.

She’d not had this fear until an elevator she was in dropped three floors.

At another time, she was trapped, panicking, in a hospital elevator for

ten minutes, where passengers included ‘a patient with a gaping wound’.

In a third incident, she was in a Hong Kong elevator that dropped

twenty-six floors.

Afraid for her job

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Currently Audrey, an accountant, was working at a job she liked a lot on

the second floor of a city office building, and had managed to keep her

fears a secret by often using the stairs. But she had just been told she

would be moved to the seventh floor.

She was afraid she’d have to try and find another job. So there was a lot

at stake for her in these sessions.

After I showed Audrey how to do the basic tapping technique that is the

core of all EFT work, we began by collapsing her emotional intensities

over various parts of the current problem. This took her gently through

panic after an elevator’s doors closed, through feeling at the mercy of

the elevator, through tensing with terror at the movements of the cage.

All these intense reactions were lessening through the tapping.

Next we used EFT’s Tearless Trauma techniques on one of the three

incidents, where the Hong Kong elevator dropped twenty-six floors.

Before she began to describe in detail what happened, we collapsed her

anxiety about doing this, from 10-0.

As the techniques began to dissolve her stress, within a few minutes

Audrey could tell the story of that accident without feeling any emotion.

She could hardly believe the change.

‘A bit more relaxed’

Returning for her second session, Audrey said she ‘felt a bit more

relaxed about this elevator problem’.

We worked on more aspects of her fears:

Even though I hate the whooshing sound a lift makes…

Even though I hate the bouncy wavering movement…

Even though I’m afraid there’ll be something wrong with this lift…

Even though I’m afraid I’ll get stuck again…

Reminder

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Afraid of this elevator

Then we applied EFT’s Movie Technique to the remaining two incidents,

including everything we could find that still bothered her in those

memories, such as:

Setup Statement

Even though I feel trapped and stranded and I hope they can get me out,

I accept myself.

Even though I’m afraid I’m going to die here, I love and accept myself.

Even though this elevator will kill me, I love and accept myself

Reminder

Afraid I’ll die in this box.

Tapping brought up other memories

As we de-fused the emotional impact of the accidents, other memories

came up, of:

three earlier panic attacks involving her feeling threatened

being in a hospital incident where she was drenched with the

blood of her haemophiliac brother.

We tapped on every aspect we could find, until she felt calm.

Finally, we tapped a bundling release on ‘the last residue of this elevator

trauma’. She said she felt calm about using an elevator now, and was

willing to try it.

One year later

A year later Audrey contacted me for an EFT session on another

problem.

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She added, ‘By the way, I kept my job. I’ve been happily going up and

down in elevators to the seventh floor several times a day since our

sessions.’

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5. Farmer Jody: Heart Palpitations

This is a case where a woman’s recent severe heart palpitations

disappeared after one EFT tapping session, although we did no

tapping about the palpitations themselves.

Jody had started having heart palpitations that frightened her so much,

she was about to go to a doctor for a heart check-up and medication.

Her farmer husband and teenage children were also worried about her.

I happened to be visiting on a property neighboring her farm when Jody

arrived in tears after a scene with her husband. This was a familiar

event where, she said, he had sounded angry and this had made her

cry. He had never struck her, but whenever she heard an angry tone in

his voice she felt fearful.

She had often attempted to talk about the situation with him, and had

asked him to moderate his behaviour, but he refused to agree that he

was angry, and said it was her problem.

Her neighbour suggested that Jody have a tapping session about her

palpitations and her distress, as I was there. Jody thought the idea was

strange, but felt desperate enough to try it.

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The problem seemed to be her reactions to her husband’s angry words.

For years she had cringed at the tone of his voice when he felt irritated

about anything, even if it had nothing to do with her – and even if he said

he was not angry.

Although they loved each other dearly, lately she was so disturbed about

her heart palpitations that she’d been wondering if she could even go on

in the marriage. The possibility of having to leave her home and family

for the sake of her health was adding greatly to her present stress.

Body sensations

I asked, ‘When you hear this tone in his voice that to you means he‘s

angry, what happens in your body, apart from the new palpitations?’

She said that her stomach churned, her throat got tight, and her whole

body caved in.

I asked her, ‘Who or what do those sensations remind you of?’

The recall was easy. Her father came to mind.

I asked if she could remember the worst time of hearing or seeing her

father angry. She remembered being a small girl crouched trembling in

her bedroom, listening while next door her father angrily berated her

elder sister. His rage seemed to go on and on, and so did the little girl’s

terror. Now, as she remembered, her terror reached 10/10.

