By Dawson Church, EFT TRN 1-3
One of my favorite sayings during EFT workshops is “The problem is never the problem.”
What I mean by this is that the problem we complain about today usually bothers us only because it resembles an earlier problem.
For example, if your spouse being late disturbs you, you may discover by digging deep with EFT tapping that the real reason this behavior triggers you is that your mother didn’t meet your needs in early childhood.
Your spouses behavior in the present day resembles, to your brain, the neglect you experienced in early childhood, so you react accordingly.
You put a lot of energy into trying to change your spouse when the present-day person is not the source of the problem.
While EFT can be useful for minor or peripheral problems, much deeper healing is possible if you assist your client or yourself in finding core issues. The events that bother us are only a problem if they resemble deeper emotional wounds.
Rather than being content with using EFT on surface problems, it’s worth developing the skills to find and resolve the core issues that are at the root of the problem.
4 Questions to Identify Core Issues:
1. Does the problem that’s bothering you remind you of any events in your childhood?
2. Can you tune into your body and feel your feelings? Now, travel back in time to the first time in your life you ever felt this same sensation.
3. What’s the worst similar experience you ever had?
4. If you were writing your autobiography, what chapter would you prefer to delete, as though it had never happened to you?
If you can’t remember a specific childhood event, simply make up a fictional event in your mind. This kind of guessing usually turns out to be right on target. You are assembling the imagined event out of components of real events, and the imaginary event usually leads you back to actual events you can tap on.
Even if it doesn’t, and you tap on that fictional event, you will eventually experience an obvious release of tension.
