hi all,

 i come from a culture where beatings and canings as well as slappings are considered the norm when disciplining a child or an adolescent. there are some parents who are "enlightened" (or "liberal", depending on who you speak to) that don't, but by and large, i'd say that the majority of us have been flogged as children. 

 my father, mother, domestic helper as well as my grandmother flogged me repeatedly while i was growing up. i never thought anything about it, thinking that i "deserved" it, and i grew up thinking it was "normal". i also seem to recall that many of my peers got similar treatment by their parents. i didn't seem to suffer from any overt pathological or dysfunctional behaviour while growing up. i got good grades, got along well with my friends, and excelled in sports. the only tell-tale sign was probably my instinctive mistrust and fear of authority. looking back, i also had a very vague but constant sense of being empty. 

 two years ago, i started suffering from huge unexplainable bouts of anxiety. it's been more than a year since i've embarked on EFT and have seen tremendous results. (if asked to articulate why i broke down, i'd say simply that it was a lifetime of accumilated "small-t" traumas that was not processed.)

 right now, i'm tapping through the events of my father's "abuse". i put the word "abuse" in inverted commas because i'm not entirely sure if it would qualify as such. to give a flavour of what happened, there were canings when i didn't get above 90% in my exams, or when i was perceived to not "give my all" during my sports trainings. they weren't controlled beatings (i.e. one or two strokes of the canes); rather, they were full-out floggings, with the red welts all over my body for days after. sometimes, the skin broke and i bled. 

one obstacle that i'm dealing with while i'm tapping through these events (which i will be sure to tap on ;) ) is how this could has impacted me so much. i tried to speak to a few of my peers about it and they told me that it was "normal" and to "get over it". they are of the opinion that the problems only arose for me because i chose to "make a mountain out of a molehill". i know they're wrong and do not believe them of course, but there IS a part of me that is genuinely confused. i grapple with questions like "why did i break down and not them?" "did what my parents do to me so terrible?" "are the scars really that deep?" "i don't understand how my peers are okay and i'm not". "this kind of treatment from my parents don't warrant this kind of emotional charge." and in my darkest moments, "am i making a mountain out of a molehill?"

i welcome any input on this. i'm living in a different country now, away from my friends and my family. it's a good thing, to be away from my family, as it's giving me the emotional and physical space to heal but i do get a little lonely. so i am happy to have this forum to air my thoughts as well as to hear your valuable feedback and advice.

 cheers,  faith. :)

 Hello Faith

Firstly, congratulations on finding and using EFT successfully for yourself.

What you have described in your email rang many bells for me, both personally and for my clients. Why does one person react differently to a situation than others? Why does one person become traumatised whilst others in the same situation are not? These are all very good questions, yet also easily answered with another question -  Why aren't we all the same? Diversity in everything is what has made nature so robust.

The nature vs nurture argument has gone on for a long time but if we start from an assumption that both play their part, then we can see how the differences in the character that we are born with make an impact on how we react to the nurturing we receive. This process actually starts whilst still in the womb. During the 3rd trimester, the baby is learning about the environment he or she will be born into and is already making adaptations to better fit into that world. 

Behind the questions you have raised, I often find lies shame and guilt - "Why should I have been traumatised by these events when my brother or sister wasn't - it must mean that I'm deficient or defective, or that I'm the one who's to blame for my suffering" (or, as you said it, "I'm making mountains out of molehills") There is a huge assumption here, though, that other siblings or other people haven't been traumatised. How can we ever know how someone else feels or what they may have repressed, or what price they are paying for looking like serene swans whilst frantically paddling like mad under the surface? 

There have been studies done on trauma and why some people who are exposed to a traumatic situation go on to develop PTSD whilst others don't. One of the main findings, I believe, is the individual's attitude towards life and themselves and how the two work together - do you believe that life does things to you or that you take charge of your own life? Have you had experiences of small 't' traumas that have taught you that these feelings are transitory? Have you been brought up to feel that the world is a fundamentally safe and loving place, although bad things can happen from time to time? Basically, this is what Gary would call the writings on your walls - your rulebook of life. All your history, personality and understanding goes into your response when traumatised, but just think for a minute about how it might feel to be so young as to not have developed much understanding of life, then along comes someone who treats you in the way you've described

You may need a lot of people to tell you over and over again that what happened to you as a child was indeed truly awful to help you to justify your deep emotional wounding. Yours and your peers response that it was just 'normal' is part of your coping mechanism which helped you to survive the trauma, but coping isn't the same as dealing with  the feelings and the emotional scars can be carried deep down for years. Basically we all grow up in environments that are 'normal' simply because that is all that we know, even though others outside can see the abuse. That is a lot of the work of therapy, being able to look at 'what is' without needing to label it as 'normal' or 'traumatic'  or something that somehow just shouldn't be - accepting ourselves, deeply and completely, so that we can release the traumas and heal ourselves. 