We tapped on her self-talk at the time:

--What if he hurts her?

-- What if he hurts me?

-- He’s like a monster

-- We’re both in danger

-- He’s out of control

-- There’s nobody here to help

-- What can I do?

-- What if he kills her?

-- What if he kills me?

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But as we continued to tap, the intensity of her terror fell steadily, until

she was smiling. ‘This feels different,’ she said.

When her stress was down to 4, we tapped on forgiving her father, who

was normally a reasonable man:

Setup Statement:

Even though I don’t understand why he was so angry, he must have had

his reasons, and I don’t agree but I choose to forgive him, for my sake.

Reminder:

I forgive you, Dad

Jody was smiling with relief as she left. A few months later I heard that

her palpitations had never returned after that session.

She said happily to me on the phone, ‘Now when he sounds angry I let it

just flow past me. Sometimes I’ve even laughed. It’s amazing.’

Not only Jody but her whole family is relieved at her new lease of health.

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6. Counsellor Rosalind: Public speaking

Adult fears of public speaking often hark back to child or teenage

events involving ridicule or put-down behaviour by other people,

which the speaker has taken to heart. With EFT, the main healing

task is to neutralise the causal event/s so they no longer intrude on

the present.

Counsellor Rosalind managed to speak in public for her work, but at a

painful price. Every time she did so, she would have what she called ‘a

terrible ache in my jaw.’ This would last for a day, often longer, and had

been occurring ever since she was teenage.

She told me, ‘Nothing I could do would stop it happening.’ This aftermath

happened not only with public speaking, but whenever she’d performed

publicly in any way, or even when she had done something else to prove

herself to other people.

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Hunting the cause

As we started to explore possible origins of this phenomenon, Rosalind

began to recognise that the jaw ache connected with a childhood need.

She recalled, ‘I had to show people I could do it myself and not let

anyone know that I was afraid.

‘This was connected with authority figures.

‘As a child I had lived for some time in an orphanage, and then I was

fostered for two years by a large, very autocratic man whose opinions of

me terrified me.

‘My fear of being judged unworthy seemed to clamp painfully in my jaw.’

We tapped on every aspect of this problem, including her emotions

about suffering this way, and some still painful events where she had

been criticised by adults in her young years.

Her feedback later: ‘Now I’m freely able to speak in public. The jaw

ache does not happen any more!’

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7. Library officer Claire: massive phobia of

snakes

Claire, a library officer, was so afraid of snakes that she couldn’t

say the word ‘snake’. If pressed, she would say ‘that thing-y’.

She had developed the snake phobia in her teens, with no idea why.

She could not remember ever having an encounter with a snake.

By the time she was in her twenties, if she said ‘snake’ or saw a picture

of one, she would break out in a sweat, feel nauseous, develop an

instant headache, feel her heart slam against her chest. So she

avoided the word. She lived and worked in outer city suburbs, where

snakes were not uncommon.

Sometime after completing EFT training levels 1 and 2 with me, Claire

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was driving a friend home, when she realised with a shock that she had

just driven over an already flattened snake.

She could only pull the car over to the side of the road and collapse

against the steering wheel, sobbing and shaking. She went through two

waves of panic attacks, while her passenger, a fellow tapper, tapped her

through them.

‘What’s the matter?’ her bewildered friend was asking. Eventually Claire

gasped, ‘I just drove over a thing-y.’

Claire decided to confront the phobia in a tapping session with me.

A kindergarten memory

Claire later wrote, ‘A week after that driving episode I met with Annie.

Through tapping on the anxiety and fear I felt over snakes, a memory

from my early childhood resurfaced spontaneously.’

We’d reached that point after I’d asked Claire about other times when

she’d had similar physical and emotional reactions. She suddenly

remembered an incident when she was very young in kindergarten,

involving another child and her own feelings of guilt.

Although she preferred not to share details, we applied the Matrix

Reimprinting with EFT process, so that Claire could tap on her young

self in her mind.

‘By the end of the hour session,’ she continued, ‘I was saying the word

“snake” with no hesitation and no negative side effects, mental or

physical. I was imagining a snake slithering along the ground, and to

my shock, I didn’t feel a thing!’

Testing the work

‘Later that day I watched “The Tapping Solution” EFT documentary by

Nick Ortner. No-one had warned me that there was a snake in the

DVD.

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‘When the snake first appeared my instinct was to look away like I

would have in the past, with my feet up off the floor, feeling like I was

going to be sick.

