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Lots of webinars make very big promises.

By just listening for 50 minutes you will become rich, thin, abundant and instantly popular.

Sadly, many of the webinars and teleseminars that I have listened to did not quite live up to their advertising.

So as not to fall into this trap I’m going to make a very small promise to you if you attend this webinar.

I hope that this webinar may help you to look at how feelings work in a different way and give you a simple tapping routine to help you more easily let go of the feelings, thoughts and behaviours that no longer serve you.

What you can expect:

• A different way of thinking about what feelings are and how they work.
• Why trying to get rid of negative feelings often makes them more resistant to change.
• How letting a negative feeling be can be a good way to start letting it go.
• A simple tapping routine that helps you let go of troublesome emotional states by allowing them to be there.
• Different ways to use ‘Inclusive Tapping’ in everyday life and therapeutic situations.

It’s a webinar for people who use EFT/Tapping for their self-development or work with other people in a helping capacity. So you will need to know how to tap to get the best out of the experience.

I hope you’ll be able to join me in exploring this interesting way of working with ‘negative’ emotions.

The webinar is on Thursday 20th June, 3pm BST (10am EST, 4pm CET)

The webinar is free of charge and you can sign up here.

If you can’t attend on the day, you can still sign up and receive a free recording of the webinar.

This is the first webinar I’ve run so it promises to be an “interesting” experience for everyone.

I hope to see you there.

Image courtesy of Daniel*1977

Do you ever find that your to-do list turns into a list of things you don’t do. That somehow you manage to put off or avoid doing what needs to be done.

If you have a gift for procrastination and putting off what needs to be done this month’s EFT Cafe will be very useful for you. Andy Hunt will demonstrate a simple two step process that makes it easier to just get on and do what’s on your to-do list

This process will help you release resistance to the task in hand and use the power of your subconscious mind to come up with new ways of helping you achieve it and choosing to get it done.

The EFT Cafe is on Wednesday, June 12th between 7pm-9pm at St Oswald’s Hospice Teaching Centre, Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE3 1EE and costs just £10.

Image courtesy of timo_w2s

People often feel stuck.

Stuck with a problem, not able to change the way that they think, feel or act because they are depressed, or their relationship is broken, or they can’t overcome their resistance.

One of the ways we keep ourselves stuck in these problems is the way that we talk to ourselves and each other about them.

Freezing The World With Words

Our language can freeze a difficult, but changeable, process into a solid thing that will resist change. Sometimes just a few words can transform a challenging process into an unchangeable problem.

What is this mysterious process of freezing problems and turning them into stone?

Simple, we talk about processes as if they were things.

This morning I took the dog for a walk along the beach, in the sun and wind, long lines of waves ran up onto the shore.

But what exactly is a wave?

We talk about waves as if they were things: “That’s a big wave” or “Look out for that wave”, but waves are not things.

If you asked me to bring you one of those waves I wouldn’t be able to do it. I can’t put a wave into a bucket to show you, it would stop being a wave and become just a bucket of water.

Waves aren’t things they are processes, they are moving bodies of water that are constantly arising, developing, changing and disappearing. Yet we talk about them as if they were solid things.

Our language lets us ‘freeze’ a process turning it into an object. In this process, sometimes called nominalisation, all the process qualities of something are removed to create a frozen idea of the true process.

This happens so easily that we barely notice it. When we nominalise a process in this way becomes solid, stable and unchanging in our minds.

The Downside Of Nominalisation

Sometimes nominalisation is useful, it’s very convenient for me to talk about seeing waves on a beach without having to describe the exact dynamics and motion of each wave as it approached the shore.

Sometimes nominalisation not so helpful, while it can be economical in speech to talk about our complex emotional predicaments as things, thinking about them as things can keep them stuck.

For example, you may have said or heard other people say things like this:

• “Our relationship is in trouble”
• “He has commitment issues”
• “I am full of anger”

Are relationships, anger and fear things?

Can you put your relationship in a wheelbarrow? Could you bring me a box of commitment or a packet of anger?

No, I though not.

Although we talk about relationships, anger, commitment, etc, as if they were things, they aren’t things at all, they are processes.