I hope that some or all of this finds a way to help you. I have an interesting document about Shame and how it affects us, which is aimed at teenagers but applies just as much to adults which might help you to understand your feelings - email me if you'd like me to send you a copy.  

Dear Faith,

Thank you for your open post and the descriptions of what happened. I think that abuse is what we perceive as such. If your peers were OK with it, and who knows if that was a coping mechanism or truly so, that is their inside job. For you, hitting, caning, punishment is NOT OK. It hurts you, it hurts your feelings, your self esteem, your body, and maybe worst of all: Nobody seemed to care, nobody helped. The helplessnes  growing up in such an environment must have been overwhelming, and we often decide, that the only way to not feel powerless is to use power against ourselves in the form of shame and guilt. I don't know how else to classify your father's behaviour than abuse (without the "..."). I am sure that he had more reasons for what he did than just that it was socially accepted, maybe even expected in your culture. I don't think that anybody would ever hit his daughter this way without having very severe anger issues. Why would you deserve such a thing? What you deserve is a wonderful life, love, appreciation, gratitude and forgiveness, not being beaten until your skin breaks. It seems that you never bought into the writing on the walls of your culture and have remained the capability to see yourself and others as they are. You must be a very powerful woman. Would it help you to get some set ups and ideas for your tapping, or are you ok with that?

I am so glad that you found EFT and this forum!
With Love

Ingrid 

 

thank you both marian and ingrid for replying to my post. i realise in retrospect that i badly needed to hear some words of support;  that my reactions towards my childhood authority figures were okay and justified, and it really helped how you explained HOW and WHY they were justified. thank you for also explaining why my peers react the way they do - intellectually, i've had a vague understanding of why we accept the "norm" the way we do, but your words help me reconcile their reaction of perceived  disbelief and non-support emotionally.

marian - your words on shame really hit the nail on the head. for the longest time, shame (along with helplessness) have been two of the hardest feelings for me to tap on. i can process anger, hurt, betrayal, sadness, fear quite well, but shame and helplessness have always seemed that much harder to deal with. i am wondering if my childhood abuse had anything to do with that. or that by human nature, shame and helplessness would be considered the hardest to deal with by oneself simply because it strips away...well... our very core self.

it is interesting that you've mentioned how "nurture" actually starts in the womb, especially in the third trimester. my mother has told me that she was clinically depressed in the latter months of her pregnancy with me. she had lost a child barely a year and half before she had me, and had not grieved over that loss. she also had an incredibly difficult childhood - one that of emotional subjugation and abadonment - and she believes that she might have passed on her "issues" to me in the womb. having read candace pert's molecules of emotion, i have to agree. i've had to tap, both for myself as well as for my mother, over these incidents. i'm made great progress in these areas, but i don't think i've zero-ed the issues yet.

 ingrid - you are right about my father and his rage issues. there was little or no control in his "discipline" of me. pulling my hair, slapping me, and throwing objects at me were not expressions of "controlled discipline". it was definitely rage-directed. 

the funny thing is that the only emotion that i ever felt growing up while enduring all of this was one that of anger and outrage. there wasn't any fear or sadness or powerlessness. it's only after i've processed the initial emotions of anger that i realise that there's a huge, HUGE well of emotions that's underneath, which were never apparent to my consciousness, until now. 

 thank you both, once again. 

much love to all. :)  

marian, your words on how many factors influence a person's reaction to trauma made me think of one of my favourite topics, temperament. are you familiar of the myer-briggs type indicator (MBTI) or the kiersey scale of temperament? the 16 temperaments are distilled into four categories - SPs, SJs, NTs, and NFs. research has apparently shown that the NFs are by far the most sensitive of the four types, with them being natural empaths.

