great reply Jo,
and great question Sally,
YES! there are very often aftereffects of dealing with things with EFT. Because we are so used to dealing with things as if we could differentiate between different aspects, eg when you had your knees replaced, it was just knees, not thighs, or hips, or toes, thank G-d, so you could put your finger on what had changed. But with emotional issues, things are much more interconnected. You solve one thing, and it has a huge effect on everything else in your life. Mother issues impacted your life in many ways before you dealt with them, and while you tried different methods - and now you're finding that they're not causing you any direct suffering. Yet there are so many subtle beliefs that caused you to suffer so in the past, not just your mother not caring enough :-). These might not have all been dealt with, and might still be playing themselves out in different themes in your life
EFT isn't an arrow that we can aim at a specific target; it's a vehicle to take you on a journey for finding happiness and completeness in life. Those of us whose bodies and spirits seem to be easily hurt, have obviously got a long potential journey mapped out for us - we can use EFT, and other methods, to help us move along it.
But there are often many painful spots along the way. Perhaps pain is caused by us hitting a corner, in which we need to change direction, right, left, up down, forward, back; or when we need new help, or a new method, more information, another person's ideas, or to be more introspective, or honest, or do good in some way, or to expand, change or grow - and yet we have resistance to doing so.
The pain is a signal that there is possible movement ahead of us that OUR DEEPEST SELF DOES WANT to do.
Dead nerves don't hurt (I'll not say anything about phantom pain here). Hurt means it's alive, and it's signalling something that we need to know.
Pain isn't bad. Neither emotional pain and not physical pain.
Pain is our friend. Pain can be a trigger for us to change. It seems to me that the basic human choice is to be able to 'get' more and more life by making these choices well. Ignoring pain doesn't make it go away. It's interesting, but contemporary thought seems to indicate that we should be able to do anything that our conscious brain wants to; we can choose jobs, spouses, food, housing - but is this true? At best, we seem to have a range of very limited choices.
And it seems to me, that we don't even need to have choices, because when we are living the way our inner values dictate, we often find we don't have too much desire for the impossible, we're happy to live the way life opens out for us. As Byron Katie and The Work describe, pain is when we are asking for the impossible. Which society encourages us to do - try to follow your impulses, or your conscious brain's plans, and then try to force it to happen.
I wonder for how many years society has been giving us this message about "rights" and "forcing" and "choosing" - is it a recent invention? Perhaps "rights" began when we started to lose touch with exactly what "wrongs" are, and began condoning all sorts of wrong things that other people do.
Back to pain, I think that our bodies give us a message of pain when we have conflict, between our deepest values -- and our current actions, thoughts and beliefs. It's like the pain is saying, think into this, explore this, there's some way that you're not using the gift of life the way you really want to.
I think pain is the message from our own deepest values, coupled with an inner belief that we CAN change, to get closer to those values.