Each is a changing, and change-able, flux of thoughts, feelings, sensations and behaviours. But, instead of thinking of them as processes we solidify them into things, already formed and much harder to change.

Still not convinced?

Try this thought experiment.

Think the thought: “He went to a party”.

Notice what goes on in your mind’s eye as you think that thought.

Now, think the thought: “He went partying”.

Notice what goes on in your mind’s eye as you think that thought.

For most people, the thought: “He went to a party” conjures up a still image of a party. On the other hand, the thought “He went partying” will conjure up a movie of what is happening at the party.

Although sentences have a very similar meaning, how they are represented in our minds can be quite different. A still image is just that: still, fixed, unchanging. A movie has a beginning, a middle, an ending and the possibilities of different endings.

How Do You Unfreeze The World?

If our problem seems stuck and unmoving, how can we begin to un-stick it, to start a process of movement and get more information?

How can we turn our relationships, commitment, anger, etc back into a fluid, changeable process.

One way is to ask questions:

• “Our relationship is in trouble: How, and with whom, are you relating in troublesome ways?
• “He has commitment issues”: Who is he committing to, or not, and how is he doing that?
• “I am full of anger:” Who are you angry with and how?

The answers to these questions can start to unfreeze our descriptions of what is not working for us. It automatically loosens the stuckness of the situation and gives us more to work on.

Enhancing The Thawing With EFT

If you are using EFT you will know that the more specific you can be about your experience the more likely you are to be able to change it.

If you have ever tried tapping on your relationship difficulties like this: “Even though our relationship is in trouble, …” you will know that it is difficult to make progress. Because the word “relationship” is both frozen and does not describe the situation in much detail.

Using the questioning process to unpack “relationship” we might have a conversation something like this.

“Our relationship is in trouble”

“How and with whom are you relating in troublesome ways?”

“My husband and I often fight” (Notice that “fight” is also a nominalisation, you can’t put one in a wheelbarrow and you can have an “ongoing fight”)

“How exactly are you fighting?”

“He shouts at me with an angry face and harsh voice, I take it for a while and then I scream back at him, storm out, slamming the door in his face … then we sulk”

Now we have a much better idea of how they are relating, the relationship is being expressed as a process and we have much more detail to tap on.

The more specific you can be about your experience the more effective the tapping will be.

Once you start to spot and unpack nominalisations you will find that they give you access to a lot of previously hidden and tappable material. The challenging part of the process is being able to spot the nominalisations when you think or hear them.

In the next article I will describe how labelling ourselves with a nominalisation can make change very difficult and give you a simple way to undo that.

This Level 2 training for helping professionals includes:

• Effective techniques for working with traumatic memories, so that you can dissolve the painful feelings attached those memories rather than feeling helpless when faced with your client’s suffering.
• Identifying and working with limiting beliefs, so that you can gently and easily help people shift their unhelpful ways of thinking.
• Finding the issues behind the presenting problems, so that you can make interventions that reach below the surface presentations of difficulties and get to the heart of the matter.
• Lots of structured practice. This is a practical training you will learn the skills of EFT through structured exercises and lots of one-to-one practice, so that you will be confident enough to use the methods taught when working with clients in real situations.

If you have a core profession (counselling, therapy, nursing, social work etc.) and want to add EFT to your therapeutic tool kit, this two day training will develop your EFT skills from the simple day to day approach taught in the Level 1 training up to a standard where you can use it with clients at a professional level.

This EFT Level 2 Training follows the AAMET syllabus and is presented by an approved EFT trainer.

AAMET is the largest professional organisation of EFT worldwide so you can be confident you will receive a thorough and effective training.

For more information click here, or

Image courtesy of timo_w2s

Is the way that you are thinking keeping you stuck?

How we think about ourselves and our world has a huge impact on the quality of our experience, how we perceive our world and what we can do to change it.

One way of getting ourselves stuck in our thinking is to turn our experience from the fluid process of life into fixed, unchangeable blocks.

We think about the ongoing problems of our lives: difficult relationships, low self-esteem, confidence, etc as if they were tangible things.

But, unlike real objects, you can’t put your relationships, self-esteem, confidence in a wheelbarrow and carry it around.

