Tag: <span>tapping on thoughts</span>

EFT Therapy • • • • • • • • • • • • By Puja 0 Comments

EFT as an assistive approach for MHPs

How can EFT help you in your practise if you are a mental health professional?EFT can be used as an individual as well as an assistive tool to help your clients with emotional and psychosomatic issues.

Here are just a few ways in which EFT can help your clients. I’m highlighting the most common benefits of using EFT with your clients and introducing it into your therapy practise.

1. Clients often get dysregulated while talking about their issues or processing their issues in the sessions. EFT helps in regulating your client’s nervous system during a therapy session. Tapping helps by sending deactivating signals to the limbic brain and that in turn calms the mind and body. Imagine how much more your clients will be able to process, if they were able to get back into a regulated state easily and gently during a session! It also helps them self-regulate in between sessions.

2. Handling difficult persistent negative feelings is easier with EFT. You can creatively combine any modality that you use with EFT to help your clients cope with and manage their difficult feelings, in the session as well as on their own in between sessions.

3. EFT can help in unearthing and transforming limiting beliefs. Limiting beliefs keep clients stuck in negative patterns and EFT utulizes a unique method to change these unhelpful beliefs – the unhelpful conclusions the clients have arrived at about themselves, the world and others.

4. Anxiety and stress are two of the most common presenting issues that clients bring to the table in our profession. EFT helps in easing the symptoms of GAD ( Generalized Anxiety Disorder). Clients can also learn the basics of EFT and apply it on themselves while they’re experiencing symptoms of anxiety such as heaviness in chest, increased heart rate, sweating etc. EFT is very effective for social anxiety as well.

5. Most clients have had some form of trauma in their lives. A specific technique in EFT is used for disarming troubling, stressful and traumatic memories and reducing the emotional charge associated with them. This is turn helps in improving their quality of life. There are many emotional and physical consequences of trauma, and working on adverse childhood experiences with EFT has proven to be very beneficial.

6. Goal setting & improving performance is another area where EFT can help either by itself or along with CBT and REBT.

7. Stress management is another area where EFT is very effective. I’ve conducted a lot of stress management classes, and tapping helps in reducing stress rather quickly. Research in EFT shows that tapping can reduce cortisol by approx 43% in a one hour tapping session.

8. EFT can complement the top-down approaches that most mental health professionals practise. EFT is a bottom-up approach which also incorporates cognitive shift and exposure. Since the body component is involved, EFT can help in decreasing body based anxiety and processing stored trauma responses in the body.

9. Talk therapies can sometimes be very overwhelming. I remember being very overwhelmed after a few of my talk therapy sessions. It felt like opening a tap and not closing it before the session ended. EFT can help in closing the tap by the end of each session. It has containment techniques than can effectively lessen the client’s overwhelm by the end of the session.

10. EFT can also help in positively resourcing a client at the start of the session.

EFT is a trauma informed approach and with increasing research backing its effectiveness, it’s time more MHPs considered learning and applying EFT. Since MHPs already have a solid background in psychology, in my opinion, they can master EFT skills easily.

Anxiety EFT • • • • By Puja 0 Comments

Tap on ABC of anxiety to feel calm

Those who’ve experienced anxiety know that it entails worry, tension, catastrophic thoughts, physical sensations in the body etc. So in a way, there are specific components that make up anxiety. In Cognitive behaviour therapy sessions, I give a form to my clients, called the ABC form [A – activating event, B – beliefs and thoughts, C – consequences – emotions and behaviour] There is also a section in the form for rating the sensations in the body. Now, if you add ‘movement’ and ‘5 sense perception’ to this, it makes it more complete. I’m calling these the components of anxiety.

5 sense perception, thoughts, emotions, sensations in body, activating event and movement – all these are significant components of anxiety that we need to address when we experience anxiety.

If you work on these components of anxiety, you will experience profound relief. Let me explain how this can be done with the help of a case example.

My client, B, got very anxious whenever she stepped out of the house. She experienced immense anxiety in the stomach with catastrophic thoughts and images of falling down the stairs, falling on the road, etc. While she was very calm and relaxed at home, going out made her anxious. We worked on some core events from her childhood that had paved the way for this anxiety. We also worked on the beliefs and secondary gain related to anxiety. We tapped on her catastrophic thoughts, wanting to escape from situations, made behavioural experiments (combining cognitive behaviour therapy and EFT) to release her anxiety. Over a span of 2 months, her anxiety reduced drastically. What brought about a significant change in her anxiety was when she started addressing anxiety as soon as she experienced it, on a daily basis, with the suggested guidelines.

I asked her to approach anxiety in the following way whenever she felt anxious:

Activating event/trigger –  Stepping  out of the house.

Even though I get very anxious when as I plan to step out of the house, I accept how I feel.

Sensations in the body – Tightness in chest and heaviness in stomach.

She tapped on her fingertips, or simply pressed her fingertip points when she had sensations in her body. (We tapped on these scenarios in the sessions also)

Even though I have this tightness in my chest and heaviness in my stomach when I lock the door and leave the house, I choose to release this anxiety from my chest and stomach. I choose to calm my stomach.

Whenever she travelled by bus and was caught in a traffic jam, she would panic. So she started tapping on this:

Even though I have this sensation in my stomach and I feel this panic due to the traffic jam, I choose to release this anxiety from my stomach. I choose to calm and relax my stomach.

Thoughts: “What if I fall when I step on a bus!”

Even though I am having this thought right now, I am releasing it. I trust my body to keep me safe.

When she started focusing on her worries and doubts, they increased. So I asked her to tap before the doubts increased in their intensity.

Even though when my doubts cross a certain threshold, I am not able to control my thoughts, I feel helpless, I feel as if I cannot control the situation, I start feeling afraid, I choose to release that fear automatically in that moment.

Emotions: She was angry that she was getting anxious.

Even though I’m angry with myself, I choose to release this anger and replace it with compassion. I choose to be compassionate with myself.  I choose to be gentle with myself.

5 sense perception:  She got an image of falling off the bus.

Even though I see this image, I choose to change it and see myself safe and secure on the bus.

We didn’t tap on movement, but it helps to include that as explained below.

 

EXERCISE

Here is a simple exercise for you.

  • Measure the intensity of Anxiety.
  • Write down the specific components of anxiety, as given below.
  • Tap on these components
  • Measure intensity again.

COMPONENTS OF ANXIETY (Ideal for Daily tapping)

Activating Event– What triggered the anxiety?  Was it a thought? Did something happen? Did someone say something? Are you going out?

Thoughts – What are the thoughts running in your head? Example- “What if I fall?”, “I cannot control my anxiety”.

Emotions: What are you feeling? Example-  Fear of something terrible happening, anger for feeling anxious etc

Sensations in the body –  What do you feel in your body when you’re anxious? What change in your body tells you that you have anxiety?  Example – rapid breathing, sweating, tightness in chest, constriction in throat.

(5 sense perception and movement – Pat Ogden and Janina Fisher talk about this in sensoritmotor psychotherapy)

5 sense perception – Image/smell/taste/touch/sound. Do you see images when you get anxious?  Do you get a funny smell? Do you have a peculiar taste in your mouth? Do you feel warm or cold? Do you hear something?

Movement – This is about noticing the changes in the movement of your body, like the posture of your body and gestures etc.  Do you look down when you are anxious? Do you slump? Do your shoulders sag?

Change your posture and tap on it.

Even though I slump when I get anxious, I choose to sit straight.

Continue to tap this way at least once every day and see how you feel. Remember, this works best when you tap as soon as you feel anxious.