‘But I started tapping, and worked up enough courage to sneak quick

glances at the screen, without any real discomfort. By the next day I

could watch the entire snake scene without flinching, and I even found

myself thinking how cute the snake was!

‘Thank you Annie, and thank you tapping! I had a complete turnaround

of a massive phobia in just one hour. Who knew it would be so easy?’

What caused the phobia?

The mystery remaining is – where did the phobia come from? And why

did it go? Claire said that her kindergarten memory did not contain a

snake, nor any snake-like object. The only similarity was Claire’s

emotional state.

Do we need to bother about why? Claire’s suffering over seeing snakes

is at an end, probably permanently.

If by any chance the phobia should resurface later – perhaps when she

is ready to deal with some other hidden memory – now that Claire has

become a trained tapper, she will know how to free herself again.

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8. Business Owner Laraine: 30-year neck pain

An EFT newbie attending one of my weekly EFT evening classes

during a six- week course did her homework -- and dissolved the

neck pain she’d suffered with for nearly three decades.

Laraine, owner of a small business, learned in detail how EFT

techniques deal with physical pain, also with clearing events.

She explained, ‘I started wondering if my neck pain and stiffness were

connected with two car accidents, one 25 years ago, and one 30 years

ago. I usually get relief by going to my chiropractor.

‘So the next day I spent a couple of hours at home tapping about this,

using the Movie Technique to tap on the emotions I still had from both

those accidents.

‘There was fear, shock, and some anger, and in one case rage at the

person who had driven into the back of my car. Then I tested and

tested.

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‘My neck pain disappeared! So I cancelled that day’s chiropractic

appointment. I’m so happy!

‘And I understand that if the pain came back, I’d need to do more of that

sort of thing.’

At the following class she was still pain-free. And she showed us how

she could now turn her head from side to side normally, for the first time

in decades.

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9. Researcher Rilla: Family Dynamics

Rilla was about to travel across the world to a rare family

gathering. She was dreading spending a few days around a family

member by marriage, Alan.

On their rare meetings over a few decades, Alan had publicly treated her

with contempt. Previously she had played his game and had felt inferior.

She didn’t want to do that again, but she couldn’t talk herself out of it.

In our EFT tapping session I asked her, ‘When you think of Alan, where

do you feel this dread in your body?’

She said, ‘My whole upper chest tightens up.’

We could simply have tapped on this body symptom to decrease its

intensity. But I decided to use EFT Master Gwyneth Moss’s

‘Imagineering’ application of EFT. This process works with metaphor,

and I thought it might enable Rilla’s right brain capacities to offer her a

useful experience.

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A ball of light

I asked her to imagine she was holding a ball of beautiful white light in

her palm, then to shrink the ball to fit on her forefinger. Then I

suggested she close her eyes and gently place her forefinger against a

part of her body that was comfortable. This was for comparison later.

I asked, ‘What do you ‘see’ in that beam of light? Just say your first

impression. The picture might be biological, or it might be anything at

all.’

She said, ‘I just see a smooth surface,’ she said.

Next I asked her to think of Alan, and place her forefinger against the

part of her body that reacted.

Rilla said, ‘It’s my chest, I see tight muscles.’

I asked her to open her eyes and we tapped a round with the words:

Setup Statement:

Even though my chest muscles are tight, I accept myself.

Reminder: Tight chest muscles

Then she put her beam of light into her chest again. This time she said,

‘Oh, now I see a meadow in sunlight.’

I said, ‘Take a good look all over that meadow, what else do you see?’

She said, ‘Oh, there’s a little green grass snake. They’re harmless, I

used to play with them when I was a child.’

I asked her to open her eyes, and we tapped again.

Even though there’s a snake in the grass, I accept and love myself.

Next time when Rilla shone the beam of light into her chest, she said,

‘I’m picking the little snake up.’

‘What is it doing?’

‘It’s hissing at me.’

She opened her eyes and we tapped on:

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Even though the snake is hissing at me, I accept and love myself deeply

and completely.

Now when she opened her eyes, she said, ‘Alan just treats me with

contempt to protect himself, that’s all it is. I don’t need to react.’

One more time Rilla shone the light into her chest and said, ‘The snake

has gone down into its burrow. There’s just the lovely field in the

sunlight.’

Where did the dread go?

We went on to other matters until the end of the session, when I tested

the work by repeating Alan’s name to Rilla and asked what she felt.

She looked at me blankly. ‘There’s nothing there,’ she said. ’Except I

feel a bit sorry for him.’

The dread that had been her companion over years whenever she

thought of Alan had dissipated in a few minutes, even making way for

some compassion. With this obstacle out of the way, Rilla could now

enjoy her family get-together.

