Once upon a time, a long time ago, a princess was born in a castle. 

At that time, war raged in the land, and the sound of battle could be heard deep within the walls of the castle. The little princess, whose name was Angharad, was scared, but she was safe behind the battlements.

The battles ebbed and flowed for years, but they finally ceased when the princess was a young woman.

The princess would stroll along the battlements, looking out at the newly rebuilt town. After five years of peace life had returned to normal. The market square was bustling with people going about their business and children playing.

It all looked very inviting, but the princess was afraid to leave the safety of the castle.

As soon as she expressed an interest in going out into the world, her advisers and guards got nervous.

“It’s not safe, your majesty. Don’t leave the castle.”

Part of her agreed, it had been very frightening during her childhood, and it was only staying in the castle that had kept her safe. But another part of her wanted to go outside and join in the life of the world beyond the castle walls.

Every time she thought about this, her protectors crowded around and persuaded her not to.

One day, as she walked the battlements, she looked out and saw a woman standing in front of the main gate holding a cake!

The woman looked kind and friendly, and the cake looked delicious.

Angharad thought she could even smell the cake from up there in the battlements.

She called down to the woman. “What is it you want?”

The woman said, “I am Tirion and I’ve brought this special cake for you.”

“What makes it special?” asked Angharad.

Tirion said, “It contains the essence of all the good things in the world, everything you have missed while you have been in your castle.”

Angharad was startled and delighted, her mouth was watering, and the cake was the most wonderful thing she had ever seen. 

“Bring it into the castle where we can be safe and share it together.”

Tirion said, with great kindness, “No, now that it is safe, you must come out of the castle, and we can share the cake in the sunshine.”

Angharad was both tempted and scared; going outside was something she had dreamed of and had nightmares about, but the thought of being in the sunshine eating cake with Tirion was compelling.

She decided she would go out of the castle.

The moment she had this thought, her guards and advisers appeared at her side.

“Don’t go, your highness; it is not safe.” 

Angharad said, “Look, there is no danger.”

Her guards and advisers, after years of war, thought everything was dangerous.

“Your highness,” said one, “that woman looks kind, but she is trying to trick you.”

Another said, “The cake could be poisoned.”

“She’s trying to lull you into a false sense of security,”  said another.

Angharad looked at them all. They had guarded her and kept her safe her entire life, and she was grateful, but, for the first time, she noticed how scared they were.

She was torn between loyalty, safety, and her new desire to be outside in the sun.

“I will go to the main gate and speak with Tirion. I will not leave the castle.”

They grumbled, complained, and gripped their swords, but Angharad had decided to find out more about life outside.

She walked to the castle gate, and standing behind the portcullis, she called out to Tirion, (who stood in the same position, holding the cake as before).

“Tirion, come closer, let us speak.”

Tirion stepped forward, towards the gate. She stopped just an arm’s length away from Angharad.

“Tirion, why are you here?”

“I am here to help you out into the sunshine so that you can taste all the world has to offer.”

“I cannot come out,”  said Angharad, “it is not safe.”

“I know it seems that way, your highness,”  said Tirion, “You have lived in fear all your life. You have become a prisoner of your own safety”.

“Can you not come in to the castle where I know it is safe?” pleaded the princess.

“No, you must come out. It is safe enough out here, there is warmth in the sun and goodness in this cake I brought you.”

Angharad smelled the cake and reached to open the gate, but the agitation of her protectors stopped her, she called to Tirion, “I dare not come out.”

Tirion said, “Your advisors and guards are scared for your safety, they are trying to protect you from old dangers.”

She called out to the guards, “I know you have protected the princess in this strong castle against great danger, but the war has been over for five years. It is safe out here in the sunshine, even though you don’t believe me.”

Angharad plucked up her courage, “I shall go out for a short while and stay close to the gate.”

She stepped outside, but stayed close by the gate in the shadow of the castle walls.

“It is good to see you”, says Tirion. “I know you are scared; being out here without your protectors feels strange, but we can stay close to your castle; the door is open, and you can always go back in if you need to.”

Angharad looked nervous but stood her ground.

Tirion offered her a small piece of cake. “Would you like to try it?”

Shouts and cries of “Don’t do it!” came from inside the castle.

Tirion gave her a small piece of cake. Angharad brought it to her lips, smelled the fabulous, scary deliciousness of it, then took a bite.