 the MBTI helped me shed some light to my issues when i was grappling with them in my earlier days of healing. it helped to know that one of the reasons why i, as an NF, broke down when i had to be a perceived "normal" childhood could have been because i was by nature (not nurture) more empathetic and sensitive.

it also helped for me to realise that my personality type - an ENFP - was in direct clash with my father's - an ISTJ - and how our society wanted us to be. our education system is very much geared to bring up ISTJ children, and basically, i was everything "wrong". i was too "loud", too "noisy", too "careless", too "impulsive", too "spontaneous", too "emotional", too "involved", too "disorganised", too "untidy", too "lazy", too "expressive", too "wild". i was everything an ISTJ wasn't.  :)

Hello Faith

I would be sure to address this as normal behavior, acceptable behavior, abusive behavior and unacceptable behavior when you are seeking to put together your verbiage for your phrasing. This way you are covering all avenues of your belief system. The part that feels it was normal, acceptable behavior because that's the way it was as you grew up and that's the way 'people' did it and also the part of your belief system which exists today that feels differently ... that those thoughts are no longer working for you now. Make sense?

You must also, at some time in your healing process, forgive those that applied the discipline as they did not know what they were doing and they were only going with what was taught them and then also to forgive yourself so that you can let go of any feelings that you have about deserving the punishment, accepting the punishment, etc.

If you have additional questions regarding my thoughts here, please feel free to express them and I will be happy to guide you further.

Peace, Kathleen

dear kathleen,

 thanks for replying. you're right about forgiving. i try to weave in the words "as much as i can i forgive...as much as i can i understand...as much as i'm ready to, i let go..."  :) 

 xxx

on a slightly separate note, my healing journey has been very intense. and this particular issue with regards to the abuse concerning my father (and other childhood authority figures) is far from a one-minute, one-day or even one-week wonder. i've spent a LONG time - i've lost count - on the abuse issue, and there are times where i'm totally overcome with despair. it's not that the process isn't working; it's working wonderfully. i start recounting the specific incidents, sort of like the movie technique, and i always start to cry in release. sometimes i don't have a specific memory in mind, and instead just feel this overpowering emotion - usually rage - that i just tap on. and there are always tears. i do this for 2-4 hours each day, broken up into 2-4 blocks. 

 the problem lies with the fact that that because this is such an intense and complicated issue - the abuse essentially spanned over 20 years - i don't seem to be able to find complete peace in a day. after each session, usually stopped because i'm emotionally exhausted, i'll potter around the house at peace, and then a short time later, i find the old symptoms of anxiety and just general tension in my body build up. so i go back and tap, and it works. the worst is night time, when i'm so tired in every single way - physically and emotionally - and my body won't allow me to sleep. i've learnt that just willing the symptoms to go away won't work, so i either practise mindfulness or (more effectively) i drag myself out of bed for another round of tapping. and it always works. 

but i wonder if there's something i'm doing wrong. i wonder if i'm just completely stuck in the past, and are just tapping on the same emotions again and again. i know they say the healing process is like an onion, and that layers might seem similar at times. the rage that i continuously tap on might be the same emotion, but the emotion has different causes. sometimes, when i'm emotionally exhausted and filled with despair, i wonder if ANYTHING gets resovled at all, and that the crying is just merely working as a dose of temporary morphine but the issues are still actually there. 

i guess that because i'm so heavily involved, i've lost perspective of my healinng journey. it's an incredibly lonely process sometimes, and so incredibly incredibly *difficult*. i was wondering if someone could give me any advice or feedback to my healing journey to make it easier i guess or even just words of comfort that what i'm doing is the right thing.  

 thank you. 

Dear Faith,

thank you for your post. Before sharing any other thoughts, I'd like to suggest that you shouldn't have to do this allone. Is there a skilled EFT Practitioner that could work with you? Please do find some help during tapping.

There is so much pain eminating from your posts, and I'd love to give some thoughts on how to approach this. 

From what you wrote, I feel that there are several core beliefs that are keeping you  stuck and don't allow for you to move forward:

faith:

 right now, i'm tapping through the events of my father's "abuse". i put the word "abuse" in inverted commas because i'm not entirely sure if it would qualify as such.

.

You mentioned in a later post that your father had mre than cultural obedience going on when he was beating you. But the belief that this could be somehow OK is still very strong in you. 

