There have been so many postings on anxiety and EFT lately that I thought it might be useful to have a summary of some of the issues around working with anxiety using EFT, so that newcomers to the forum are able to gain an understanding quickly, without having to read through lots of past postings. (Apologies to the moderators for the length of this to read, I'm trying to capture lots in one place to help people with anxiety!)
There are several things that are important to understand when dealing with chronic anxiety. Without an understanding of these elements, our approach can lead to more upset and fail to help us to heal with EFT.
1. The need for support
Chronic anxiety by its very nature suggests that a part of us feels afraid and unsafe. Anxiety is a response to not feeling safe feeling our feelings. It is a valid response due to things that have happened to us in the past. It is very important for us to honour that a part of us doesn't feel safe and realise that we need to proceed with gentleness, compassion, patience and empathy. This is not always easy to do on our own, and is often a lot easier with the support of an experienced practitioner. For more on this, see EFT practitioner Marian Mill's article Forget Stress It is Trauma that Kills, which gives a good explanation of why we often need support in our healing process.
If you are dealing with chronic anxiety, please seriously consider doing a few sessions with a practitioner who is experienced with dealing successfully with anxiety (this is a specialised area, one that not all EFT practitioners, no matter how experienced they are, are equipped to deal with.) If you feel that this sort of support isn't possible for any reason, I strongly suggest spending some time tapping on your beliefs around this and seeing if you can't find a creative way to have a session with an experienced practitioner. It could make life a lot easier for you. Some practitioners offer a free first session so that you can find out whether their approach would be supportive for you, so consider exploring this option as a way to get started.
If you, for whatever reason, feel you aren't able or don't want to work with a practitioner, you will need to become more informed and learn ways to take care of yourself throughout the healing process. One way to assist is to ask a trusted friend if they will sit with you as you tap, this can make a big difference in us being able to feel safe enough to tune in to the issues. Note that we often feel safe enough to do the tapping on our own, and yet hit blocks in clearing issues when we do so. This is because the feeling of being unsafe is often at a subconscious level - we are often completely unaware of how a part of us feels at a conscious level. Another possibility is to find a tapping buddy, there is a free online resource that enables you to do this at Tapping Buddies.
2. Anxiety as a form of protection
It is very important to understand that anxiety is serving a valuable purpose for you, and simply trying to get rid of the anxiety is likely to only make things more difficult for you. If we suffer from chronic anxiety it means that we have experienced things in the past that were simply too big for us to process, and so a part of us holds the feelings for us in order to protect us from being overwhelmed by them. It is very common for people with chronic anxiety to be unable to access any feelings, even around what were very traumatic events, and this lack of ability to feel often upsets people when they are new to EFT. It is so important to understand that the lack of feeling is a form of protection and we need to do EFT in a way that honours the need for protection.
Here is an analogy that can aid in understanding this important concept. Imagine that a person has gone through some traumatic events, and felt totally unsupported as a child. This person has a friend who loves them very much and wants to do all they can to protect them. This loyal friend will stand between the person and anyone or anything that could upset them, ensuring that their friend is safe and protected. If someone wanted to help them and simply tried to get rid of the friend who had been protecting them all this time, all that would happen is the person would become even more afraid and anxious as their only form of support is taken away from them.
This is exactly what happens with EFT if we approach it with the attitude that we just want to tap away all our anxiety. While this is an incredibly tempting approach when we are hurting and afraid and so want to heal, it is totally counterproductive. It is far more supportive to gently start supporting the loyal friend and gaining its trust, before trying to approach the person and deal with the core issues that are causing the anxiety. When we are working with EFT on our own, this means spending time doing very gentle tapping to let the part of us that is protecting us from feeling know that it is safe now. We need to gain the trust of that part of us, before we start trying to address the source of our anxiety. Seeing this part of us as a loyal friend who loves us and is working hard to protect us can result in a major shift in attitude and approach, and help to open doors that are simply slammed in our face if we approach that part of us as an enemy that we want to get rid of.
This is the area where it is often so much easier with the support of an experienced practitioner. However if you are choosing to work on your own, you will need to find ways to have the patience and compassion necessary to hear how the parts inside you feel, before going on to address the source of your chronic anxiety. Here are some resources and ideas that may help you with this:
Listening to our emotions
It is important to understand that emotions are messengers. Once we truly hear the message of it the emotion is able to move through (emotion = energy in motion). But if we don't hear the message, the emotion gets louder and louder. Compare it to hunger. You start to feel hunger pangs, they get stronger and then you eat and they go away. The body has an amazing way of letting us know what is going on. It does the same with all emotions as it does with hunger - it draws your attention to something that really does requires your attention. If sadness comes up for example, and we sit with it and hear it and hear the message it has for us, then the sadness dissipates, just like our hunger. If however we don't hear the message, it will get louder and louder to attract our attention. When we feel anxious, it is likely that if we tune in to our body we will feel that anxiety physically somewhere in our body. If we can tune in to this feeling in our body and sit with it, giving it the time to share its message, we can really make a big difference with our approach with EFT.