It tasted strange and wonderful at the same time. Angharad was delighted.

“Come, let us step into the sunshine,” said Tirion.

A great wailing echoed from the castle “Don’t go, it’s not safe!”

Angharad went back to the gate and called out, “I think it is safe. I am going to step into the sunlight.”

“But, what about us? We have served you and saved you all these years. Remember all those terrible things we protected you from. What will happen when you leave?”

“Stay here, I will not go far, and I can come back to you if it is dangerous,” said Angharad.

They nodded, looking dejected and defeated.

The princess returned to Tirion, who said, in a voice loud enough for the princess’s protectors to hear, “It is understandable, that your guards and advisors are scared for you and scared for themselves. I honour them and their service, keeping you safe all this time.”

Angharad stepped into the sunshine to eat more cake.

She enjoyed it and nothing bad happened.

“What shall we do, your highness?” called her protectors, “We are afraid; if you leave us, we will have no purpose, we will die without you.”

Angharad called back, “There are many things you can do that would help me out here in the world”. 

“Come out into the sunshine, relax, and have some of this delicious cake. We can decide what to do next.”  

Also, stop calling me ‘your highness’, I am Angharad.”

P.S. Just in case you were wondering, Angharad and Tirion are Welsh girls names. Angharad means ‘much loved one’ and Tirion means ‘kind or gentle’.

Image courtesy of Allan Harris alh1 | Flickr

The post The Castle And The Cake appeared first on practical wellbeing.

The webinar gives a general overview of the principles and practices of Identity Healing.

While it’s aimed at EFT Practitioners it should be understandable by anyone familiar with tapping.

You can find out more about Identity Healing at https://identityhealing.com

The post Identity Healing Webinar in French and English appeared first on practical wellbeing.

Think of a child car seat.

If you are a parent you probably had one (or more) in the back of your car as your children grew up.

Under most circumstances your baby started in a baby carrier and then progressed to getting strapped into their child seat (often with a lot of squirming and shouting).

Eventually your child is comfortable, securely seated and safe.

Eventually they get too big for the child seat, moving on to a booster seat, and finally they sit in the car just like everyone else.

Imagine, that for some strange reason, the child has to use the same little seat forever!

When they are small this is not a problem, the seat fits and they can be comfortably secure.

As they grow this gets more difficult, they get too big for the car seat, it’s too small the straps constrict them.

As they get even bigger this only gets worse.

Imagine a teenager crammed into a child’s seat.

Imagine an adult squashed into the child seat that once held them safe but is now their cramped prison.

In the outside world this is a ridiculous scenario, but in the inner world this kind of thing happens all the time.

Imagine growing up in a hostile family: as a child you have to find a way to survive in this situation. You need your care givers to feed and clothe you, to look after you and keep you safe, ideally until you are old enough to fend for yourself.

Keeping yourself safe in that kind of environment isn’t easy, you will soon learn ways to appease them, please them or avoid trouble and get just enough care to get by.

These necessary safety strategies and responses are often formed when we are the age when we would physically fit in a child seat.

This mental, emotional and behavioural ‘child seat’, keeps us more or less safe. We strap into it every day and hope for the best. Once we have a strategy that works we stick with it.

Since these strategies are familiar and run in well worn neural pathways, it’s much easier stick with them rather than having to find new ways of coping.

Unfortunately, while our circumstances may change our safety strategies and responses stay the same.

Even when we leave our family, we unconsciously cling to the strategies that used to work, even when they don’t fit our current circumstances.

For example if you had cruel parents that you had to appease, you would become very skilled at putting them first and looking after their needs, because your life depended on it.

Let’s imagine you leave this family far behind, never seeing them again. However long ago and far away it was it is as if those appeasement strategies are your goto way of being in the world.

Even though the ‘family car’ is long gone, you are still squashed into that ‘child seat’.

Unfortunately, once we have strapped ourselves into our solution it can be very hard to let it go. We may know at a conscious level that we no longer have to do this, but at some other level we can’t stop.

Sometimes, we can’t just talk ourselves out of it, we need help to release the straps and get out of that old solution that no longer serves us.

That’s where processes like Identity Healing, Intention Tapping and EFT can help us get free of our old, redundant safety strategies, so we can settle into a bigger, less constricted life.

The post Are You Stuck In Your Child Car Seat? appeared first on practical wellbeing.

