By Anne Merkel, PhD, CNHP
Amanda presented a very serious autoimmune condition: Wegener’s vasculitis, in which the body’s blood flow gets cut off from major organs. She had almost died and had spent extensive time in the hospital, part of which was in an induced coma. Amanda came to me first with fear that her symptoms were returning and then later we worked together to help her lose the weight that she had taken on while on extensive steroid therapy.
Amanda is a “poster child” for successful use of EFT and energy therapy tools, and she continues to improve to this day.
Her case is an extreme example of how one’s lifestyle and life stresses can start to kill a person. She described her health and situation here:
“Two and a half years ago I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called Wegener’s vasculitis. It’s an attack of the small blood vessels that can swell up and cut off blood supply to my organs. Long story short, it landed me with pneumonia in the hospital, and that put me in a coma for 14 days in a total of a 28-day hospital stay. From that I was given chemo and massive steroids. That kind of led me to looking at additional options to help heal myself.
“I had a lot of trauma from being put in a coma for 28 days. And I had just had a miscarriage. My last job was stressful because I missed so much work because my body was shutting down. I didn’t feel good about myself and my productivity in that job. That left some bad feelings. I was also a student at the time working on a degree. I was doing all kinds of things, working, working on the degree, trying to get pregnant, and then my body just said: ‘Enough! Uncle! I’m not putting up with this.’ And I also had a young 3-year-old child at the time.”
At this point I’d like to share a bit about Amanda’s history as she provided it to me in her pre-coaching form.
Prior to her illness, she was leading quite a busy and stress-filled life: finishing a degree in school, working a stressful job, tending a toddler, trying to get pregnant, which led to a miscarriage 6 months before her breakdown, acting as guardian of her handicapped brother, eating a bad diet, and, on top of all of that, giving up smoking after 14 years. Her lifestyle was not only stressful physically but also mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. She remarked that many people were not surprised when she became ill.
Amanda was used to a life full of stress. She told me in her history that she had always been a perfectionist. At a young age, she pretty much had to take care of her dysfunctional mother and handicapped brother, so it seems she never really had a childhood.
Generally, one has to change one’s lifestyle in order to survive serious autoimmune issues. This requires creating a new lifestyle with new attitudes. A rebalancing must occur as you’re planning ahead and thinking ahead. For Amanda, as well as a lot of others, her symptoms in the past had been so serious that survival was the biggest issue.
Yet Amanda had a to-do list that was very intense. Just a couple of years after her major illness event, she had a family, a child, was guardian to her handicapped brother, was still studying to finish her degree, was anticipating her next job, and then still planning to get pregnant. This woman was driven … but was that in her best interests?
Amanda’s case is like so many others. The symptoms start to come on, but there may not be an indication that it is very serious until too late. As I continued to delve into her case for more clues as to the earliest point when emotional stresses started to take their toll, they showed up pre-birth.
Potentially, there was a lot of trauma carried in Amanda’s DNA because her mother had suffered abuse and trauma in her childhood. Because she didn’t have a decent family life growing up, Amanda’s mom seemed to want to create a family to make her happy. There were a lot of expectations on Amanda, who related that her birth was normal but that she didn’t start breathing for a few minutes after she was born, admitting that maybe there was a bit of subconscious reluctance to arriving into the situation in which she was born.
Amanda’s birth parents divorced when she was 5. Her mother continued seeing other men even though she married again. Amanda knew that there was some cheating going on behind her stepfather’s back. Then there was a second divorce when she was 9. Her mother was into all kinds of shenanigans and cheating and lying, so Amanda cut off relations with her mom before the time of her illness.
Just before our session, Amanda’s mother had requested that they go to a counselor together, saying that she promised she would change. Amanda noted that she was skeptical, and also noticed that after that request was when she started to see her symptoms return.
We all have parents and they are humans who have stuff that they’ve inherited from their parents, who have inherited from their parents, and so it goes. We get emotional and psychological input from the DNA of our ancestors. Our parents do the best they can do, just like we do the best we can do in every moment. But some parents have been really horrible, so there is a lot of emotional baggage to clear, even though they may have had intentions of trying to be good parents.
Working with Amanda: Her First Session
I asked Amanda to focus on when she was a little girl and her mother was doing things that she knew were wrong, while expecting Amanda to take care of the health and well-being of her and her brother. Amanda said she felt pressure in her chest.
