Being Specific Leads to EFT Breakthrough

My name is Max. I would like to share with you a significant breakthrough I achieved in my healing process. It illustrates the need to be specific, and to use the right words doing EFT. Please keep in mind that I am a work in progress. I still have many issues to solve, but this major one was tackled with a single sentence, after years of detective work

A little background about me: I suffered from the very traumatic divorce of my parents when I was 12 years old. My mother left my father after having had an affair with my piano teacher. She became very violent towards me, beating me, and yelling all the time. She wasn't my "mum" anymore, she was a different person. At the time I didn't understand that she was suffering from severe depression. My whole world collapsed. I decided to live with my father, and it was a very long battle to obtain the right to do so.

Finally I was allowed to live with my father, and I didn't see my mother for the next 14 years. I understood much later that all my "passions" were revolving around the effort to regain the control I had lost at that time.

I was deeply interested in self-help methods and spirituality, and in 2006, I stumbled upon EFT. For a long time, I had no tangible result on myself, only some spectacular ones working with others. I firmly believed in EFT, but couldn't apply it correctly to myself. I was always feeling this vague sensation of loneliness, emptiness and, and nostalgia.

Then, in 2008, the worst happened. It won't be a big surprise if I tell you that my relationships with women had always been extremely difficult. It was my turn to be cheated on and left, like my father had been when I was 12. I instantly relived my painful past. I started having panic attacks and had to quit my medical studies.

I decided to give EFT another try... but differently. I used the slow EFT technique for a while, repeating a key word slowly while staying for a long time on each point. This was basically a kind of EFT meditation. From my point of view, it was the only way I could work on my complex issues alone, because there were simply too many aspects to tap on. I released many aspects of different episodes from the past.

Then I asked my psychologist if I could just tap while we were talking. It was a way to integrate the "telling the story" technique into regular therapy. Sometimes I would just tap on my finger points while talking, and I must say that many insights were coming to the surface from doing so. For example, the realization that I had been a control freak for all those years without even suspecting it. And, that it was related to the fact of having lost control at one point of my life. This form of tapping was inspired by the articles of Steve Wells and David Lake.

At one point, when talking about what the announcement of the divorce had provoked in my mind at the time, I instantly said: "The feeling that it would never be the same ever again", and tears started flowing. We had to stop tapping.

All day long, every time I would think of this key sentence, tears would roll down my checks.I managed to fall sleep at about 12:30 a.m. and woke up at 4 a.m., all sweaty, still with this sentence in my mind. I decided to gather my strengths and to tap on this key phrase specifically. After about 20 minutes, all of the emotional burden had left me. I was able to contemplate the sentence without feeling anything.

The results:

• The next day I was joyful and felt very light.
• I don't feel this inner emptiness and nostalgia I have always felt.
• I now have a very good relationship with my mother, and we talk very often about many things.
• I still have some addictions (I smoke a lot, for example), but I have a very strong desire to get past them.

I hope that this example gives a good illustration of the necessity of being specific, choosing the right words, and being persistent.

Max Pinoche
Bordeaux, France

From the EFTfree Archives, which are now a part of EFT International .
Originally published on November 24, 2012