As an EFT Practitioner you may find that working with clients who have such difficult identity beliefs, such as ‘I am not good enough’, ‘I am a failure’ or ‘there is something wrong with me’ can be challenging.

Helping people with problems about ‘who they are’ (identity) is much more complicated than working with ‘what happened to them’ (memories), what they think (beliefs) or ‘what they feel’ (feelings).

In standard EFT approaches the practitioner identifies and neutralises the memories that caused the person to feel not good enough, hate themselves or be gripped with childlike panic. Undoing the formation of these identities by soothing those memories allows the client to adopt new identities, free of the stress and distress of the original experience.

Rather than identifying and working with specific memories, Identity Healing takes a different approach.

Identity Healing is a collection of processes using Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) and Neuro Linguistic Processing (NLP) designed easily and effectively dissolve troublesome identity beliefs.

Rather than identify the memories and work with them, these techniques work directly with the parts of ourselves (sometimes called sub-personalities, ego states or inner children) created during these experiences.

Identity Healing identifies these parts of ourselves, softens their challenging emotional burdens, gives them the resources they need and finally re-integrates them into our adult selves.

Training Dates & Times (UK times)

• Wednesday 19th January 2022 – 9:00am – 1:00pm
• Thursday 20th January 2022 – 9:00am – 1:00pm
• Thursday 27th January 2022 – 9:00am – 1:00pm
• Thursday 3rd February 2022 – 9:00am – 1:00pm

Is this training for you?

This is an advanced EFT workshop for practitioners who want to use these techniques to help their clients and for their own self-development.

It is not suitable for novice tappers, therefore you must be a certified EFT Level 2 practitioner from recognised EFT training organisation

The course is practical and participative, using demonstrations, discussion and supervised pair practice of the techniques.

Important: This course is not a substitute for therapy.

Although Identity Healing is a powerful way to change the way you think and feel this training is to help you learn the Identity Healing techniques not a substitute for personal therapy or counselling.

This course will provide 12 hours of your EFTi CPD requirements

The post Identity Healing Practitioner Training – Jan 2022 appeared first on practical wellbeing.

Many of us look towards future events, both real and imagined, and feel afraid.

In some circumstances fear is extraordinarily useful. If a Bengal tiger wanders into your dining room, being afraid is an entirely appropriate response. This is the kind of fear that demands that you fight, flight or freeze to save your life. This fear is justified, valuable and persuasive.

Sadly, there are lots of places and situations in the world where fear is a reasonable response, but even if you are not in imminent danger, there are other kinds of fears that can prey on our minds.

Because we have been both blessed and cursed with imagination, we have the power to create all kinds of vivid stories in our minds that can scare us (film directors make good use of these abilities to scare us for as long as the movie lasts).

If you are imagining how difficult your upcoming interview, surgery or date is going to be and all the ways it can go wrong, then you may experience some fear as you think about it.

This may be a baseless apprehension, if it’s your first interview, surgery or date you have no prior experience to base your anxieties on. It really is all in your imagination, but what if it is not your first interview, surgery or date and things didn’t go well last time?

Now we have to add in that other blessing and curse of being a human: the ability to remember. We tend to have an excellent memory for painful experiences, for good reasons: remembering past pain reminds us to be careful in those kinds of situations that were difficult for us.

If you blend the memory of distress with imagination of future events you can create a potent cocktail of fear and apprehension.

If you are going to use tapping to defuse such fears and apprehensions, I think it is worth understanding how this works so that you can effectively neutralise those fears using tapping.

I think the structure of these kinds of fears goes something like this:

1. I had some bad experiences in the past. The memories of those experiences are still raw and have a lot distress attached to them (even if we are not conscious of that most of the time).
2. When I think about future events that remind me of those painful experiences I take those feelings from the past and project them into the future.
3. When I think about those future events (that haven’t happened yet, or may never happen), I feel those bad feelings from the past in the present.

Note: You may have heard yourself, or a client, say something like: “I don’t want to go through ‘that’ again”. If you hear the word again in a sentence like that you can be reasonably confident that ’that’ (whatever ’that’ is) still has a lot of emotional intensity.

Using tapping you could soothe the sensations as they arise in the present moment. This might work for a little while but the untapped combination of vivid imagination and painful memory would resupply the current fear and it would soon return.