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10. Teacher Melanie: Driving Phobia

When teacher Melanie started to panic while driving her car around

the city she lived in, she couldn’t understand why. This began to

happen whenever she came to a freeway, or to a road curving off to

one side.

She told me at the start of her EFT tapping session with me: ‘I would just

freeze and I couldn’t drive on. It was terrible, and dangerous too.’

Melanie had been driving for some time, if a little nervously, before this

fear developed. She’d decided to try for help from EFT, as she’d heard

that it could dissolve phobias quickly and gently.

To introduce her to EFT, we did four fast demonstration rounds. For this

she focused on sadness she’d felt for three years, over a

misunderstanding with a friend. She was astonished to lose the

sadness so quickly.

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A solo drive

Melanie’s driving difficulty tracked back to her first solo interstate drive.

She had been enjoying country driving, and had bought a chicken roll for

lunch. However, soon after eating it, she began to feel strange –

disoriented and ill. Fighting the worsening sensations, she kept driving

when she could.

Her heart now started pounding, she had to stop to vomit. She

suspected food poisoning. She stopped at a roadhouse and vomited

again. (Melanie also has a vomiting phobia -- which she can now deal

with later through EFT.)

Closer to home on the freeway, as she pressed on she became even

more disoriented. She hallucinated that the (flat) road was rising up and

down, felt she was speeding although the speedometer showed 10 kph.

She gripped the wheel desperately.

Terrified, she pulled into the next truck layby, hoping to find help, but it

was empty. She tried to call her son in her home city, but her cell phone

would not operate. This was the worst part of her journey.

Later the phone worked. Her son and a friend eventually arrived, and

her son drove her car home with the friend following.

Tapping all over it

In EFT terms, we tapped all over this series of events, for all the

emotions that had been involved, especially fear, for body sensations,

disorientation, vomiting, for her feelings when calling her son --

helplessness, embarrassment that she, the mother, was out of control,

guilt for bringing him out.

When we tested the work, her anxiety was at zero.

I asked her to remember the times she had tried to drive on a freeway

when she had frozen, and we collapsed her current emotions about

those.

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I asked her to close her eyes and imagine she was now about to drive

on a freeway. She easily imagined it.

Later Melanie reported to me on email, ‘I can now drive on freeways! And

the impact on my general driving has been very positive, I’m much more

relaxed, I am really enjoying driving now.’

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11. Retiree Marigold: long-standing body pain

A special delight for EFT practitioners is seeing clients healing

right in front of us.

After a decade of specialising in this energy therapy, I still feel wonder at

the fact that – even at the most basic level of EFT, as this account

shows -- its rewards can be out of all proportion to the small amount of

effort required.

My 70-year-old client sat tensely on the chair for her first EFT session.

Her blue eyes showed worry. And she’d forgotten to bring her hearing

aid.

Marigold was there because she had read an article I wrote on EFT

helping relationship stress. ‘That sounded so good,’ she said. ‘I’ve had

abusive relationships.’

She had rung me on the 33rd anniversary of losing a 12-year-old

daughter, who had been abducted on her way home from netball, and

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was never found. ‘I can’t get past it,’ Marigold said. ‘I’m seeing a

psychiatrist and a psychologist, they’ve been so kind.’

Her children’s rejection

By means of a raised voice and gestures, I managed a brief intake form

with Marigold. She spoke of the present, of one of her 4 adult children

rejecting and abusing her, spoiling Marigold’s relationship with the little

grandson she adored.

She also spoke of the past, of her history of working in shops. She

repeated the words her mother had told her were her response to

Marigold’s birth: ‘I didn’t want a girl, throw her in the rubbish.’ Marigold

said now, ‘I still can’t look at myself in the mirror, I feel totally displaced.’

I said (loudly), ‘After talking about all this, what are you feeling?’

‘Sad,’ she said. ‘Sometimes I think all this sadness will choke me.’

So I taught her the basic EFT release process focussing simply on ‘this

sadness’, which Marigold rated at 10 plus/10 at that time.

‘Like going down in a lift’

After the first round, Marigold looked surprised, because her intensity

dropped to 8. After the second round it went to 6. After the third round

she gasped, ‘Five.’

Her body visibly sagged and she curled over so I was seeing the top of

her head. Was she fainting? Not quite. She was simply overcome with

relief. She said, ‘Oh, I feel like jelly, oh, it’s a lovely feeling.’

We tapped the next round and she folded over again, saying, ‘Oh, it’s

like going down in a lift. Thank you, thank you.’ (We were both thanking

EFT.)

