Dear EFT Community,
In this article, demonstrating the Movie Technique during an EFT workshop brought out previously hidden aspects of a traumatic crash, and led to new insights for the woman involved in the accident.
-EFT Universe
By Dawson Church
The Movie Technique (and its companion Tell-the-Story) is one of the most simple yet effective ways to use EFT.
It’s the first technique taught in Level 1 workshops, and while it works reliably for novices, EFT experts often use it as well.
In this example, systematic use of the technique during a class uncovered surprising new aspects of the traumatic event.
Cassie, a 45-year-old woman was one of a group of 5 people with whom I worked simultaneously during an EFT workshop.
Her presenting issue was a car crash two years before. As she spoke about the crash, she was flushed and trembling visibly, and when I probed for earlier childhood experiences with a similar emotional tone, she couldn’t find any, so we worked on the adult experience together.
The first step we recommend in our tutorial on the Movie Technique is to tap on the title of the movie, which for Cassie was a 10. We tapped on “The Crash” till the title itself went down to a 2, at which point we began the movie at a neutral point, before the first emotionally troubling part of the incident.
The crash occurred as Cassie and the rest of her family were driving home after a meal at a restaurant. She and her husband have three adult sons. Leaving the restaurant, she sat in the passenger seat of a truck belonging to one of her sons.
The truck was hit from the rear, unexpectedly. “He came out of nowhere,” she said, and we tapped using that as a reminder phrase.
Cassie’s SUD level dropped from a 7 to a 1. She then “rewound” the movie to the neutral point, and began replaying it in her mind again; the intensity was still low when she passed the point where the impact occurred, and proceeded to the next emotional crescendo.
That was when she got out of the truck and saw how bent the sheet metal was, though no-one had been injured. Her intensity rose to a 7, and then down to a 2, around the image of the wrecked vehicles.
Cassie’s husband was driving his car, with her other children, behind the truck, and witnessed the accident.
The driver of the other car was a man in his nineties who misjudged the distance between his car and the truck. “I’m angry at him!” said Cassie, “He was too old to be driving!” Her anger was an 8, but quickly came down to a 1 after a couple of rounds of EFT. “That’s the end of the movie,” she said, and so I suggested she then “tell the story” out loud from the beginning, starting at the neutral point when she climbed into the truck.
She began her narrative, and then gasped, and her face flushed. Her number went up to a 10.
“I just remembered,” she said, “why I was driving back with my son. My husband and I had an argument earlier that day, before we saw the kids, and I didn’t want to be in the car with him on the way home.”
We tapped on different aspects of the argument till that too had a low level of emotional intensity (Click here for our tutorial on Aspects).
I was struck by the way that Cassie recovered a memory, and we discovered a new aspect of the car crash event, that she had forgotten or suppressed till the other emotional crescendos were cleared.
It’s common during EFT sessions to find clients recovering additional details in this way, and one reason why rewinding the movie and re-telling it from the neutral point is so useful in determining that all the aspects of an event have been cleared.
