Reality Sucks!
Or at least the reality as we may see it in the moment!
I struggle with the reality that as humans we will always have “issues.” I don’t want to have “issues.” If I do happen to have an “issue” I certainly don’t want it to stick around!
When my issues are painful I want it fixed NOW! I want it easy and quick. EFT often does that, which is what makes it so seductive. And I want to tap for a short time and have long term issues disappear – just like I read in some of the articles. Tap a few times and my event/issue/problem is gone. After all who wouldn’t want that? We are into “easy and quick and painless.”
I remember many years ago a conversation I had with Gary Craig. I’d been tapping for just a few months and I asked if, in his experience, he’d noticed any average length of time that it took people to work through all their issues. Gary laughed. “We never are through,” he said.
We begin developing ways of responding to life very early. We develop, and in some cases are born with, certain predispositions. We grow older, hopefully wiser and with better coping skills. Stress happens and we revert. Doesn’t even have to be a BIG stressful event. And there we are – back to our problematic predisposition – our childhood coping style.
I often forget to tap – yes, me, really! I’ve noticed too that all too many clients, if they tap on their own at all, tend to just tap a short time until, “I felt better.” Too rarely do we go for a “total resolution” of the issue. And, when we do sometimes disappointment sets in when we find that there are still more issues to resolve. Yes, even with EFT it can take significant time.
I remember being surprised as I listened to Steve Wells talk about his anxiety. Now I have seen Steve in action on stage and in social settings. Steve is a competent, confident, able therapist and speaker – not someone you’d look at and think, “Now there is an anxious person.” But, by his own admission, he is. He and often co-presenter David Lake, are proponents of “continual tapping,” a process that simply involves tapping the finger points whenever possible throughout the day. Steve’s talk clearly reinforced that our long-practiced, less than ideal, ways of dealing with the world are difficult to break and the concept of continuing to tap very often throughout the day can be very helpful.
Tapping on any sort of regular basis can keep us calm. When we are calm we can deal with the new stresses and challenges of our day without reverting to our much younger and now less useful “solutions” such as anxiety or OCD or anger or whatever we have used to deal with life challenges in the past.
Are we ever totally over our strongly reinforced outdated “solutions” such as anxiety? Maybe, it does happen; but, maybe not, at least not without consistent, persistent tapping.
What we can be totally over, what we can tap away, is our tendency to blame ourselves and feel badly that we are “doing it wrong” or worse, that “something is wrong with me.”
What tapping can give us more of is acceptance of who we are and how we cope in the here and now. And that truly is a very large gift.
