EFT Tapping for Coronavirus Stay-at-Home Stress

It was the first time I worked with Sheila and it was her first exposure to EFT. We had talked about EFT before and decided that, rather than me sending her information to read, we would plan on a longer initial appointment and I would give her an overview before we started.

At the beginning of the call, we went over the basics and I let her know this was a safe nonjudgmental space to work on anything. I also made it a point to let her know that, in the case of challenging or hard topics, I had gentle techniques to guide the direction and speed we worked on things. I let her know, too, that it is important for us to use her words and thoughts, so if anything doesn’t resonate for her, please speak out and correct me or if new things come up, don’t hesitate to let me know.

This was the beginning of the stay-at-home order for coronavirus. There was a lot of family in Sheila’s home and she was feeling stress and that she couldn’t support others as she wanted. I had her focus on the stress she was feeling and where she felt it in her body. She felt it in her throat. The SUD was a 7. I asked her if an event came to mind where she might have felt that feeling in her throat before.

Sheila responded quickly with a time she had been molested as a child and the terrible feeling of being out of control and not being able to speak out. I confirmed it was a one-time event and short in duration. She didn’t want to talk about it out loud, so I had her use the silent movie technique. I described what we would be doing and reassured her that I would lead her through. I had her identify a safe starting place for the movie. She gave the movie a title. At first, she wanted to make the title “I hate him.” I didn’t want to use such a potentially negatively charged name, so we talked about the importance of having a neutral title and changed the name to “The game.” We tapped on the title of her movie.

Once the title was a SUD of 0, I had her start from the safe place and go through the movie until she got to the first point where there was a surge of emotion. She identified the first point as “embarrassed” and said it was a 10. We tapped it down to a 1.

I had her start again from the safe place and go through the movie. She identified a point that happened before the last point, but she hadn’t realized it had a charge. She named it “stupid” and we tapped it from a 7 to 0.

Sheila started from the safe place again and went through the movie until she got to a surge. This point she identified as “Not Me.” We tapped on this, taking it from an 8 to a 0.

When she went through the movie again, she was able to go through the entire movie without a surge. She was so happy. She said she had been aware that she needed to do something to address this event and she felt really good.

I wanted to make sure we had taken care of the presenting issue. I had her close her eyes and go back to the stress she had been feeling and asked how her throat was feeling. She said it was down to about a 3 or a 4. I had her describe the feeling in her throat and asked if it had a color or a texture. It was blue and felt like a big round knot blocking her throat. We tapped on the stress feeling in her throat and all the aspects—the blue color and the big knot blocking her throat. It went down to a SUD of 0.

When I had her take a deep breath and think about the stress, she said it was gone. I asked her how her throat was feeling, and she said it felt great. I asked her if she thought she could speak her peace and support her family like she wanted. She was listing things she could do and ways she could speak up and let them know what she needed and still allow them to get their needs met. She had changed from being tight in her neck and facial expressions to smiling and relaxed.

She later wrote a review stating how amazing the session was and that it helped her resolve something she had struggled with for years, stating it as a huge breakthrough.