She reached zero and looked stunned, still sagging in the chair.

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Dealing with a painful lump

A little later she showed me a hard lump of flesh at her midriff, painful to

touch, that she described as a calcium deposit that showed up on X-

rays.

It had grown 55 years ago, starting when she was 15 years old.

The lump appeared after her father had punched her there so hard that

she had flown out through a doorway and lost consciousness.

He ‘d punched her to punish her, one day when she arrived home from

work. Her crime? Having refused that morning -- when Marigold was

about to run for the bus to get to work on time -- to make her abusive

mother a cup of coffee.

Marigold said, ‘I feel I lost myself when he punched me, he took my soul,

does that sound crazy?

‘Now I think if I say no, someone will kill me. So I’ve always let people

walk all over me.’

Pain diminished

‘Is the lump painful now?’ I asked.

‘When I touch it, it’s a 5 out of 10,’ she said. So we tapped

Even though this lump is painful, I love and accept myself deeply and

completely.

She bowed her head again, dizzy this time, as the pain shot up to 10.

As we tapped another round the pain went to 2.

‘That’s so nice, the relief, that’s so nice,’ she kept saying. Testing by

prodding her midriff, after the next round she could not find any pain.

She was astonished. She said, ‘’Could that have anything to do with the

cough I’ve had all my life?’

I said that the pain might return, as we had not dealt with the trauma that

had caused it, but for this, and for help with other traumas, she would

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need to return with her hearing aid. She said she certainly would,

adding, ‘I feel so relieved, I could sleep for Australia.’

I explained that now she herself could repeat the basic tapping

technique whenever she felt sad or uncomfortable. She left with a

tapping guide and my DIY EFT book, ‘Tapping Your Troubles Away with

EFT’.

‘I’m going to be busy,’ she said.

Follow-up 3 days later

‘After that session,’ Marigold said on the phone, ‘Walking up the street I

started to laugh. And I can’t stop writing light-hearted poetry, it’s pouring

out of me.

‘And something else strange happened. For years I’ve had such pain in

my hips and back, and I tapped, and it has lessened so much – ‘

She gave me permission to share her experiences because she herself

had come to EFT from reading an article.

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12. Nurse Janice: bereavement

Janice, a nurse, was suffering from an annual malady: feeling sad

and depressed around the anniversary of her father’s death five

years previously.

She came to me in the hope that she could stop this regular depression.

What could she do? It wasn’t getting any less each year. She didn’t

want to have to take drugs every year to feel better.

As we talked, what emerged was that hers was not just sadness over

the loss of a loved parent. There was more to it.

Janice felt weighed down with sadness because she hadn’t known her

father well, although he had lived with the family. Tears came into her

eyes.

She said, ‘He wasn’t at home a lot, and I didn’t get on with him anyway.

He was emotionally cruel to Mum. Why am I so sad?’

‘That was his fault!’

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She listed a number of uncomfortable events in her own life that, deep

down, she felt were her father’s fault because of his behaviour when she

was growing up, although she’d never said anything to him about this.

We began to tap down her anger at him, but she stopped and said, ‘I

know I need to let this anger go, it’s not good for me, but doing this

makes me feel disloyal to him.’

So we tapped on the disloyal feeling, which evaporated as she focussed

on his behaviour and her suppressed rage, which she rated as 8 /10.

She continued, ‘He’d put Mum down in public, and force her to do things

that would make her look foolish. That poor little dolly! He was a bully! ‘

She burst out with: ‘My father was contemptible!’

Tapping continued to diminish this long-held rage -- which she hadn’t

known what to do with, all through her life.

A spontaneous change

When Janice felt her anger was only 4/10, she started to wonder how

her father had got to be a person like that.

She said, ‘His own father came home from a war, and I guess these

days we’d say he had Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, but in those days

it wasn’t known.’ I told her that now it was quite well known that if a

parent was suffering from PTSD, the rest of the household members

were also likely to become traumatised.

She said, ‘I guess Dad’s father didn’t treat him very well then, when he

was young,’ she said. ‘But adults do have choices. He could have tried

harder to be a kinder person! His brother is a very kind man, and he

went through a war too.

‘Maybe Dad just didn’t have the mature tools to do that. Yes, I would

say he was immature.’

As her anger continued to dissolve, soon she was spontaneously saying,

with conviction, ‘I forgive you, Dad, for being immature.’

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And then she couldn’t find any anger at all. She didn’t approve of how

he had been, but she could feel some compassion for him.

And strangely – she wasn’t sad any more, either. She left smiling.

THE END