By Hari Lubin,
What we think of as purely physical pain can sometimes have surprising emotional roots. When we identify and resolve the underlying experience, even pain that has persisted for years may shift dramatically.
Dave, a 60-year-old man, had been experiencing persistent knee pain for five years. At the beginning of our session, I asked him to rate the intensity of the pain on a scale from 0 to 10. He rated it a 7 out of 10.
Because the pain had begun five years earlier, I asked Dave a simple question:
“What was happening emotionally in your life around the time this pain began?”
He immediately identified a frightening event that had occurred shortly before the onset of the pain.
Dave had been a passenger on a commercial flight that was approaching the runway for what appeared to be a normal landing. Then, without warning, the plane abruptly pulled up and climbed steeply.
Something was clearly wrong.
Dave remembered hearing the engines roar as the aircraft suddenly accelerated upward. The pilot initially gave the passengers no explanation. Fear gripped the cabin.
I wanted to identify the different aspects of the traumatic memory rather than simply tap on the general event. I asked Dave to go back in his mind to the moment when he first realized something was wrong.
One phrase captured the emotional charge for him:
“Panic in the plane.”
When I asked him to rate the emotional intensity of those words, he gave them a 5 out of 10.
I then asked him to identify the most intense part of that memory.
Dave immediately remembered the woman sitting across the aisle from him. She completely lost control and went into a full-fledged screaming panic attack.
That became our next tapping target.
We tapped specifically on “the lady across the aisle” and the panic he had witnessed. We also performed the 9 Gamut Procedure several times while focusing on the phrase “panic in the plane.”
As Dave performed the eye movements used in the 9 Gamut Procedure, I noticed something interesting. His eyes seemed to skip or hesitate when moving through one particular quadrant of his visual field.
I had him repeat the eye movements through that quadrant several times. Eventually the skipping stopped.
That was my cue to ask Dave about the emotional intensity of the memory again. It had fallen from a 5 to just 1 out of 10.
Then I asked about his knee.
The pain that had been a 7 at the beginning of the session was now also just 1 out of 10.
At this point, Dave experienced an important cognitive shift. Looking back at the event from his new perspective, he said:
“I succeeded in not getting infected by the panic of the other passengers.”
Instead of experiencing himself simply as someone trapped in a terrifying situation, he could now recognize his own resilience. Despite the fear spreading through the cabin, he had maintained his composure.
There was still one more aspect I wanted to explore.
When people have experienced chronic pain for years, they may develop an underlying belief that the pain is permanent. Even when the original emotional trigger has been resolved, part of the mind may still be expecting the pain to return.
So I asked Dave whether he believed his knee pain could actually go away.
He replied that he believed it might.
We tapped on both possibilities:
“My pain might go away.”
“My pain might not go away.”
We alternated between these two possibilities for several rounds, allowing to accept himself fully with or without any particular outcome. We then performed the 9 Gamut Procedure again while focusing on these phrases.
Finally, I asked Dave to check his knee pain once more.
Zero.
The pain that had persisted for five years and had been a 7 out of 10 at the beginning of the session was now completely gone.
I also asked him to return mentally to the frightening experience on the airplane and check his reaction to the phrase:
“Panic in the plane.”
That was also zero.
This case illustrates the extraordinary connection between mind and body. Physical pain can have many causes and persistent pain should always be appropriately evaluated by a qualified healthcare professional. Yet sometimes an unresolved emotional experience can keep a pain pattern active long after the original event has passed.
By carefully identifying the specific aspects of Dave’s frightening flight—the sudden aborted landing, the unexplained climb, the panic spreading through the cabin, and especially the screaming woman across the aisle—we were able to use EFT to reduce the emotional charge associated with the memory.
As the emotional intensity disappeared, so did his physical pain.
The body and mind are not separate systems. When we follow a physical symptom back to the associated emotional experience, we discover a doorway to healing that has been waiting there for years.