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You are tapping along with EFT, or in the midst of a Focusing session working on an issue by yourself, and all of a sudden a huge wall of fear or resistance rises up inside you. It feels like it’s going to engulf you, like it’s too much to handle, so you pull back and feel you just don’t want to go there right now...
Is there anything you can do to make this process easier working on your own? Fortunately yes! This article contains simple but powerful ideas on how you can approach the sort of intense emotion that occasionally comes up when getting close to the core of a big issue.
When we are getting close to the core of a major issue in our life, or a recurring pattern that has gone on for as long as we can remember, it’s mostly likely that we will find the source of the issue early in our life (if you want to read more about this, check out Finding Core Issues.) For this reason, the emotions that come up while we are working on our own can be quite intense. I’ve had times where I’ve been doing EFT or Focusing on my own, and I’ve hit a wall of fear and just haven’t wanted to continue, because it just feels way to scary to go there on my own. However I’ve recently discovered that if I can keep these feelings in perspective, I am able to continue with the tapping or Focusing and make huge breakthroughs, without needing someone else to sit with me.
As a young child, we are totally dependent on the adults around us to keep us safe and help us to feel secure. Many things can happen that threaten our feeling of safety or security which feel huge to a child, which don’t seem that big from the perspective of an adult. When we are dependent on a big person to take care of us, it can be easy for us to feel that something is life threatening if it results in the big person withdrawing their approval. So something that to us as an adult appears to be quite insignificant, could have resulted in intense feelings of fear for us as a young child.
If you find that it’s just too scary to go there, there are three things that I’ve found that can be really helpful when working on your own on in this sort of situation:
Accepting the fear
The first and most important thing is to accept the feelings inside you – accept that part of you that is scared to continue. If we try to continue healing without this level of acceptance for something inside of us that is very frightened, we are unlikely to get the co-operation we need from all the parts inside us to heal the issue.
I recently had a powerful example of this. I was working on an issue that suddenly became very intense. I still wasn’t aware what was driving the feelings, but hit a huge wall of resistance to continuing. It felt like 100% pure fear, and that there was no going forward. So I spoke to that part of me that was afraid, and when it didn’t feel like anything was shifting, I decided to stop the healing session, and wait to continue it later when I would have the opportunity to sit with a friend to support me. I lay down to rest for a while, and all of a sudden I realised that with fully accepting the fear inside me, it had shifted, and it now felt OK to continue with the session. This may seem too simple, however in my experience the feelings inside of us that have long been out of our awareness simply need to be fully heard, and then they are able to be resolved and let go of.
Keeping it in perspective
The next way to approach this that I find useful is to realise that as intense as the emotions you are feeling are, they are most likely the emotions of a very young child. When we can see that the proportion of what we are feeling is different as an adult to what it was to a young child, we are more likely to be able to hold that space inside that is afraid, without being engulfed in the fear. When we can remember that we are an adult doing this healing, with all the resources that we now have, and no longer totally dependent on our parents for our survival, we can sometimes hold the emotions long enough to let them be heard, felt and dissipate.
Being a parent to the inner child
As a child, we just wanted someone to fully listen to us, to understand how it was we were feeling. When that has happened in a particularly intense emotional situation for us as a child, that need to be heard is locked inside of us. No matter how many years it is frozen inside of us, when the opportunity for healing arises, the emotions from the event long forgotten can surface. When this happens, we have the most wonderful opportunity to be the parent to our inner child, that we desperately needed at the time and for whatever reason, didn’t get. In my opinion, there is nothing more powerful that we can do for our own healing, than to listen with empathy to the untold stories inside us. Emotions are energy in motion. When the emotion is trapped inside us for any reason, it is unable to continue in motion and be resolved. When we come across these intense emotions as an adult, we have the most wonderful opportunity to simply listen with empathy, and feel the emotion transform and release. For more on working with the Inner Child, click here.
There is no doubt that it takes a certain amount of courage to deal with these core issues on our own. It’s great if we can work with a practitioner or a Focusing partner where possible. However I feel it is also very important to use simple ideas like those above in order to be able to be with ourselves when intense emotions arise, so that we have the opportunity to heal issues that are triggered in day to day life, whether or not we have a practitioner, Focusing partner or friend available to sit with us as we heal.