Thinking about these processes as things, seems to freeze them in place, making them harder to change. It’s as if we freeze the river of our lives into unmoving and unmoveable blocks of ice.

In this EFT Cafe, Andy Hunt will show you how to recognise this stuckness and how to use tapping to melt this frozen thinking, allowing your mind to get back into the flow of life and give you more ways to change your experience for the better.

The EFT Café is on Wednesday 8th May, from 7pm-9pm at St Oswald’s Hospice Teaching Centre, Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE3 1EE and costs just £10.

Image courtesy of Eric Langley

Lots of people are hard on themselves. Some people are very hard on themselves.

However hard you are on yourself it is not fun.

Being shouted at on the inside of your head by a Sergeant Major who is telling you how useless you are can be very stressful.

Very few people enjoy the treatment, but when they are invited to accept themselves and let go of the inner critic they suddenly find themselves reluctant to part with it.

They might say that if they didn’t have their inner critic goading them on they would lose their motivation and just become couch potatoes. Although they don’t like the inner critic they need it to keep them moving forward.

But is this true?

Do people lose their motivation when they retrain or retire their inner critic?

Have you been with a baby when they are learning to walk?

Babies are indefatigable. Once they have it in their minds that they are ready to learn to walk they really go for it. With huge concentration and effort, they get up, stagger a few steps, fall down, get up again, stagger a few more steps, fall down again (have a cry), get up and take some more steps. That’s a lot of work, a lot of disappointment and failure at the beginning until they enjoy more and more success.

If you are helping a child to learn to walk, do you shout at them when they fall down, tell them they are doing it all wrong, that they are not good enough and will never get it right?

For the child’s sake, I hope not.

If that child had an inner critic who spoke in such harsh terms, would they find it helpful?

I doubt it. It’s hard to learn when your paralysed by fear and condemnation. Fortunately at this stage children haven’t yet learned to criticise themselves.

Most people help a child to walk by being encouraging, kind, and supportive, acknowledging each setback and praising each success.

If that child had an inner mentor who treated them like that, would they find it helpful?

I think so. Acceptance and encouragement make the world a safe environment to learn in.

You were once a baby learning to walk; fast forward 10, 20, 30 years or more.

Now your inner critic tells you that if they don’t threaten and criticise you then you wont do anything, learn anything or make any progress.

In who’s interest is the idea that the inner critic is the only one who can keep you moving forward?

Not sure? Here’s another clue: who is telling you that you can’t succeed without them?

That’s right, they are!

But your inner critic is wrong.

In lots of research the differences between people who accept themselves and people with punitive self-criticism, the self-acceptant people are more resilient, motivated, more likely to persist with a task and less prone to procrastination. (Is your inner critic getting nervous reading this?)

It may that your inner critic is doing the best it can for you and it has an important job of motivating you, or keeping you safe, but the way that it is doing it is at a very high cost to your emotional and physical well-being. All those stress hormones it floods your system with are not helping you.

You might like to entertain the possibility that there is life after an inner critic is retrained or retired and that you can motivate yourself quite well without being beaten up.

If the inner critic starts telling you all the reasons why that would never work, just remember who’s speaking.

The ability of a child to persevere and learn is still present within you and all of us and it doesn’t need being shouted at to work.

Image courteys of Katie Tegtmeyer

Most of us have a list of things that we don’t want.

We might not want to be unfit, overweight, disorganised, lazy, and so on. Our list of “don’t wants” could be quite long.

However much we don’t want these things somehow they can seem difficult to change.

In this month’s EFT Cafe Andy Hunt will take you through a tapping process for clearing the way for you to get from what you don’t want to what you do want, easing resistance to your goals and the process of getting from what you don’t want to what you do want.

This EFT Cafe is on Wednesday 10th April from 7pm to 9pm at St Oswald’s Hospice Teaching Centre, Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE3 1EE and costs just £10

In many years of research about the “masters” and “disasters” of relationships he’s identified four ways not to handle the stresses and strains of being in relationship.

1. Criticism
2. Defensiveness
3. Contempt
4. Stonewalling

In the video Dr Gottman describes these behaviours and their effects, including: contempt is the best predictor of divorce and being on the receiving end of contempt is a predictor for the number of infectious illnesses they will experience in the next four years.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

It’s a sobering and funny video that is well worth watching.

