Dear EFT Community,
My friend Eric Robins, MD, coauthor of Your Hands Can Heal You and contributing author toThe Heart of Healing, is a urologist at a Kaiser hospital in California, and has seen remarkable results using EFT to clear urological issues that would otherwise have required surgery or medication.
Dawson Church, author of The Genie in Your Genes
By Eric Robins, MD
I have an interesting case report. About 6 months ago I saw a woman in my urology clinic for incontinence. Before I entered the exam room I was reviewing her outpatient chart and noticed that she was on antidepressant and anti-anxiety medications. In my mind, emotional issues often affect physical symptoms and diseases, which is why I try to use EFT as often as I can in the clinical setting. The fact that it can be used so quickly is a big plus because I don’t have a lot of time to waste. I have some presuppositions that I use with regards to the effect of emotions on health:
1) Stress and negative emotions aren’t in the head; they are stored in our bodies.
2) People will unconsciously tense down on smooth and skeletal muscles to hold painful issues and traumas down in the body and prevent them from coming up to conscious awareness.
3) Where stress and negative emotions are stored in our bodies, they block the flow of the body’s healing energy.
With these thoughts in mind, I entered the exam room. A bladder ultrasound revealed that she was only emptying half of her urine volume after she voided (i.e., she was retaining urine). In females, it is rare to find an anatomic blockage responsible for this urine retention. More commonly, we find that these women are storing stress in their pelvic floor and sphincter muscles, so that when they urinate the muscles aren’t relaxed and the bladder doesn’t empty. Also, in this woman’s case, some of her depression medications were serving to relax the bladder and were likely contributing to the problem.
I told her that oftentimes stress can contribute to physical symptoms. When I say this to patients, I am real careful that the person doesn’t think I am telling them that the problem is “all in their head.” I usually tell them the following metaphor. I’ll say, “if someone has an ulcer, they have a real physical hole in their stomach, isn’t that right? But if you ask the question, ‘Gee, I wonder why they developed an ulcer in the first place?’ the answer might be, ‘Well, they were producing too much stomach acid, and it burnt a hole in the stomach.’ But, if you ask the question, ‘I wonder why they were making too much stomach acid, the answer might be that they had too much stress and anxiety.” I want them to be clear that emotional issues physicalize in the body.
I next told her to close her eyes, and trust what came up when I asked her the following question: “If you knew, what emotional issue in your life might be contributing to your bladder problem?” Immediately she replied, “My son is in prison on death row. The fact that he is on death row doesn’t bother me too much, as I have a lot of faith in that. What really bothers me is that when I go to visit him (a 460-mile drive each way to the prison), the guards only allow me 45 minutes, then they rudely and abruptly push me out of the visitation room.” As she said this, she started to cry. I asked her if she had a specific incident in mind where this had happened that still bothered her, and she did. As I had her focus on the event, we did two rounds of tapping, after which the emotions were completely released off of the event. Whenever I start EFT, as I am getting a SUD measurement I like to ask them where they feel the emotion in their body. After I’m done, if they can no longer feel the emotion in their body, I know the work is complete. Body level shifts like this are usually permanent, and oftentimes physical healing will result.
I saw her back several weeks later to look into her bladder with a cystoscope. At that visit we found that her bladder was emptying much better, but the incontinence persisted. After a normal cystoscopic exam (as I expected), we had a few extra minutes, so I asked her if there were any other traumas that she wanted to clear. We worked on her two biggest ones from childhood. In one event, she said she had been “tortured” by someone, and we quickly used EFT to reduce that event to 0. The second event involved her being sexually molested by a relative, and that event too was quickly “dashed upon the rocks” using EFT. Both events took less than 10 minutes total to clear.
After that office visit, I didn’t see or hear from her until today, when she brought her son to see me for an unrelated problem. I asked how she was doing and she reported the following:
1) She has been off all antidepressant medication since our second visit.
2) She went from taking temazepam (an anti-anxiety sleeping pill) every night at bedtime to using only six pills in the prior month, and now is almost completely weaned off.
3) Her longstanding severe back pain is gone, and she is off the motrin.
4) She still takes her blood pressure pills, but now her blood pressure is “too low” and she needs to get this adjusted by her internist.
5) She still has some headaches, and the urine incontinence still persists; both of these indicate more work needs to be done, but not bad results for spending a total of 15 minutes in a busy clinic!