I asked her to put one hand right where she felt the pressure in her chest with the other hand across her forehead in an Applied Kinesiology hold, while she thought of the issues during childhood related to her mother. (This technique can easily be used with EFT as it naturally releases physical reactions brought on by emotional stress. The forehead above the eyebrows provides natural “emotional release neurovascular points” that gently relieve the physical pressure as the energy dissipates.)
Amanda held those points as she related that as a young child she often felt guilty and also felt her mother’s anger as she screamed, yelled, and was abusive to the men in her life. Her mom had had a hard childhood, and brought a lot of her angst into Amanda’s childhood. This brought up lots of sadness in Amanda and she began to cry.
I guided her through some EFT tapping to clear the sadness that arose and her sense of loss of her childhood. After she felt relieved of that, we continued.
Following her trail of guilt (which often shows up in autoimmune disorders), I took her to another point that she had brought up in her history involving a car accident at age 15 when she was driving. Even though nobody was hurt in the accident, she reported that she still felt a high 10 SUD level of guilt about the incident–even after many years.
I asked Amanda to tap the points Above and Below the Mouth (together) while she focused on that guilt. I asked whether there was something she would like to say to those in the car during the accident, to get it off her chest and let go of some of the guilt. She replied:
“I’d like to say that I’m sorry. I did say sorry during all of that. The biggest issue is that we were all underage–I didn’t have a driver’s license. The older friends of ours kind of covered it up, so it was a big lie. They said I wasn’t driving. They were good friends–and they still are. I’m still friends with them, but I still feel terrible about it.”
While Amanda tapped, we focused on:
– I choose to let go of this guilt. It’s unbeneficial for everybody else.
– I choose to let go of this guilt.
– I choose to accept that it was a stupid thing that I did when I was 15.
– I choose to understand that everybody riding with me made a silly mistake, too.
– I understand that guilt is a heavy emotion that can really keep me stuck.
Amanda continued tapping on these two points (which is where we often store shame, guilt, embarrassment, and misuse of power) until she felt a shift and a lifting of the guilt.
Guilt can be something that can have a big impact on self-esteem and sense of self-worth, and it can keep a person paralyzed. In Amanda’s history, that was a significant trauma that she had listed, and I wanted to see if we could clear that before going on. At this point she reported that she felt the guilt had lowered in intensity to a SUD level of about 3 from a 10.
She reported that she still felt it a bit in her stomach, which was normal for her whenever she thought of the accident. I asked Amanda to place her hand where she felt it in her stomach and the other hand across her forehead in the kinesiological hold. She did this and then looked back over the “video” memory of the event. She then reported that she felt no more guilt about the accident.
We then returned to her mom issues and I asked about what she felt at this point when she thought about her mom. She reported a fear of being lied to again, and again she felt the sensation in her chest. She created the energetic circuit using the kinesiological hold with her hands across her forehead and on her chest. I asked that she go back to the negative emotions she felt about her mom during the most traumatic memory she could think of, with the worst repercussions related to her mom’s lies. She chose a memory with a charge of SUD 10 out of 10 on the 0-to-10 scale–related to abandonment.
Amanda’s mother had been abandoned and Amanda had inherited the predisposition to feel abandoned, plus her mother had abandoned her when she went off on her tangents and when she told lies about where she was going, where she had been, or when she might return.
I invited Amanda to tap on her Karate Chop point. She tapped on:
– You’re feeling all alone.
– You can’t even trust your mother.
– Who can you trust if you can’t trust your mother?
– That hurt you so much.
– Why couldn’t she tell you the truth?
– You felt so alone and so responsible for other people.
– Who was taking care of Amanda?
Amanda felt the energy shift and reported the charge had come down from a SUD 10 to a 4, and now she felt angry about the abandonment.
At this point, I asked Amanda to place one hand over her chest where she had placed it before and with the other hand, I asked her to tap at the end of her eyes, on the gallbladder End of Eye EFT point. I asked her to go in there to that memory and feel the anger and resentment.
– I was abandoned.
– I was lied to.
– Where were you when I needed you?
– I was always there for you, but where were you when I needed you?
– You were supposed to be the mother.
– That really hurts.
– That really makes me angry.
– I feel angry about it.
– Mom, I’m so angry that you did that back then.
– I’ve been carrying that for so many years.
– That hurt.
– I choose to let it go.
– It’s nasty energy that I’ve been carrying.
Amanda reported that the emotional charge on that nasty memory was down to a 0. I asked her to go to another traumatic memory where she was lied to by her mother. She summarized: “My mother continued this into my adult life, so shortly after I woke up from the coma, I could tell that she was seeing another boyfriend while married.”