Image courtesy of kirainet

Many people struggle to accept themselves, some people even hate themselves.

In their eyes they don’t have a problem, they are the problem.

In my work with these people I work with three aspects of self-hate.

• Inner critics
• Unhelpful identity beliefs
• Internal identity conflicts

The aim of this work is to

• retrain or retire inner critics
• dissolve unhelpful identity beliefs
• to resolve the internal conflicts between our different identities

Retraining or Retiring The Inner Critic

Most people are familiar with an inner critic, a voice in our mind that comments, blames, criticises what we think, say and do. Sometimes this criticism can be just a background irritation, sometimes it can be a crippling diatribe against you.

If you listen carefully to what they say, these inner critics generally speak / curse / shout at you in the third person:

• How could you be so stupid!
• You’re pathetic!
• What is wrong with you!

The inner critic is an internalisation of an outer critic. Part of us has taken on the role of the critical other and now runs the “critic program” in our head, even if the original author of that criticism is long gone, or even long dead.

Having an inner critic is not fun, what they say is often unhelpful and how they say it is often very stressful and debilitating for us. It’s easy to understand why people would want to get rid of their inner critics, but getting rid of an inner critic may be a mistake.

The inner critic is often trying to do something beneficial for us, perhaps it is trying to help us succeed, look after ourselves or be safe. It’s just that the way that it tries to do that stinks.

For this reason I think of working with inner critics as retraining to do their job without the bullying manner, or retiring them gracefully if the critic has nothing useful to contribute to our lives.

Working from this perspective it is possible to change a harsh inner critic into a supportive coach, quite a change. It is such a change that after this work it usually takes people a few days to adjust to their quieter and friendlier inner world.

Dissolving Unhelpful Identities

There’s more to you than meets the I.

We think and talk about ourselves as if we were just one person, a single unified being travelling through life. But, if you think about it, that doesn’t really match our everyday experience.

We often find ourselves saying things like “I don’t know why I did that”, “I don’t know what came over me”, “I don’t trust myself”.

If we were just one “I” then these sentences would make no sense. How can the same I not know why it did that?

These kinds of sentences only make sense if we think of having different “parts of ourselves” taking on the label “I” in different circumstances.

Have you ever had the experience of at certain times feeling like a much younger version of yourself?

Perhaps you had the sense of being a frightened child or a whiny teenager. You might even have noticed that it wasn’t how you wanted to feel or behave but have been powerless to change it. (In some situations I used to feeling like I was a whining pre-teen complaining that “It’s not fair!”. Even though I didn’t want the way of being it could be difficult to shake it off)

At those times one of your different identities had been called up to take charge of you and what you did in that situation.

It’s as if we have a collection of identities that take centre stage at different times. In some psychological systems these identities are sometimes called sub-personalities, or ego states: parts of our beings that manifest themselves in certain circumstances.

Important I’m talking here about the every day experience of being a slightly different person in different situations, rather than the extreme end of this continuum known as Dissociative Identity Disorder or Multiple Personalities.

Identities are powerful

Your current identity, who you are in each situation, has a powerful effect on your life. Identities and identity beliefs exert a lot of influence on how you think, feel and act.

Compare the sentences “I feel depressed” with “I am depressed”. I feel depressed is just that, a description of a feeling, something you are aware of now. All feelings have a limited shelf life, they come and go. If you feel tired, then a good nights rest and you will feel refreshed in the morning. Each feeling morphs into another over time.

However if say “I am depressed” that is quite different, this like saying “I am a depressed person everywhere and all the time”. This experience feels like it is 24/7 and won’t go away. It is the all-encompassing stickiness of these unhelpful identities that can cause us problems.

Some examples of not so helpful identity beliefs.

• I am stupid
• I am defective
• I am useless
• I am pathetic
• I am hopeless

Imagine having these statements describing your way of being in the world. That’s not a very useful way to be in the world, is it?

How did you learn who to be?

Nobody is born with the identity “I am stupid”. These beliefs and identities are learned (usually) in our early lives. We pick up these ideas from our own experience and other people, parents, siblings, teachers, classmates and the wider community.