Realising this you could use tapping to soothe all the vivid imaginings they have of those future events (then perhaps tidy up any remaining uncomfortable feelings).

This approach would probably work better because it defuses the ’future’ aspect of the problem as well as the present experience. However, the unprocessed past is still available to catapult its distressing feelings into the future to cause trouble later.

I’d like to suggest a three stage process to undo this particular way of distressing ourselves.

Stage 1: Soothe The Past

The painful memories supply the emotional fuel to these scary fantasies of the future.

Find and process the memories that are the source of the current feelings, by using all the standard tapping detective questions such as: “What does this situation remind you of?”

If your client has said something like “I don’t want to go through ‘that’ again!”, then ’that’, whatever it may be, might be a good place to start.

Process those memories until they no longer have any emotional charge.

Stage 2: Defuse The Future

Once you have soothed those distressing memories, you can process whatever remains of those fear provoking fantasies.

Without the emotional fuel of the past they should already be much reduced and easier to clear.

Stage 3 – Tidy Up The Present

To find out if there is anything left to resolve (and to test your work), have your client imagine that future event and process any residual emotions and sensations that they experience.

I have used this process with clients and found it effective, I believe its effectiveness comes from the order of processing: past first, future second and present last.

As always I would be very interested to know how it works for you

The post Back To The Future – Tapping For Apprehension appeared first on practical wellbeing.

You may have noticed how complicated your inner life is.

At any moment in time there are thoughts, feelings, memories, fantasies, images, physical sensations, etc. floating along in your stream of consciousness. Some of it may be important, some of it not so much.

If we want to use tapping to work on one of our own issues, or to work with someone on one of theirs, the contents of that stream of consciousness becomes important because you will need to tap on some of it.

Sometimes there’s too much ‘stuff’ to deal with.

When we are struggling to handle difficult emotional issues and trying to understand what is happening, the amount of stuff to tap on can be overwhelming. There’s a lot going on, and if you can only tap on one thing at a time, how do you choose what to tap on?

If you are tapping with someone else you could listen to their descriptions of what’s going on and try to decide from that what is the most important thing to work on. That could take a while and you would have to decide what the most important thing was from all those words (the most important thing might not even have been voiced).

One way of handling all that information would be to make a list of all the aspects of their experience, then give each one a SUDs score from 0-10 to estimate their relative intensity. Now you would have a list of ’tapping targets’ and you could get to work.

This approach can work well, but it does have a few drawbacks:

• It is slow. Our inner world usually moves much more quickly than we can describe it, to describe and evaluate each aspect takes time.
• To describe our experience we have to ’step out of it’ to talk about it. In most cases tapping works best when we are in our experience.
• Once we have described our experience we have to get back ’into it’ to make the most of the tapping.
• It’s hard to stay in a state of flow if you are stopping and starting in this way.

There is a simple way to find out what is important to tap on that bypasses those drawbacks and enhances the flow of the tapping.

But first, have you ever stubbed your toe?

One moment your mind is happily (or unhappily) occupied and then your attention goes straight to the vivid pain (while you hop around the room cursing).

This process is automatic and unconscious. You don’t have to say to yourself “Pay attention to the pain” it just happens. Millions of years of evolution has made us exquisitely attentive to pain and distress because they represent potential threats to our survival. Paying attention to these signals may keep us safe, so when there is pain and distress that’s where our minds go.

The most intense part of our awareness is the most noticeable part and that draws our attention to it.

But what does stubbing your toe have to do with tapping?

All the feelings, emotions, thoughts, memories, images and everything else swirling around in our awareness will have different ’emotional intensities’.

The one with the most intensity is probably the one that draws your attention and needs your attention (and tapping).

So an easy way to find out what to tap on is to ask the person doing the tapping: “What is most noticeable?”

To answer this question your mind has to sort through your awareness to decide which aspect has the most emotional charge. If there is a mental stubbed toe this won’t be difficult, but even if there are a lot of things to choose from the unconscious mind (which does all the sorting) will choose the most important part quickly and easily.

Now you can tap on the most relevant aspect without breaking the flow or having to have a conversation about what is important.

As you process each aspect, the next relevant one will come into awareness and all you have to do is ask “What is most noticeable now?”

By tapping on “What is most noticeable?” you can tap smoothly through the important aspects as they unfold and change.

