Jane Buchan

After several years of offering EFT to college students for specific learning issues, my personal experiences with EFT led me to to support EFT clients' and practitioners' use of these tools to safely and gently address somatic reactivity and patterns of behaviour rooted in long-forgotten experiences of early trauma. Adverse Childhood Experiences, ACEs as they are more familiarly known, show up as chronic health conditions, learning issues, social challenges, and professional sabotaging behaviours that prevent us from living happily inside our own skin regardless of the ongoing challenges in the larger world. Working with traumatized people, whether in classrooms, EFT individual sessions, or training groups, requires trauma sensitivity. This concept is a relatively new one requiring that we ask not the harsh, "What's the matter with you?" but rather the more gentle and inviting, "What has happened to you?" Since, most of us grow up in climates of denial in which our traumas are caused and normalized by authority figures who blame us for what is going wrong, we can live for decades, and even an entire lifetime, without ever identifying the traumas that have shaped us in very specific, often isolating ways.
EFT is a safe and gentle means of inching into the trauma arena where our big battles happen; as a somatic technique, it makes use of our gifts of story telling, curiosity, and yearning for connection to speak to and for the body as it gentles into the peaceful state brought on by acknowledgment and compassion for the suffering self/Self. Trauma, especially early trauma, exerts a powerful and ongoing impact upon our lives. Working with traumatized people (and this is pretty much everyone on Earth to greater or lesser degrees), requires deep respect, empathy, cognitive knowledge, and somatic skills. It also requires that we learn to trust ourselves after authorities in our lives robbed us of trust through what is often unintentional betrayal. Happily, EFT helps us to parse our own and others' experiences of trauma with the delicacy of the bomb dismantlers at work in the world. Sometimes, we unintentionally detonate a mine, but even then, our skilled use of EFT allows us to gather the fragments and piece together a stronger, more joyful reality. Please visit www.winterblooms.net for more about trauma and my work with individuals and EFT practitioners.