By Alan Morison
‘Jackie’ asked for a session of EFT because she was scared being on her own in her large apartment.
She did not sleep well if she was on her own, plagued with nightmarish dreams and feeling a spooky presence with no face hovering over her. She expressed that she would feel fingers around her throat trying to kill her.
She began tearing up as she related this story so I suggested she stop and just do some tapping.
Even though sharing my dreams feels frightening, I am safe as I deeply and completely accept myself.
She felt better, but was still left with the fear around the threat of being killed. She then confessed that she had felt this nasty presence with her for years. I stopped and asked her when these dreams had started. She said it was in her parents’ old house as a child of about 12.
Knowing how childhood fears can develop from shadows in the corner after the light is out (personal experience aged 5, long since tapped away) I asked about that, feeling at the time that maybe she was a little old for that kind of fear to start up.
She said it could be, but she would tie the doors to her wardobe closet together with string in case something scary would try to get out at night.
We tapped for something scary in the wardrobe closet, but her SUD Level of intensity of 9 dropped only to a 7-8 on a scale of 0 to 10 – some improvement but nothing significant.
When I asked her if it reminded her of anything, she couldn’t think of anything, but her emotions began to rise again and she needed more quiet tapping to calm down.
All she could think of was lying petrified in bed, but tapping for that didn’t help either. I enquired about her family, but she responded that she had grown up in a caring environment and nothing bad had happened. I asked about her life in general, what she did as a child of 12.
When she mentioned reading as a favorite pastime I felt the alarm bells going. What kind of books did she read?
When she mentioned the author, Stephen King, I thought we might well have found her core issue. She was ready to pass over that comment and go on to something else, but I stopped her and asked her how she felt when reading the horror stories.
She felt gripped by them like nothing else, not able to put them down, fascinated and horrified by the dark side, unable to resist the magnetic pull of one story after another. When asked, she realized the wardrobe closet feelings coincided with reading ‘Carrie’, King’s first published novel.
We tapped for being spooked by that novel and instantly the SUD intensity feelings dropped to a 4 out of 10. After another round, it was zero.
Even though I am spooked by the Carrie novel, I deeply and completely accept myself.
I asked Jackie if she could picture being alone in her room at night. No problem! No threat from anyone or anything, nor ghostly fingers round her neck. Pressure of time was upon us but she left for home on a definite high.
I saw Jackie again the following week and she felt that somehow there was something missing somewhere.
Several clients have mentioned this at the end of a session, often feeling a strange ‘gap’ over the stomach area or a sense of not being complete. This is what Jackie felt. She had been dominated for so long by these feelings of terror that their absence created a sense of imbalance.
So we tapped for not being complete, feeling something was missing, and finishing with a choice to be whole again. After a couple of minutes of tapping she began to feel that she was ‘all there’ and her huge smile confirmed how good she felt.
A day later, I received an email from her:
“I just thought you might want to know that I have slept very well in my flat even though I was all on my own. I haven’t had any bad dreams since. Its amazing. All my life I’ve had these dreams and now it seems they are gone! All the best and many thanks!”
