Part 2 of 4
After I became comfortable and successful using the imaginary surrogate tapping, described in the first installment of this series, I found that fully engaging my imagination in the process allowed me to surrogately apply EFT hands free.
The next EFT application illustrates a method I found helpful for empowering the effectiveness of my “imaginary” EFT. After a few days of unsuccessful tries on friends and family, something clicked and this technique began to work like a charm. I had a similar experience when first learning to surrogately muscle test. After a week of consistent, yet failed, attempts to surrogately muscle test, one day it just started working. Consistent practice proved to be a necessary step for me in the process of finding a successful method of practicing intentional EFT.
Step 2: Hands Free Surrogate EFT
Sue came in for an EFT session clearly agitated about something. When asked what was bothering her, she immediately responded that one of her coworkers at the massage office she worked at was giving her a hard time.
She said, “I was scheduled to give Jan, my coworker, a massage. A client of mine had bought a gift certificate for her husband’s birthday. The client’s husband came in one day with the gift certificate and wanted a massage while I wasn’t available. Jan agreed to give him the massage, assuming I would pay her for the work she did.
First, I am aggravated she would just assume this, rather than tell him to call and schedule an appointment when I am available. But that is not the point. She decided it would be ok if I just gave her a massage in exchange. So we set up an appointment.
I showed up right on time. Jan was nowhere to be found. I checked my messages and Jan was on my voice mail saying, ‘I have been waiting for a half hour for you to show up. My time is important and you need to respect that. You can leave a check on my table to pay for the hour’s worth of work you owe me.’ Jan is impossible and a pain to deal with! It’s almost like she is intentionally trying to take my clients and have me pay her for it in the process!”
I then began breaking down the components that needed to be addressed for Sue to get beyond this office environment trauma, which I expected to have many more facets than there really were. In response to her story I said, “It sounds like you are angry that Jan is trying to take your business and also your money.” She emphatically replied, “Exactly! I can’t get that voice mail message out of my head. The tone of her voice made it sound like this mess was entirely my fault!”
I then asked, “On a scale of 1-10, ten being as mad as you can get, how angry are you when you think about that phone message?” She said it was no less than a 9. This was affirmed by her facial expression. Since the phone message was most prominent in her awareness I decided to start with that.
Now that I had a measurement of her intensity and a key issue I decided to try out my latest technique. The days leading up to this session had been hit or miss with the technique, but I decided to trust the process and it worked beautifully. Here is what I did.
First, I told her to hold on a moment while I thought about a phrase to use for the Setup and Reminder Phrase. I immediately came up with a very simple phrase: “Even though that message infuriates me, I deeply and completely accept myself.” The reminder phrase was simply, “That message.”
So as I was “sitting there thinking” I began the process. First, I imagined a sensation of my own karate chop point being tapped. Then I imagined her tapping her karate chop point, while I mentally repeated the phrase, “Even though that message infuriates me, I deeply and completely accept myself.” After the third repetition I felt a relaxation in my chest.
Second, I imagined a feeling of my eyebrow point being tapped while simultaneously imagining her tapping her own eyebrow point and mentally repeating, “that message.” I repeated this second step for the following points: side of eye, under eye, under nose, under lip, under collarbone and under arm.
At each point I imagined I could feel the point being tapped on my own body around 5 or 6 times, while imagining her tapping about 5 or 6 times on each spot as well. After the under arm point I felt the need to take a deep breath. I noticed her shoulder relax down a bit and I asked her to check into her body. She said she felt more relaxed.
Note: Keep in mind, this sounds like a lot of sitting around doing nothing. It takes longer to read than it did to complete. The imagination works faster than actually performing an action. If I had to guess I would say it took no more than 20-30 seconds. On average it usually takes me about that time to come up with good delivery phrase.
Since I saw her relax, I asked her to think about the message one more time. She did and admitted, “It isn’t as troublesome as before. Besides, what else should I expect from Jan?”
I said, “Has the intensity gone down any?” She said, “I’m more irritated with myself now than anything else. I’m more mad that I got pulled into her drama.” She then asked what happened, since I was just “sitting there thinking”. Jan is familiar with surrogate tapping as she too has seen the EFT DVDs. I told her I was practicing a method of surrogate tapping and asked if I could continue doing so for the duration of the session as long as it worked. She said that would be fine. She knows my policy is not to charge unless significant change is made during a session so she really had nothing to lose.
I then asked how mad she was at herself, and she replied, “about a three.” To get more specific with this phrase I asked her to tell me what was most irritating about the part she played in the situation.
She told me she was upset with herself that she allowed Jan to make her mad, because that was probably Jan’s intention. The phrase that immediately came to mind for the setup was, “Even though Jan tricked me again I deeply and completely accept myself.” The reminder phrase was as follows, “That tricky b****.” Having worked with Sue on issues dealing with Jan before I knew this was a common term Sue used when referring to Jan.
Again I imagined a sensation of my own karate chop point being tapped, imagined Sue tapping her own point, and mentally repeated the setup phrase three times. Then I went through the following points: eyebrow, side of eye, under eye, under nose, under lip, collarbone, and underarm. At each point I imagined a sensation of my own point being tapped, I imagined Sue tapping her points, while mentally reciting, “That tricky b****.”
Just as in the first round, once I got to the underarm point I felt the need to take a deep breath, and noted Sue doing the same thing. Then she laughed and said, “The whole situation is really silly isn’t it?”
I got the sense that these two rounds took care of the whole coworker situation, so I asked her to think about the whole thing and relate it to me as if she were telling me a story. I told her to close her eyes as she was thinking about it and really relive it.
She recited the whole situation and did not get any intensity on it. Even though Sue’s core anger was directed at Jan trying to take her business and her money, all it took was a round of EFT on effects of the phone message and an affirmation about how Sue perceives Jan. The entire process took less than five minutes to complete. I feel this would have taken at least twice the time to go through all the physical motions involved in regular EFT.
The third installment of this series will address how to improve interpersonal communications that may be sabotaged by polarity reversal. This problem quickly disappears using a using an even more refined and elegant version of intentional EFT, which naturally evolved from the physical surrogate tapping described in part 1 and the hands free surrogate EFT described in part 2.
Ryan Kurczak