There are several advantages to this approach:

• It’s simple and lets your client’s unconscious mind do all the hard work.
• It is responsive to change. As we continue to tap the relative importance of aspects can change, any master list can become quickly out of date. By tracking what is most noticeable as we go along we always have the most up to date information to guide the tapping.
• This question doesn’t interrupt what is going on. You can flow smoothly from one aspect to the next, without the tapper having to ’step out’ of the experience to report on it.
• It maintains and builds rapport, because asking the question and accepting the answer validates the person’s experience – there is no ’argument’ about what matters.
• It is inclusive, whatever is ’noticeable’ in awareness may be a thought, feeling, image, memory, etc. The question doesn’t introduce a bias into what the tapper attends to.
• It helps you ’get out of your own way’ because all the information is coming from the person doing the tapping not from your conscious mind assessment of what is important.

I have found this question especially helpful working with clients who have a lot going on in their inner world.

Does it work every time? No, nothing works every time, but I have found that it works very well a lot of the time.

Perhaps, you could try it out on for yourself and the people you tap with, I’d love to hear how you get on.

The post How Do You Know What To Tap On? appeared first on practical wellbeing.

Neutralizing difficult memories with EFT is straightforward, by soothing one memory at a time you can work your way through troublesome memories to get relief from the past.

These days I’m using Steve Wells Intention Energy Processes (IEP) most of the time for working with all sorts of emotions, thoughts, beliefs and memories. It’s a fast and efficient process that uses the unconscious mind to do most of the heavy lifting while you are tapping.

Sometimes, clients tune into an issue and report that lots of memories related to that issue are coming up into awareness. Using EFT you would probably have to process these memories one at a time to get full relief.

With IEP you can also defuse difficult memories one at a time, but there are also ways to process challenging memories in bulk, by using the unconscious mind to gather the relevant memories together and then do the work of defusing them.

The Experiment

I was working with a client who had a prickly relationship with a close relative who was prone to emotional outbursts which intimidated my client. After each of these episodes my client spent a lot of time walking on eggshells around this person so as not to provoke another outburst.

We were processing some of her memories as part of defusing her sensitivity to these events. We had neutralised two memories using IEP when I asked her to remember another one and she commented “There are loads of them”.

Rather than do one at a time, I thought I’d try a little experiment.

I suggested to her that there must be a part of her unconscious mind that was acting like a ’librarian of memory’, able to select the relevant memories of these events and bring them into awareness.

She agreed with that idea.

I said “Ask this ‘librarian of memory’ part of you to assemble all the memories of these outbursts into an ‘album’ that we can work on rather than just one memory at a time.” After a few moments processing she said she had one.

I suggested that she put this ’album’ of memories out in front of her where we could ’see’ it.

I asked her to “release all her emotional attachments to all those memories in the album”. After a few rounds of tapping like this there was no charge left on any of the memories in the album.

Then I said “Put all those memories back into the past where they actually happened.”

She did that and I asked her to remember them now and there was no charge on any of them. (From what I know of the client’s history there would have been dozens of those memories).

The walking on eggshells feeling had greatly reduced. We still have some work to do on some of the triggers and beliefs, but the ’album process’ made it easier to deal with a collection of similar memories.

Since this first experiment, I’ve been using and refining the process with dozens of clients to help them process many memories at once.

There are several advantages to using this process.

• It’s much quicker than processing each memory one at a time.
• It’s more comfortable, because the memories are processed in a ’contained’ form that keeps them at a ’safe’ distance from the client.
• It’s more efficient than letting the conscious mind decide which memories to process, because the unconscious mind has a much more comprehensive understanding of how things are connected.

The Process

Note: this process is intended for people who have experience of using IEP with clients

1. If the client comes across a collection of related problematic memories, ask them to gather them into an album. Saying something like: “Ask your unconscious mind to gather all those memories (related to that experience) together and put them in a ‘photo album’”.
2. When they have done that (it may take a few seconds) ask them to imagine putting that closed photo album, containing all those memories, out in front of them more than an arm’s length away. (If the intensity is high tell them to move the album further away to a safe distance).
3. Use IEP on the album and the memories within it. “I release all my emotional attachments to that album and all the memories in it.” This may take many rounds of tapping to allow the emotions in the client and the emotional charge of the memories to decrease.
4. When the initial charge has diminished you can use “I release all my emotional attachments to those memories and everything they mean”.
5. Continue tapping until the charge on all those memories has greatly reduced.
6. When you are in this phase of tapping, individual memories may present themselves to the client. If that happens you can use IEP to deal with each of those memories as they arise.
7. Eventually the emotional charge on all those memories will be very low, then you can complete the process with “I put all those memories back into the past where they actually happened.”
8. Have the client check in with their issue, what they notice about it now and how it is different?

