If alternative healing techniques are beneficial for physical ailments, then how about for emotional ailments? Until a conversation last night, I’d forgotten about one I used to utilize—EFT or “tapping.”
When I was seeking counseling for my ailing marriage, one of the suggestions made was to use Emotional Freedom Techniques or EFT as a way to speed the healing/discovery process. It’s an odd combination of affirmations, replacing negative with positives, and Chinese medicine.
The idea is to relieve/release depression, stress, phobias, and old emotional patterns by focusing on a particular disturbing memory or feeling and then with your fingers or hand, tapping out a series of points on your body’s meridians where such anxieties are stored in the body’s energy field.
The way I was taught, you concentrate on the negative pattern or feeling and then tap out “replacement” feelings. My initial ones were upsetting feelings about issues in my marriage, which I replaced with simple affirmations such as “I am worthy of being loved as I am.” From there, I went on to work through a few phobias and stresses. I found that it didn’t take long to work through some of the issues, though others were deeper and needed more time, but some of the self-esteem issues of that era that held me back from ending my marriage and moving on were worked through actually very quickly.
Maybe it’s because by forcing myself to replace the negative thought with the new, positive thought about myself, it was almost like hearing it for the first time…and in some cases, it was definitely the first time I’d heard it from me. It helped me to figure out what I wanted for my life and what I as a person deserved.
I haven’t used it much in the past 3 years, but in the last months of my marriage, it was as useful to me or more so than anything else my counselor gave me.
A Southern witch returns home. Secrets won’t stay buried. A chance to confront and heal—or face the consequences.
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