Kathryn was the brave tapping volunteer in a recent complimentary teleclass (http://tinyurl.com/EFTwithRue) Her story seemed quite simple on the surface. She was worried about her 26 year old son, who had moved into his own apartment with 3 other young men. She wanted him to be independent, but she worried a lot about whether he would be OK.
This is what I didn’t know when we began:
When Kathryn was 5 years old a “terrible trauma” (her words) had befallen her suddenly. “I had been going along as a happy energetic child, a cheerful free spirit, and then something dreadful happened out of the blue. After that, I knew that anything could happen at any time, even when things are going fine, and I had to be on the lookout for it, always. It is decades later now, and I still can’t stop worrying.”
We did this whole tapping session without the rest of us on the call knowing what actually happened when Kathryn was five.
It turned out that Kathryn came from a family of worriers. “Oh, Mum’s a worrier,” is what they all said about her grandmother, and her father was a highly sensitive man who had become an unpredictable alcoholic.
I asked her if she had done any therapeutic work around the “dreadful experience.” Was there a lot of emotional response in her when she thought about it now? Or was the problem mostly showing up as the belief in her that “I can’t stop worrying?”
Kathryn said she had done quite a lot of work on the incident, and “It’s mostly the belief now,” she said. “I just have some feelings stuffed down inside about it. It feels like a habit—a way of being or perceiving things.”
It often happens in a tapping session that the person I am working with says something that they themselves don’t hear, as if their unconscious mind is offering a powerful truth to me that needs to be brought to light. I could tell that it hadn’t occurred to Kathryn to connect her constant worrying with her stuffed feelings. As we talked a bit about that, Kathryn said “This thought just popped into my head: Life is not safe.”
That seemed like a good place to start!
