Multiple Allergies Cleared with EFT and Persistence (Part 2)

Part 2

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Next I started thinking about how people have said that if you haven’t eaten dairy products in long time, your body doesn’t have the enzyme to digest them, and so we tapped on that too, just to be sure.

That afternoon, something incredible happened. It was like I was all of a sudden redefining my whole beliefs about food. I realised for the first time in my life that, despite my lifelong battle with dairy, my body does not have a problem with food; it’s the subconscious beliefs that cause the reaction, not the substance itself. I wasn’t able to realise this until after we’d cleared the “It’s all in my head”, and as we cleared that, I ended up tapping on “It really is all in my head, and that’s OK!” (and got to the point where I could laugh about it!)

I later found myself asking Rex all sorts of questions on how he saw different types of food, and I began to sort my food beliefs into valid and untrue. I realised for the first time that white bread is not nutritionally useful, but it is not poison to the body (as I had long claimed). I found myself for the first time ever entertaining the idea of actually choosing to eat small amounts of food for their taste, even if they aren’t nutritionally great (I’ve been very strict with my diet ever since my candida days, and although I have enjoyed what I’ve eaten, I’ve now come to realise that my metaphor with a lot of food was the same as my metaphor with the candida – a war zone, with my body trying to “kill” the bad guys (like dairy and wheat.)) I actually found myself daydreaming about trying the chocolate croissants they make here in France, made with two former “poisons”.

The next evening, we decided to go for broke and really test it. Rex made cauliflower cheese, which for me was the greatest test – milk, butter and cheese all in one dish. I ate a good helping, and had no anxiety, except feeling a bit strange that I didn’t have any anxiety! I was a bit phlegmy the next morning and sneezed a couple of times, but that’s a reasonably regular occurrence for me, so we concluded there is no reason to believe that my body cannot handle dairy products, it being a far cry from past reactions to even small amounts of dairy.

I have had multiple chemical and food sensitivities for at least 20 years. For the first time in my life I can now see that it is not a case of something poisonous invading my body, but rather an overreaction caused by my seeing myself as unsafe, and under attack. This has been a major revelation to me.

My metaphor has for so long been that of the canary in the coalmine – alerting the world around me that what we are doing to the environment and our own bodies is not OK. The metaphor has now changed, and the canary is now out of the cage and flying free, however I still have real concerns about our bodies needing safe ways to alert us when what we are doing is not OK. This is something I think I will integrate over time.

Third Session

When we started the third session, we felt that we had made huge inroads into all my allergy issues, as a result of dealing with the issue of not feeling safe, and the realisation that it wasn’t actually my body reacting all that time, it was as a result of invalid associations in my subconscious.

I was however still quite nervous about trying wheat, as a result of the severity of past reactions. I still also felt I had an issue with not wanting to let go of the allergies due to feeling like if I did, nobody would believe that I had ever been sick (this is common for people with illnesses like CFS who have had the “It’s all in your head” implications throughout their lives).

As we tapped on this particular aspect, I realised that the main issue was that while I was very sick but the doctors couldn’t find anything wrong with me, I started to doubt my own sanity. We were unable to get past psychological reversal on clearing the wheat, until we addressed this aspect.

It was interesting to note here that once we started on this issue, I started crying and accused Rex of making light of the issue and not taking me seriously! It was very hard for him to understand, and I would imagine that any therapists who have not had severe allergies might not realise just how significant this was for me or others like me.

We also addressed the issue that once I no longer had reactions, I needed to choose to rely on my intuition to let me know if it wasn’t a good idea to eat something. And the lifelong dairy “allergy” had disappeared so rapidly and easily, I felt it also important to do a round on “It’s just too easy!” We also did a round with a choice, choosing to be free by learning to choose my own limits, instead of letting my body set them for me.

We then started on the wheat itself, and tapped on the three most recent and severe times I could remember reacting to wheat, and we tapped on Even though I recently heard an ‘expert’ say that wheat is incredibly difficult to clear even with EFT… We then worked on cravings, as I had noticed that I’d been craving cheese ever since the first bit of testing a few days prior.

By this time I was feeling ready to try some organic wheat bread we had purchased for the testing that morning. My only concern was that I wasn’t concerned!!! After enjoying a slice without any symptoms, we made some soup to enjoy the bread with for lunch, and the rest of the day was symptom free. It took a bit of getting my head around this, as past exposure to wheat had left me in pain and with all sorts of horrible symptoms for several days, starting within a couple of hours of eating the wheat.

I noted later in the day, that the cravings I had had for cheese since eating the first lot to test had stopped, and I was not craving the bread at all, which is very unusual as I usually even crave the wheat free bread I eat sometimes. Something else that really stood out for me is that I am normally very paranoid when handling wheat – I always wash my hands right after giving the dogs a biscuit to avoid touching anything that I could later touch before eating. After the tapping, I was very comfortable handling the wheat and had no desire to wash my hands or clean up every crumb on the bench.

That evening we decided to go for broke, and I ate wheat bread, together with three different types of cheeses, with dinner. I enjoyed it, no anxiety at all! A little while after dinner I noticed I was starting to swallow a bit of phlegm. I did a couple of rounds on it, and discovered that I was feeling guilty that I’d eaten so much and expected my “poor body” to be able to cope with digesting it all, for the first time in so long. The phlegm stopped.

A few days later we had dinner with a friend, and as I sat debating in my mind whether to ask what the dessert was, and what it was made of, I realised that it was the first time in 10 years that I had been able to trust that it was OK to eat something, without knowing exactly what was in it. I realised that I have used controlling my food as a way of giving myself a false sense of security, masking the feeling deep down that I wasn’t safe in the world. It was a real eye opener.

Summary

This whole thing has completely blown me away. To think of all the hell I went through during all those years, and it was just because I arrived in the world feeling unsafe, and continued to “build evidence” that that was true as I grew up.

I’m having to revisit everything I’ve “learned” about allergies over the years, and am integrating the fact that it appears that for all these years, my body has not been reacting to substances, but rather to my perception of the lack of safety of those substances. It’s been hard for me to come to terms with, particularly as I’ve had occasions in the past where I have reacted when neither Rex nor I have known that I’ve ingested wheat, and only discovered after some detective work after the symptoms appeared that Rex had unknowingly used stock with a small amount of wheat in it.

However despite what my conscious or unconscious mind thinks I have now been symptom free after eating dairy and wheat (and some anything else I eat or am exposed to) for 3 years, and I am thrilled to be enjoying life without so many limitations. The food is only a very small aspect of this, because clearing this issue has completely changed my understanding of healing and health, and I now feel that the sky truly is the limit. The days of chronic fatigue are long gone, just incredible after battling for over 16 years. And I haven’t had any issues with candida since, without having to modify my diet or take any of the other measures I used to have to take regularly.

For anyone working on safety issues alone, if you find that you aren’t accessing the emotions that you need to tap on, I strongly recommend that you sit with a trusted friend or experienced practitioner. It can be very difficult for all parts of you to feel safe enough to clear these early and traumatic experiences without some support from someone you can trust to truly hold a healing space for you.

Jo Hainsworth
New Zealand