In my last post I mentioned how great it was to have Celia to help me through my first session using Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) as a tool to cope with my anxiety. I was thinking about this after I published the post and felt I wanted to explain a bit more about how key it was to have a professional there to guide the process.
So, not only did Celia show me HOW to do EFT but she also really helped me to get to the core of what I needed to achieve with it by asking me (hard) questions. The first part of this was exploring which beliefs about myself were related to my triggers. Without Celia, I don’t think I’d have managed to get to the real, underlying beliefs and feelings surrounding what causes me to be anxious. An awful lot of what I said initially in response to her questions related to other people. When Celia asked me about my beliefs connected to my trigger my initial answers were along the lines of, “I’m worried that other people might think…”, “I’m worried that other people might experience…” etc. So not about me, about other people. This should come as no surprise if you’ve read my previous blogs on this topic.
The process of realising I need to connect these things (beliefs and thoughts around my anxiety and it’s triggers) to ME and not other people felt very enlightening and empowering. It seems that thinking about yourself is actually a good thing. Who knew?! I’m here for this! When I came out with these statements about others, Celia nipped it in the bud (chuckled at me for once again thinking NOT about myself first) and then helped me to uncover what lay beneath that and relate it back to myself. Here is some of the fun stuff we uncovered:
- I don’t want to be the bad guy
- I need to be the good guy
- I should have done more
- It isn’t good enough
- I’m not good enough
- It’s my fault
- It’s my responsibility
Excellent eh?! We then looked at the potential consequences of these beliefs and that led on to why it’s so important for me to address these (horrible) thoughts and work on replacing them with better ones. This is how we then formed the statements/mantras which I used for the EFT.
So while you can do EFT on your own (and now, I’m convinced, you should!), I think it’s important to know exactly what it is you’re trying to clear so you can get the statements right. I plan to use journalling as a method of looking deeper into different scenarios where I want to use EFT as a tool. Maybe it can help you too? I hope so, it would make baring my soul worthwhile!
Hygge For Happy 