We may have significant traumatic experiences where we take on the idea that we are bad, stupid, pathetic, etc. Experiences of high stress where we come to those conclusions ourselves or those ideas are fed to us by someone else and we accept them.

Unfortunately as children we don’t have much experience of the world and our conclusions can be quite wrong. Unfortunately, from the outside these experiences may not look traumatic at all and be completely overlooked.

The other way of creating these identity beliefs is to distil a lot of different experiences into the conclusion I am bad, stupid, pathetic, etc. In these cases it’s not just one thing, it’s a series of experiences over time that create the identity belief.

Once this identity is formed, it tends to get stuck, it’s as if that self stops growing, isolates itself from the flow of your life and is left with the beliefs, resources, thoughts and behaviours it had at that time to handle those kinds of situations.

However they are formed, when faced with specific trigger experiences these identities with all their young feelings, thoughts, beliefs and resources come to the fore and try to do the best they can for us in that situation. This is the feeling of the younger self that you may experience in difficult situations.

However expecting our younger selves to handle stressful encounters with authority figures, money problems, romantic disputes probably isn’t a recipe for success.

You can upgrade your identity beliefs?

The good news is that you can update these early identity beliefs and their sub-personalities into a more resourceful, integrated adult state.

This younger identity can be identified, relaxed, give emotional resources and re-integrated into the greater whole so that you can become a more integrated person operating in the world from a more resourceful adult perspective.

Inner conflict resolution

I, myself and me

There are more parts to us than just “I” we also have parts of us with the labels myself and me.

Usually we think about I, myself and me as referring to the same single entity.

But what about sentences like this:

• I hate myself
• I don’t know what’s wrong with me
• There is something wrong with me, I need to get myself under control.

If we take these literally in

• I hate myself: there is a part of our experience (called “I” in this sentence) who hates another part of our experience (called “myself” in this sentence). Because we are talking about ourselves we think of this as just a statement of fact rather than a description of an internal interaction between different sub-personalities. If we think “John hate’s Janet” it’s easy to see that there are two different personalities at work. In the case of “I hate myself” there is a similar dynamic between two sub-personalities.
• I don’t know what’s wrong with me: Likewise in this sentence a part of us (called “I”) doesn’t know what’s wrong with another part of our experience (called “me”).
• There is something wrong with me, I need to get myself under control: In this sentence there is something wrong (in someone’s opinion) with a part of our experience (called “me”) and another part of our experience (called “I”) needs to get yet another part of our experience (called “myself”) under control to manage the problem.

Just as we may have many more than one “I” we may also have many more than “myself” or “me”

The intra-personal conflicts or inner civil war can take up a lot of time and energy and hold us in place as opposing inner forces slug it out. By relaxing and resourcing these sub-personalities, then resolving their conflicts, they can be re-integrated into the whole without the struggle.

Resolving the conflicts between these parts of our psyche means that we can spend more time being in the world than expending energy into unresolvable conflict between parts of ourselves.

Each of these parts of our experience have their own “ages”, feelings, believes and behaviours.

Summary

The aim of this work is to help people be the best fallible human being they can be and not to waste time or energy punishing themselves for being who they are.

Image courtesy of ЕленАндреа

In this month’s EFT Café Andy Hunt will demonstrate a technique for reducing self-judgemental attitudes, reduce should-ing on yourself and increase self-acceptance and compassion.

A few years ago EFT Master Gwyneth Moss invented the  tapping routine “About, To, As If” to help ease difficult interpersonal relationships.

It allows you to tap through layers of difficult responses, judgements, unspoken thoughts towards that other person and develop a more empathic understanding of them.

“Reflexive Tapping” is a variation on that process which uses EFT to work on the judgements we have against ourselves, reduce the should-ing on ourselves that we do, ease our internal communications, leading to greater flexibility and more self-acceptance.

Andy Hunt will be demonstrating Reflexive Tapping at this months EFT Cafe on Wednesday March 13th.

The EFT Cafe takes place at St Oswald’s Hospice Teaching Centre, Gosforth, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE3 1EE from 7pm-9pm and costs just £10.