When you are feeling anxious try stopping tapping for a bit, and sitting down and closing your eyes and gently placing your hand over the physical feeling that arises in your body when you feel anxious (there may be more than one place that you need to work through this process with). Now talk to that place in you like you would a frightened child. Gently say hello and let it know that you hear that it's hurting and you are wondering if it would be OK for you to just sit quietly with it for a while to see if you can understand how it feels. You may be surprised at what it reveals to you, you may have memories come up or beliefs or emotions, whatever comes up see if you can stay with it with empathy and then ask that place inside you if it would like to feel better. When it's ready you can tap on the emotions/memories etc, and use language linking it to the physical sensation in your body.
Remember here that attitude is everything. Imagine wanting to talk with someone who is shy and hiding in their house. If you bang on their door and demand entry and keep banging and expecting them to come out and talk, you may frighten them so much they won't open the door. If instead you let them know you are there and that you'd really like to get to know them, and patiently sit outside periodically letting them know you are still there, in time they may feel safe enough to open the door a little. If they do, it's best not to jam your foot in it and immediately demand answers, and definitely not a good idea to judge anything they say or tell them they are silly for feeling as they are. Tread carefully with empathy and you may find a friend inside yourself with some answers to what you would benefit from tapping on.
Sometimes when we try this approach we have all sorts of thoughts like "this is a waste of time", "let's just get on with the tapping", "I can't do this" etc. If this happens for you, simply acknowledge those thoughts and if they are really persistent you may need to sit with them and how they feel in your body before coming back to exploring the emotion. While this may seem a slow process, it is helping us to build the foundation without which we may be unable to heal.
Talking to the frightened parts inside us
Sometimes no matter how long we patiently listen, the message still isn't accessible to us. When this happens a different approach is needed. Betty Moore-Hafter's free teleclass and supporting booklet "Creative Language with EFT" are really great resources to help us to learn new ways of talking to the frightened parts inside us. You can download these fantastic resources from http://www.creativeeft.com/. In the teleclass and booklet, Betty gives lots of different ways that we can use language to address our subconscious. This is very powerful healing. To see how powerful this can be in practice and understand more about this, read Healing my 15 year old self - she just needed to be acknowledged on Betty's website.
3. The source of anxiety
For chronic anxiety it is unlikely that the cause of it will be found in current life circumstances. Most practitioners find that anxiety has its roots very early in life, sometimes our time in the womb (as a fetus we share our blood with our mother through the umbilical cord and experience all the same chemical reactions as she does, so if she is going through something traumatic or sad, we will feel all those feelings too), a traumatic birth, or events in the first 6 or 7 years.
What we think of as traumatic as an adult often results in many events that are traumatic to a fetus/newborn/young child going unnoticed as possible contributors to our anxiety. For example people often think that there was nothing traumatic in their birth, but on further investigation it is found that due to the way we, as a newborn baby, perceived things, something that was very traumatic happened to us. An example of this was with a woman I was supporting with EFT who was sure that she hadn't experienced anything traumatic during her birth. She mentioned that when she was 24 hours old her mother was taken into intensive care, but her grandmother stayed with her the whole time so it wasn't traumatic. I invited her to consider tapping with me on it anyway and although she was sure it wouldn't help, when we did tap all sorts of emotion and fear came up and she realised that at 24 hours old she thought that her mother had died and was never coming back and that she would die as a result of this. Clearing this trauma and its associated beliefs resulted in a major shift for the woman on both the emotional and physical levels. She realised that from that time on in her life, she had always been extremely anxious when someone she loved withdrew from her, even if they simply left the room during an argument.
Chronic anxiety often originates from a lack of bonding immediately after birth, and this can arise from many different circumstances. If for example your birth was a caesarean and your mother was unconscious she will not have been able to be there to bond with you in those first crucial moments. This can also happen a little later on when a woman has post-natal depression and is unable to truly be present to her feelings and you. These sort of circumstances can set up a life of chronic anxiety as the infant part of us is triggered by events in our current life and responds with the fear of an infant - as an infant if your parents are not there to protect you, you feel very unsafe. While it seems strange that as adults we have the same reactions, in circumstances that are not in fact unsafe, the infant or child part of us who hasn't been able to resolve the early issues is triggered and causes us to react as if we really are unsafe.
