
By Dawson Church, PhD, EFT TRN-3
The old saying “I’ll believe it when I see it” has the sequence exactly backward. You can’t see something till you believe it.
You have to believe it before you see it. That’s the way your brain works.
You have to develop the neurological wiring to perceive something, in the absence of evidence, before you can see it. There are many stories on the this website of people who strongly believed they could find a loving relationship, or be healed from a chronic disease, even when the external objective evidence said otherwise.
This belief builds the neural capacity to carry the information signals that record the desired event.
When you add belief to the capacity of EFT tapping, you have a potent combination indeed.
The same applies to improving your choices in relationships. You have to set up the brain state in which it is a subjective reality before the objective reality can manifest. Your brain has to be wired as though the healthy relationship you seek is already with you before you can perceive this person in front of you.
In this story below, Emily comes to the recognition that, rather than focusing on the external event of attracting the right man, she needs to focus on her internal blocks to finding the right man and rewiring her brain so that she can see him when he appears.
Tapping Away the Blocks to Emotional Availability
By Emily P.
When I started EFT tapping for relationships the one issue that I wanted to work on in particular:
I attract, and am attracted to, men who tend to be emotionally unavailable.
When I asked a colleague of mine about this, her reaction was because I am afraid of giving love. Their emotional distance makes them “safe” for me. She suggested that I find an emotional event in the past that could be behind this and I answered that I just couldn’t think of anything in particular.
A few days after our meet-up, however, I went through the most recent EFT Newsletter and I read an article about a woman, who by simply changing her name had unknowingly dramatically impacted her life. This was an interesting concept to me, as I went through the process of legally changing my middle name some years ago. I did it because my middle name was my “evil grandmother’s” and she’d done some particularly hurtful emotional blackmailing over the holidays that year.
I’d had enough and decided to legally change my name.
I started tapping, and as I was tapping, I had an epiphany:
When I changed my name, I closed my heart off from my grandmother and from anyone else who was supposed to love me. I assumed from past experience that such people would either leave me or hurt me.
Some past experiences with her, as well as with some of my other relatives, taught me that I would be treated meanly and silenced by the people who were supposed to love me unconditionally, that I would never be good enough to receive their love. So the safe thing to do when I reinvented myself as my new middle name was to do so with a closed heart that would protect me from hurt.
Looking back, I see that the romantic relationships I had from that time forward were not particularly loving, and I had a lot of doubts about them from the beginning–it always felt as though there was something big missing.
Three years ago, when I got out of the last one, which had not been long but had been emotionally abusive, I decided that I was just going to date casually, have fun, and figure myself out.
I did that for 2 years, finally decided that I was ready for a serious relationship, but then the men who kept appearing in my life and who I found attractive ended up being emotionally unavailable.
They seemed like great guys at first, but they quickly ran off because of their own issues and insecurities, without giving me any of the love I deserved, and I just kept feeling hurt.
I began to tap:
Even though Emily closed her heart off when she stopped being [my previous middle name], I deeply and completely accept myself.
I tapped on this for some time and my SUD Level of Intensity number on a scale of 0-10 with 10 being the extreme, went from a solid 10 to a 2 in a few rounds of tapping on this. I then integrated the statement:
I respect and embrace all of me and all I have ever been through no matter what my name was or what I used to be called.
My SUD Level of Intensity number reduced from a 7 to a 0.
I then began to visualize my heart opening.
What I saw wasn’t cold, but a beautiful, vibrant, beating heart. I started tapping on that image, using “What if my heart was beating beautifully and vibrantly?” and “What if my heart was open and vulnerable?”
I visualized my heart radiating white energy out toward other people and I tapped on “What if my heart was open to giving love to others?” for a round.
Then I switched to “What if my heart was open to receiving love from others?” while visualizing my heart receiving brilliant white light from the people in my life.
My SUD Level of Intensity number went from an 8 to a 2 after a round of tapping. It was quite powerful.
Following this, I did a couple more rounds using Pat Carrington’s Choices Method:
I choose to know that I am Emily [new middle name] and that my heart is open to giving and receiving love.
Finally, I turned to using the tapping phrases suggested in Carol Look’s “What If” in regard to relationships, followed by the sequence she does more generally on abundance. By the time I tapped through all of her phrases, I felt as though all the possibility in the world was open to me.
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This article is excerpted from the book
EFT for Love Relationships,
By Dawson Church, PhD,
Pages 274—279.