How This Process Works

This process takes advantage of the unconscious mind to select the memories and to use the intention tapping process to resolve them.

When groups of memories arise in awareness during tapping it is because they are associated in some way with the issue being worked on.

The Librarian

Our conscious mind can’t keep track of all the experiences that are related to a particular issue by the threads of feelings and associations that link them.

However our unconscious mind ’knows’ which memories are connected to each other and can use those feelings and associations to gather them together.

By asking our ’inner librarian’ to gather these memories together we hand the job over to our unconscious mind (which can do it) and keeps the conscious mind (which often thinks it knows what is going on, but doesn’t) from messing things up.

Once our unconscious mind has gathered these memories together we need some way to hold them while we process them, which is why we ask the unconscious mind to put them into an album.

The Album

The album is a metaphorical device to contain distressing memories in a way that makes them safe to work with.

We have varying degrees of capacity for working with challenging emotions and experiences. If those experiences are ’too much’ we become overwhelmed and activated, or we numb out from them for our own protection. (See [The Road Of Fire And Ice for a more detailed explanation.)

The work of the practitioner is to modulate the client’s experience so they can stay in what might be narrow a zone of safety.

The ’album’ can help to keep the client safe by changing the way they represent those painful memories.

By definition, emotionally charged memories are vivid, these memories are made vivid because of their perceptual qualities (known as submodalities in NLP).

Emotionally intense memories are often:

• big
• movies rather than stills
• in 3D
• panoramic (they surround us in our IMAX cinema of the mind)
• too close (we have a front row seat in what is distressing)
• in full view of your mind’s eye.

Those are the qualities that give the image some of their intensity.

When, metaphorically, we put those images in a photo album we make them:

• small, photos in albums are typically small
• still images, not movies
• 2D, photos are flat
• bordered, photos are rectangles: everything in the scene has an edge and is contained within the photo
• secure, the ’photos’ are stuck to the page: they can’t move, they can’t get to you
• hidden, you can’t ’see’ the photos in a closed album.

You can add metaphorical locks or bindings to the album to boost their security.

Finally, the album (and all the memories in it) are placed outside your body at a safe distance, further than arm’s length. If you think about it, you will probably find that dangerous things that are further away than your arm’s length feel safer than if they were closer: hence the expression ’keeping someone at arms length’.

Now that your client has put those contained memories at a safe distance you can start tapping.

I start with “I release all my emotional attachments to that album and everything in it”.

When the intensity has dropped I’ll switch to something like “I release all my emotional attachments to all those memories in that album”.

Then to “I release all my emotional attachments to all those memories and everything they mean”.

Often as the tapping progresses individual memories will ’pop-out’ of the album and you can process in the usual way before going back to the album.

When the ’intensity score’ on the album and its contents is at or close to zero I’ll say “I put all those memories back into the past where they actually happened”.

A few thoughts about this process

I’ve used this process to work with many kinds of memories some of which have been very intense and the process works well.

However, I would not suggest using this on intense material with a new client.

My suspicion is that the process needs a strong therapeutic relationship and a lot of rapport with your client to process more challenging material.

If that is not present I suspect the client’s unconscious mind, which is in charge of selecting the memories to process, will only give you the memories if feels safe to work with.

If you try this approach out I’d be very interested to hear how it works for you.

Credits: While there are some other EFT based processes for working with groups of memories, the idea for this approach was inspired by a chapter in the excellent NLP book ’The Heart of the Mind’ written by Steve and Connirae Andreas (1989). Using NLP methods they teach a client to use an NLP process to neutralise a troublesome memory, then have the client’s unconscious mind gather the relevant memories and process them unconsciously rather than go through each one individually.

The post Defusing multiple memories with Intention Tapping – The Album Technique appeared first on practical wellbeing.

You have probably seen things you would rather not have seen, heard things you would rather not have heard and felt things you would have preferred not to feel. It wouldn’t be surprising if you took those memories home with you and, however much you tried, they came back into your mind bringing all their stress and distress with them.