 

I come from a culture where beatings and canings as well as slappings are considered the norm when disciplining a child or an adolescent.

dear ingrid,

 thank you so much for responding to my post with such compassion and kindness. i apologise for not being thorough in giving more details to my healing journey: i have worked very closely with an EFT therapist since september 06. we communicate mostly through e-mail as well as through phone sessions. what we've found out over the last year, is that my issues essentially consisted of an entire lifetime's worth of unprocessed traumas. i used to think they would be considered "small-t" traumas, but this thread has made me reevaluate that a considerable number of these traumas would objectively be considered "big-t" traumas. we've tapped through a significant number of them, including the abuse issue that i've written about in this post.

my therapist is of the opinion that i'm strong enough to handle tapping by myself, as she's pointed out that i seem to be able to "take myself" through the phone sessions. sometimes i agree with her, sometimes i desperately wish that i had someone else on the phone because it's just *that* much easier to have someone to just listen. during this month however, because she's uncontactable and i'm out of the country, i've decided to try to stand more on my own two feet, and have done my daily tapping sessions entirely by myself. this is also when i decided to use this forum more regularly for support.

you might be right that my core beliefs and my core issues haven't been released yet, which might account for the slow pace of my healing. but given what's been uncovered with my therapist so far, i believe it's just a matter of going through more specific memories. i also do think that while i might have thought i had "deserved" the beatings initially, this thread and my tapping sessions over the last few days have gone some way in dispelling that notion. i can feel the emotion of shame losening its grip. :)

 it's the interim periods that i find so hard to deal with - it's 2:30 am where i am for eg - that i cannot have one single peaceful day. that the negative emotion creeps up on me throughout the day, and can be neutralised only during the periods of tapping and the short times after. and i'm so tired.

so, given this, i'm not sure what else i should do. should i continue what i've been doing? or should i try something else - adding something new in to the routine? basically, anything to make the healing journey as gentle as possible.

thank you so much for listening.

Hello faith

Something occurs to me from reading your posts and I hope you'll forgive me if it's out of place. You are being very diligent in your use of EFT and gradually tackling an entire lifetime's worth of issues, and I wonder how much room there is in your life at the moment for some fun, happiness, joy, gratitude etc. When we are climbing up a cliff, we only see the rock in front of us and sometimes forget that the sky is blue, the sun is shining, the birds are singing and that the higher we get, the better the view. Joy can be found in tiny things, for a few seconds or minutes at a time, but often it is that that makes our life worth living, not the journey up the cliff. When life seems to be full of , it's worth remembering that flowers grow well in !! I have a quote from Alfred D Souza on my desk to remind myself about this, because I have tended to easily get myself tied in knots over the 'work' on myself that I haven't yet finished, and that there seem to be more negatives in my life than positives at times. I hope it helps you too. "For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin - real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way. Something to be gotten through first, some unfinished business, time still to be served, or a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that this was my life. This perspective has helped me to see that there is no way to happiness. Happiness is the way." Gratitude is one of the best ways to raise our vibrational level and I think one of the Abraham-Hicks books has some good gratitude games in it that you might like to try. Wishing you joy and peace

dear marian,

thank you so much for your post. you were not out of place at all. my instinctive reaction when i read your post was one that of shame and guilt, as i felt once again, like the small child who was always "wrong". i tapped on it, and i realised very quickly, that your post had one very important piece of advice that i really needed: that while tapping on the negative stuff might be essential for healing, the tapping on affirmations and building gratitude would help the healing process go a lot more gently, as well as help me find happiness amidst these traumatic memories.

the quote that you cited is absolutely the best possibly quote for me at this time. i have realised, much to my consternation, that i've always been of the perception that there has never been a single "perfect" moment in my life. there's always something that could be better. and this quote reminds me that this IS life...that happiness exists in the midst of the "imperfections", and that sometimes, happiness can be found within the "imperfections".

so. the practical takeaways i've taken from your post include:

a) tapping for affirmations and gratitude. i just did a few rounds of that: i listed all the people in my life that loved me, the people that i loved, the beautiful house that i lived in, the acts of kindness that i received, as well as the acts of kindess i gave. i tapped for the people in this forum, including you! :), and was awash with gratitude. as with tapping for the negatives though, tapping on the positives also brought about so many tears. this is normal?

b) i'm going to try to incorporate at least ONE activity that brings me joy each day and i am going to make a conscious effort to savour each moment of it.

my question is: i don't have any "responsibilities" - children, work, etc - at the moment (yes, i'm incredibly lucky for this, and i've just tapped on this), and i have a lot of time to deal with the traumatic memories. sometimes i wonder if it's healthy to spend so much time each day working on the past, but to go without tapping for long stretches brings about emotional agony. this is the part i'm confused by. i agree that i should make more conscious efforts to incorporate the postives to my days, whether during the tapping sessions, and also during the day. but would you suggest that i make any other changes to the status quo? i thank you for any advice you could offer.

