"Maxine" is anticipating a difficult event tomorrow. She is nervous about what might happen. How can she use EFT to help with this nervousness? How does she decrease her anxiety about the future with tapping?
Maxine used a very effective approach. She imagined the worse case scenarios in her mind. (Yes, Maxine had more than one "worst case"!) Up came lots of details that made her nervousness spike.
She imagined seeing the scene at a distance and then approaching it.
She imagined asking a difficult question and hearing the answer she didn't want to hear.
She felt her stomach drop and her chest grow tight.
She used these details and many more of the imagined scenarios to tap away the fear. How did she do this?
The EFT Movie Technique is a technique used for neutralizing past trauma. Tapping while imagining a future event can be just as helpful in preventing future trauma, or any negative emotion, for that matter.
Maxine started with, "Even though I'm afraid that ____ will happen tomorrow, I deeply and completely accept myself." This was her set-up statement while tapping the karate chop point. Then on the different points, she tapped while imagining the scenes, playing each out like a movie.
Maxine tapped while she focused on both the physical symptoms of fear (her stomach dropping) and the action in the scenes. In this way, Maxine was able to tap on many aspects.
After tapping like this for several possible worst case scenarios, Maxine could then imagine the scenes and be calm. She felt more prepared for the difficult event, feeling less vulnerable to over- reacting when she wants to remain in control of her emotions.
Maxine had another incentive for tapping for these future events. She knew that if she tapped today for tomorrow's difficult event, she could save today from needless anxiety. She didn't want to be fretting all day or lose sleep tonight. What an excellent reason for tapping now about future events!
The real test of her tapping will be the actual event and Maxine is prepared to tap tomorrow before the event in case she has last minute jitters. But for now she's enjoying her day and not living in fear of the future.
Update
Following up a few days later, it turned out that the difficult event that Maxine had been anxious about turned out very well. Better than she expected!
Ann Smith is an EFT International Accredited Certified EFT Master Trainer and Advanced Practitioner in Bloomington, Indiana, US. She has a private EFT practice in person, by phone or by Skype. She specializes in using EFT for compulsive eating but enjoys guiding any client in their journey using EFT. She also does trainings and mentors practitioner candidates for EFT International Certification. You can find her at www.InsideOutWithEFT.com
From the EFTfree Archives, which are now a part of EFT International .
Originally published on Mar 8, 2014.
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