It is likely that if you are suffering from chronic anxiety you will need to explore the origins of it early in your life. However remember that this sort of exploration should only be undertaken once all parts of you feel safe in doing so, and may be much easier with the support of an experienced practitioner. If you are choosing to work on your own, and you feel that you have gained the trust of all parts of you (you are able to access how you feel without being overwhelmed by them or feeling totally removed from them), there are several approaches you could take:
* Silvia Hartmann's Proxy Tapping - this article is an excellent resource for anyone wanting to work through their childhood and clear events that are still impacting on them. If you decide to work through this, be sure to keep checking in with how you feel all through the process, proceed carefully, and if at any stage it feels like you are blocked or afraid to feel what happened, stop using Silvia's approach and go back to tapping for safety and assuring all parts of you that you hear what they are saying. As you work through Silvia's tapping, really reflect along each step of the way on any beliefs that you may have taken on about yourself or the world, particular beliefs around your safety, and tap on any of these that come up.
* Karl Dawson's Matrix Reimprinting - this is a technique that is very helpful in getting to the core of our behaviour and feelings. It is often easier for people to work with than standard EFT when dealing with traumatic events, and has proven to be very helpful for people who are aware of the traumatic events but unable to access their feelings surrounding them.
* Tearless Trauma Technique - If you are working on your own with traumatic events, it is essential that you understand this technique. If you find yourself unable to approach your healing on your own in this way, then you will need to call on support from an experienced practitioner or a friend who understands EFT and this technique well.
4. The need to address beliefs
One common way for people to do their own healing with EFT is to work through the Personal Peace Procedure. This fantastic tool works really well for a lot of people, however in some cases of chronic anxiety on it's own it is not enough to really clear all the drivers of our anxiety. This can be for at least two different reasons and if we bear these in mind while working with the PPP, it can be a really powerful tool for us.
* Lack of preparation
As discussed above, sometimes starting our healing journey by tapping on core events can cause parts of us to panic and feel worse. When this happens it suggests that the foundation for the parts of us feeling safe enough to address the specific issues has not been laid. For more on this see the comments in points 1 & 2 above, and the Tearless Trauma Technique, also discussed above.
* Not addressing core beliefs
For many people simply tapping on the events themselves is sufficient for healing to take place. However when we have a chronic pattern of anxiety, often we need to also address the beliefs that we took on about ourselves or the world as a result of our perception of the events. As we work through the PPP, we also need to spend some time exploring what beliefs we took on as a result of each event, these may be beliefs around our safety in the world, our not being lovable, our never being successful, etc. Even if we tap on all the traumatic events in our life, if we don't address the core beliefs we took on as a result of these events, the chronic anxiety pattern can stay in place. If you are having difficulty identifying the beliefs to work on, consider working with an experienced practitioner. If you aren't able to or don't want to do this, you will need to spend time exploring what sort of beliefs you may have taken on. One way to do this is to use Matrix Reimprinting (see above), as when you use this process you are able to ask your younger self how they feel and often this results in core beliefs that need to be addressed surfacing.
5. The Generalisation Effect
Some people who have had a lot of sadness and hurt are concerned that they will have to tap through every single event that hurt them before they are able to heal. It is important to understand that this is not the case. A good example of this is some of the Vietnam veterans that Gary Craig and others have worked with. In many cases the vets are haunted by in excess of a hundred traumatic memories, and often after clearing only 4 or 5 of these events fully, they are no longer bothered by the rest. This is also sometimes seen in survivors of ongoing sexual abuse - when they fully clear the very first or worst event, they do not need to address all the other events.
6. The Blunt Saw
Sometimes people use EFT and get very frustrated because no matter what they tap on nothing clears. It is important to remember that EFT is a tool, and like any tool the way in which it is used makes all the difference. An analogy that Gary Craig often uses is that our emotional issues are like trees in a forest, and that we need to cut down each tree systematically, making sure it completely falls, in order to heal that part of the issue (the forest representing the issue as a whole). An extension of this metaphor can help us to understand when EFT isn't working. Imagine that you are trying to cut down that forest of trees with a blunt saw. No matter how persistent you are, how hard you work, it will take a very long time to cut down a single tree. In fact if the saw is really blunt, you may never get right through a single tree.
If you are tapping and nothing is clearing, it suggests it is time to stop and sharpen the saw. When dealing with chronic anxiety that means going back to the basics, and addressing why parts of us do not feel safe enough to heal. If we just stubbornly keep tapping without addressing these issues, it really is like trying to cut down a huge tree with a very blunt saw.
7. SET (Simple Energy Techniques)
There is a method that has been derived from EFT that can be very supportive in cases of chronic anxiety. It involves simply tapping on the finger points continually without the need for any phrases. While this method alone has helped some people to heal from chronic anxiety, in most cases it is best used as a support alongside of all of the above. To learn more about this method, you can read about it on the EFT Down Under website or listen to a free interview about anxiety on the EFT Revealed website.