“Best not to think about it.”
“Put it behind you.”
“Don’t dwell on it.”
“Keep yourself busy.”
“Have a drink and forget about it.”

These are all common responses to something unpleasant happening to us. We think that by taking our focus off the problem we will somehow forget it and overcome it. If we stuff it away somewhere it will not bother us any more.

Initially we may find:

• Unpleasant or negative events re-visit us in the dead of night keeping us awake and sleep deprived
• That the thoughts rattle round and round in our heads like some sort of internal torture.
• We try to numb them with food, drink, TV etc.
• We keep ourselves very busy in other ways; work, internet surfing or helping others, again in an attempt to deaden the feelings.

Eventually the feelings subside, we are not thinking about it or feeling the emotions any more and we think it has gone. It has, it’s gone deeper into our being, perhaps somatised in some recurring pain or health issue, or buried alive in our sub-conscious.

Feelings buried alive whether in our sub-conscious or our body have a habit of revisiting us.

We may not even make the connection but something happens and our pain flares up, or we totally over-react to the situation. What is happening is that the emotions that were numbed and buried are triggered and re-surface affecting our current day situation. And this will happen again and again and again until we shine a light on the original painful event and heal it.

EFT shines that light.

We bring to mind the unpleasant event, we call it tuning in. This seems to activate the learned stress pathway associated with that event in the amygdala and we re-experience the emotions and feelings. We then use tapping to stimulate specific acupressure points which reduces the arousal in the amygdala, and seems to deactivate the conditioned response.

Although the exact mechanism is still unknown we do know that this affect is usually long lasting. So this is why we talk about the negative in EFT, why we recall unpleasant events and may talk about them in detail. We are looking for all the aspects of a problem which trigger the stress response so we can tap and eliminate them and so gain Emotional Freedom.