She said that she felt disgusted that her mother always seemed to have a guy on the side, and that she felt it in her gut.
While tapping Above and Below the Mouth (under nose GV and chin CV–EFT points), she felt the shame that she had felt for her mother since she was a little girl, with that sense of disgust, shame, and embarrassment. After tapping and focusing on the memory she said she felt better.
I asked her to go back to that time when she was waking up from the coma and there was her mom who she knew was lying to her. On a scale of 0 to 10 she reported that she only now felt a SUD 1 or 2 about that.
When I asked Amanda to think back in general about her mom wanting to get back in contact, wanting to be in her life, she said the worst feeling before was the fear of being lied to and that had been a SUD 10, but now it was a 3 or 4.
I told Amanda that her mom might still lie to her, but her charge was different so it wouldn’t affect her as much. The important thing was that she wouldn’t be walking around with that high-level charge that might cause undue stress in Amanda every time her mother misbehaved or lied.
Many people who have people like this in their lives just can’t carry any more of the “emotional baggage” for those people. In fact, they’ve got a lot of stuff in their aura and in their energy field that doesn’t belong to them, and that can lead to ill health. Tapping the Under the Eye points is very therapeutic on a regular basis just to clear other people’s stuff. There are a lot of energy-suckers out there, and I advised Amanda to make a habit of clearing her mother’s stuff out of her own system. We started by tapping on the following:
– It’s unbeneficial for me to still be carrying my mother’s emotions.
– This stuff really hurts me.
– It never benefitted my mother either.
– It’s time to clear this energy.
– I choose to let go of her energy now.
– I choose to cut the cords to my mother.
– I send them back with love and gratitude to where they came from.
– I choose to be cleared totally of my mother’s influence and her emotions.
– I choose to be cleared totally of my mother’s emotions and baggage and influence.
– I choose to reclaim my personal power.
– I choose to let go of my mother’s influence.
– I choose to let go of my mother’s pain.
– I choose to let go of my mother’s trauma and abandonment issues.
– I choose to allow my body to heal itself.
Amanda reported the SUD charge was down to a 0 or 1 and that she felt much lighter. She added that she felt a bit drained but not too bad. She also said that the thought of her mother coming back into her life no longer caused her to feel panic inside.
Amanda wanted to know if what we did was permanent or if the emotional charge would return. I responded:
“What we did and the aspects we cleared are clear, but other aspects may come up. The analogy that I like to use is that of the beautiful gemstone, a diamond with the facets. Each facet or gemstone surface represents an aspect of the issue at hand. The work we do clears a few aspects at a time. There may still be a few facets or surfaces that we haven’t seen on the diamond. They’re not pointed in the direction we’ve been working in, so we can’t see them yet. They may show up at some point, and then you can clear them alone or with a facilitator. These additional aspects of the original issue will probably hold less emotional charge because you’ve taken the edge off of the whole issue. The basic stuff we’ve worked on and the way we’ve worked on it should be gone.”
After that session, Amanda and I ended up working together for a month, a total of four sessions after the first one. During that time we addressed her skin issues related to the lung and large intestine meridians, where we often hold issues related to grief, loss, and issues of rigidity and control. We also focused on clearing fear and anxious frustration or impatience held in the kidney (Collarbone point) and bladder (Eyebrow points).
Then 4 months later, I asked Amanda what had changed in her life during the short time we had worked together. She responded:
“Lots of things have shifted. The disease is completely in remission, so that’s great. Through the EFT, I’ve cleared lots of trauma around the disease and the fear about it. Even trigger words such as ‘since I had chemo,’ and that kind of stuff, would really send me off. And also around past, growing up, in my childhood, issues with my mother, lots of stuff has shifted. I’ve been able to let go and just kind of move on from lots of issues. On top of that, I started looking at other things like diet and exercise and what else I could do. You mentioned, of course, the Paleo diet, which has been very, very helpful. Since I started two months ago I lost over 17 pounds of the 75 that I gained taking steroids. That’s been huge for me. And I know that it works. I know going forward that’s got to be a main component in my life.
“I think the difference in me now and me before is that I can recognize what is causing the symptoms. It is like: ‘Okay, calm down. You know the diet worked before so it’s time to get back on it.’ And then different things kind of came into play. That includes the eating better and the sleeping and just going back to simple things that make me feel better, including tapping, of course.”
