Back Pain, Guilt, and Saying No: A Case Study

I would like to share my self-tapping experience here. I have been suffering with low back pain since I was 16 years old, and I was advised by my physician to do certain exercises to manage the pain in the long run. Every time I would start doing my exercises, I would stop after few days. My resistance to doing these exercises was very solid and stubborn—as was my resistance to working through this with the help of EFT. I felt enormous shame for avoiding these exercises, and also reached a point in life where I needed to do these exercises for the sake of my spine health. By using EFT to explore my relationship with the exercises and the back pain itself, I was able to uncover many intricate layers of the issue.

Investigating Secondary Gains

I began by tapping on the resistance, which was at a 10. It was scary to acknowledge it. I tapped on the phrase: “Even though it’s scary to accept and acknowledge that I have so much resistance to doing the exercises, and I don’t know why, I deeply and completely accept myself.”

After I moved on to “Even though I am feeling ashamed for not doing exercises despite knowing the importance of it...” the question arose: “Do I really want to improve my spine health?” My response was, "Yes, but what difference will it make when I do not have the pain?” When I tapped on this tail-ender, I came up with another aspect: “How will my life be when I don’t have any pain?”

When I tapped on my uncertainty, which was at a 10, a specific event came up: When my doctor said there was nothing wrong with my spine years back, I remembered feeling sad. The phrase "I do not know how I became so attached to the back pain” felt very true, and the validity of cognition score was at a 6.

When I tapped on this, an observation came to me: “A part of me is so resistant to do the exercises.” I moved into exploring this with tapping: “Even though I have this younger part that looks like a round-shaped cactus with poisonous thorns on its surface...” “Even though I think it’s a teenage part of me and that’s when my low back pain started...”

Following the Thread

The observation emerged that “As a kid, I never had my space.” When I explored this more with tapping, I found myself reflecting that as a child, I preferred staying at home and doing my works instead of going out. I never liked visiting my relatives or attending parties, but my parents encouraged me to go with them—and as a child, I felt guilty saying no to them and felt that I couldn't say no.

As I continued tapping on “Even though I felt very guilty saying no to my parents for not attending parties or social gatherings along with them...” and “Even though I couldn’t say no to them because they would always come up with explanations that seems to be good and valid...” I realized that as a teenager I felt very different from my cousins and relatives. I understood that my parents couldn't appreciate those differences and that must have been scary for them, so that was why they compelled me to attend family functions along with them.

After tapping on this aspect, I realised that it was very difficult for me as a teenager to handle the pressure. It does not bother me now when they do not appreciate the differences, because I am an adult now, but I didn’t have many options back then because I had a lot of academic tasks to complete, so I had to stay at home outside of school hours most days. Back pain must have been the only way to make my parents understand my academic pressure and responsibilities and allow me to decline attending social gatherings. I am also realising that my teenage years were not easy and I had to do a lot of healing work on the academic stress I experienced at those times.

Conclusion and Follow-Up

Using EFT this way also helped me to see that guilt prevented me from saying no to my parents, and this still gets generalised to situations in my present-day life when I need to say no. I ended the session feeling less resistance and feeling more inclined to do my exercises, having experienced the cognitive shift that I no longer need back pain as a reason to say no. The teenage part may have needed that, but I am an adult now, and can very well handle things like an adult. I do feel that I should use EFT to work more on the stress and pressure I experienced as a teenager.

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Saranya Shanthakumar is a certified accredited EFT practitioner based in Tamil Nadu, India.

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