As well as coping with your own distress you may need to cope with the distress of patients and their families and maybe even your colleagues.

Depending on the role you have, you may know exactly what the corona virus is like and what it can do to people. Sometimes you will know how little you can do to help them.

I’m not there, so I can’t really imagine how scary this might be for you.

You may be scared for yourself, your colleagues, your family and friends. Not only do you have to cope with your own fears and anxieties you have to deal with their anxieties for you. That’s more stress and distress to deal with.

You may feel anger about how the ‘powers that be’ are making things worse and you might feel grief for the family, friends and colleagues you have lost.

There are probably a lot of other things that prey on your mind, batter your emotions and wear you out.

You may have your own ways of coping with all this stress and distress.

I’d like to offer you another stress relief strategy that could help you cope. It’s easy to learn and it’s free.

Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) / AKA Tapping

You may have heard about EFT/Tapping. It involves tapping on acupuncture points with your finger tips to relieve stress and distress. You can find out more about EFT/Tapping here.

If you have not had any experience of it, it probably looks and sounds unusual. However EFT has been the subject of a lot of research and is now being researched by NICE as a treatment protocol for PTSD.

Here is some of the research that has been done on using EFT for PTSD and anxiety:

• EFT vs EMDR for PTSD
• Meta Analysis: EFT for Anxiety
• Meta Analysis: EFT for PTSD

If you are in the NHS or a care home setting working with corona virus patients I’d like to offer you free sessions to help you relieve the stress and distress of your work and show you how to use these techniques for yourself.

This offer is open to you whether you are a consultant or a cleaner, a nurse practitioner or a porter, a junior doctor or a health care assistant. If your work is at the sharp end of the pandemic I’d like to offer what help I can.

I’ve been in private practice as a psychological therapist for 20 years, I’ve been using and offering training in EFT since 2004. I’m a member of two professional organisations (and on the ethics board of one).

The sessions I am offering are for helping you let go of some of the stress and distress of what you are experiencing and to teach you how to use these simple processes for yourself.

Please note:

• These sessions are NOT counselling or psychotherapy.
• The hour long sessions will be online using the Zoom platform.
• I have capacity for up to six free NHS/Care Home clients, each client would be entitled up to six one-hour long sessions.
• These strictly confidential sessions are offered from my private practice, I have no links or contract with the NHS. The fact that you are seeing me and the content of our sessions will not be in a report to your employer / manager.

If you would like to find out more and whether these sessions would be helpful to you, drop me a line using the form below and we can arrange a short telephone conversation to see if this might be helpful to you.

I hope this offer can help in some small way. I have no useful medical experience and I wouldn’t even be able to sew you a set of scrubs, but I do know how to help people let go of stress and distress and I’d be honoured to help in that way.

Thank you for doing the wonderful and difficult work you are having to do.

Sincerely,

Andy Hunt

If you are would like to know more about this offer please get in touch.

The post Corona Virus Stress and Distress Relief: An Offer For NHS And Care Home Staff appeared first on practical wellbeing.

It’s common to talk about EFT/Tapping for stress relief: have a difficult experience, feel bad, tap on those feelings to feel better.

Usually people (even experienced tappers) have to feel really bad before they think of tapping for stress relief.

Rather than wait to feel bad before tapping wouldn’t it be better to reduce your stress response before the experience so you could be calm when the stressful situation happens.

In this month’s EFT Cafe Andy Hunt will introduce some approaches to help you be in the ‘eye of the storm’ when it comes, rather than being blown about by it.

This month’s EFT Cafe is on Tuesday, 10th March 2020 at St Oswald’s Hospice Teaching Centre, Newcastle upon Tyne.

The post EFT Cafe – Stress Prevention – March 10th 2020 appeared first on practical wellbeing.

What would you get if you crossed Ericksonian hypnotherapy with tapping?

One of the things you might get is the ‘Process Instructions Technique’, created by expert tapper Gene Monterastelli.

This is a simple way of combining tapping and the power of the unconscious mind to come up with new solutions and perspectives on our problems and outcomes. No swinging pocket watches or trances required.

To find out more join me at St Oswald’s Hospice Education Centre next Wednesday at 7pm.

The post EFT Cafe – ‘Ericksonian Tapping’ – 12th February 2020 appeared first on practical wellbeing.