 Hi faith

I'm glad the quote had some resonance for you and that you've found that you do indeed have lots of things to be very grateful for.

One of the things that might help you is to learn to meditate. Mindfulness meditation is good (see Jon Kabat-Zinn's books Full Catastrophe Living or Coming to Our Senses)

Mindfulness meditation is all about being present to  yourself and the world, yet not getting involved and hooked into the emotional drama. When you go close up to a painting, all you can see are the intricate details of the brush strokes and the sense of the colour that fills your eyes. However, when you get a bit of distance from the painting, you start to see the form and shape, light and dark, all as part of the whole picture.  EFT is great for the detail - being specific is needed for it to work well. However, we can get into a habit (or perhaps perpetuate a habit we might need to change) of constantly tuning in to all the negative feelings - so that we can tap them away with EFT of course. But actually wanting to tap them away is also a way of not accepting them. Mindfulness meditation involves just tuning into yourself, paying attention to what you are feeling, with no need to judge your experience, or to change it in any way. It is "moment -to-moment, non-judgmental awareness, cultivated by paying attention in a specific way, that is, in the present moment, and as non-reactively, as non-judgmentally, and as openheartedly as possible." 

One good way I have found to do this is to use an ancient breathing technique where you breathe in gentleness, and breathe out gentleness, and let yourself become gentleness (this is not about relaxing or slowing your breathing, but rather bringing the gentle quality to your breath and your body). Notice the air feels cool on the tip of your nose as you breathe in and how it feels warm on the base of your nose as you breathe out. When your mind wanders, just come back gently to the breathing. Be aware of the quality of yourself that is in your breath - this is your pure essence. If you find breathing in harder than the breathing out, just note this and continue. There is nothing that can be right or wrong here.

Now for some difficult questions, which seem to arise from your postings. They are not meant for you to feel that you have done anything wrong, but to hopefully shine a light into a previously dark place. 

In what ways might you be inadvertently continuing the abuse, ie the emotional agony you suffer if you don't tap almost sounds like you are being punished for not tapping and working through your issues.

When did you decide to keep suffering? 

Could you choose to do something completely different? 

Who will you be when you no longer identify yourself as a trauma victim? 

What's the worst thing that could happen to  you if you stopped tapping?

I really don't mean to encourage you to stop tapping, and you must, of course, rely on your EFT practitioner who knows you far better than do I. These are just questions to reflect on - see if you can be open and curious about them rather than critical and judgmental towards yourself.

I really do wish you all the best with this - and keep posting. You are exceptionally brave and courageous and I'm sure your willingness to share your private thoughts and fears will be an inspiration to many others who visit this site, whether they post or not. 

May peace and joy lighten your days

Dear Faith,

I'd love to suggest some setups, if I may. 

Even though I have been through more than anybody will ever understand, I choose to feel surprisingly proud that I never forgot who I truly am

Even though nobody helped me, and I thought it must have been my fault, I know deep down that nothing can ever justify the abuse, no matter how different from them I were

Even though I don't know what my life is going to be like once I am done with it -how will my family and culture feel to me?- I deeply and completely love and accept that I will be who I always was, I'll just enjoy it more.

Please let me know if this direction resonates with you, or what would work better, and I'd be happy to give you more.

Please  keep writing! We are glad to have you in the forum!
With love

Ingrid 

dear ingrid, 

 thanks so much for your tapping statements. i did tap on them and it did help me ease into the specific memories. i think i'll be fine for the moment, but what i do think i need is a truted friend or my therapist with me while i deal with some of the specifics of the memories because they can be quite scary. it's odd - i can speak of the memories intellectually without any charge, but dealing with them on an emotional plane brings up so much distress that your mind cannot help but want to instinctively turn away. 

 dear marian, 

thanks for telling me about mindfulness. i actually have been practising mindfulness for over a month now, and it does help. i actually learnt it from tara benett goldman's emotional alchemy.

 xxx

 on a separate note, i realised belatedly that my account of my healing journey so far has not been exactly accurate. i feel now that i need to clarify further, lest wrong conclusions be drawn. :) i DID start EFT in september 2006 but the treatment then wasn't intensive. i met up with my therapist once a month, and tapped maybe once or twice a week. all the way from september 2006 to september 2007, i was working full time, and juggling EFT alongside with it. i've also made some pretty major changes to my life, including getting married and moving countries. my therapist had been trying to gently suggest to me that given the kind of emotional work i had been doing, i should best not work because work took up so much energy. she was right, and when i told her i needed to stop working, she said "that's what i've been trying to suggest!" the intensive daily sessions that i talk about above has only been the case since october 2007. so technically, the amount of EFT that i've been exposed too hasn't been as much as it originally sounded. 

besides this abuse issue, i have many other  "heavy-duty" issues to deal with. i'd even venture to say that the abuse case hasn't been the hardest so far. i write this with the hope that people don't get discouraged when they see how long EFT is taking for me. it's something i initially struggled with in the initial months - why vietnam vets seemed to recover so much more easily than i did. but i have learnt that what i have are seriously heavy duty issues, separate from the chronic abuse that i've documented here. i've gone a long way in dealing with it, so i am very grateful for it.

 i asked my mind whether i should continue tapping at the rate i had been donig for the last few days. i also asked it why it was so difficult to function OUT of these sessions. it told me that tapping was a good thing, and that it agreed, as marian suggested, that i needed some emotional nourishment in addition to these cleansing sessions. it also told me that why this abuse issue was SO HARD was because each tapping session saw me neutralising aspects of the issue, but leaving other aspects untouched. these aspects that still carried charges were the ones responsible for my out-of-sorts moods. having found this out, i've started closing each session with asking it to put the remainding aspects in a little box, and that i promise i'll get to it when i can. 

i also hope i haven't given the impression that i do NOTHING but tap. it's true that tapping is my first priority now, but there are moments of joy and peace and happiness in my life. i'm in the midst of organising an event now, and while this brings me stress, it also brings me joy. and i will be conscious to give thanks for these moments.  

 thank you all for your kind and loving words. they have helped tremendously. 

love,

faith.  

Dear Faith,

I have to repeat myself that you are a very strong woman. I respect your devotion to healing and tapping and asking for help when you feel stuck. You have come a very long way already!

When you tap, please be mindful of how you want to feel, what you want your life to be like, and include that into the tapping set up and sequence.

Even though I am separated from my culture and miss being part of a society that truly works for me, I choose to see each great contact I make as a person welcoming me to my new ME.

Even though I sometimes feel overwhelmed by all the debris that I seem to have to remove, I choose to appreciate myself for the mountains that I have already moved.

Even though I wish I knew when I'll begin to feel the way I want, I choose to appreciate every glimpse of it as a confirmation that my wishes are true and granted.

-I feel so desperate sometimes    -It is hard to know what is right or wrong     -sometimes I feel so confused, I don't know where to go     -I wonder why I am doing this     -I must have found something already that I was not aware of     -And I don't remember anybody telling me about it        -Why did I recognize it and why is it so important?     -Maybe there is something profoundly wonderful and heaing about me     -Maybe I have already found everything I need     -Maybe my healing is not about becoming who I am, but removing what prevents me from enjoying who I always was     -that would be so much easier      -maybe I can heal just by letting go of who I am not    -and maybe I know exactly how to do that, after all, I have kept my inner self safe all this time    -maybe the end of the tunnel is much nearer than I thought it is    -that would be nice    -then things woud become easy    -I can alerady see how I am going to be    -and I feel that I will love myself very much    -Thank you, Faith, for never giving up!    -thank you, Faith, for moving on, until you are there    -thank you for being so connected to your true self    -thank you, Faith, for allowing yourself to heal and enjoy your life

You get the idea. Tap on all that makes you feel good. You will balance your energy system in relation to it.

"Even though Dad wanted me to believe that I deserve to be beaten, I choose to see that I deserve to be loved, no matter what dad said"...might be a way to tap on the "yes-but"thoughts that come to mind when you tap on the positive.

Hope this helps.

Please keep writing. You are very much appreciated!

Love

Ingrid