It allows you to clean out a lifetime of accumulated emotional debris, reducing and eventually eliminating negative self-image and self-doubt. As you eliminate major contributors to your negative state of mind, your health will improve. A marvelous side product of this work is a growing sense of relaxation.
Two Basic Approaches to the Personal Peace Procedure
1. Clearing Our Negative Emotional Forest: This analogy encourages ‘pulling out’ every negative tree (experience) from our emotional forest and in doing so eliminating the major causes of our emotional and physical ailments. Consider each of your negative emotions or specific events as a tree in a negative self-image forest. They might be events of things from your past like rejections, abuse, failures, fears, guilt, etc. There may be hundreds of them and they may be so thick as to resemble a jungle.
Fortunately, you do not have to cut every tree down. We address the most intense experiences, the biggest clump of, let’s say, 10 trees. Once you have cut down 3 or 4 of them, the other 7 will usually fall on their own.
This approach works well for people who can access memories of specific events. Each negative tree represents a specific event:
2. The Tabletop: This analogy is extremely helpful for those who deal with their emotional issues in a very global manner: “I was an abused child,” “I’m always anxious,” “I feel abandoned.” Many people have endured specific events that are too disturbing to remember easily and/or they have been raised in homes where the rules of the household were clear: “don’t feel, don’t think, don’t talk.” Remembering specific negative events has created sufficient anxiety that they file these disturbing events away into global, nonspecific ‘thought files’ labeled with the symptoms that represent the problem, for example, feelings of abandonment, feeling less than, etc. Addressing these ‘thought files’ with EFT does not yield the benefit that addressing the ‘specific events’ filed away in them will. A very helpful way to access these ‘thought files’ is to use the Tabletop approach.
• Thought Files: Consider the name of the file “I was abused as a child,” “I feel abandoned,” as the top of a table. The legs of the table represent the
specific events that support it. The table will collapse from lack of support when enough of the legs (specific events) are removed. This way we address the specific events, (the true causes) and not the symptoms.
• A variation on the tabletop approach that can be helpful is to draw a tabletop on a piece of paper, then draw under the table one leg for each decade you have lived, starting with birth. So if you are 40 years old, you would have five legs under your table (one for each decade plus your starting point, birth). Then reflect on what happened (specific events) when you where 0 to 10 years old that caused you to “hate your father” or “feel abandoned.” Write them down. These are specific events that need to be addressed. What events happened when you were11 to 20 years old, 21 to 30 and so on? As you gain access to those specific events tucked away in those global, nonspecific ‘thought files’ you can begin your Personal Peace Procedure.
How to use the EFT Personal Peace Procedure Effectively
Establish rapport with yourself by honoring the process and, in doing so, establish and dedicate a time and place in which you can do this work without interruption of any sort, with the exception of the fire department.
1. Make a list of negative specific events, traumas, losses that come to mind. You can anticipate at least 10 or more for each decade of your life. (By the way, if you don’t register discomfort at the thought of some specific
events, that’s okay. The very fact that you remembered them is telling.) If you are feeling stumped identifying specific events, use the following possible areas of negative events: ABUSE: (emotional, physical and/or sexual); HOUSEHOLD DYSFUNCTION: growing up in a household where a) someone was in prison; b) where the mother was treated violently; c) where there was an alcoholic or drug user; d) where someone was chronically depressed; e) mentally ill; f) suicidal; g) where at least one biological parent was lost to the patient during childhood — regardless of cause.
2. Give each specific event a title (as if it were a mini movie), for example: “Jim calling me a nerd”; “Dad hitting me in the back seat of the car”; “Mom forgetting to pick me up at the airport”. (See The Movie Technique.)
3. From the list, pick specific events one at a time, starting with one that has a strong clear negative charge and apply EFT. Continue to apply EFT until there is no longer any charge. (Note: Stay with each event until it is resolved. You will either laugh about it or you will not be able to hold the thought or image.)
4. If you cannot get a 0-10 intensity level on a specific event, assume you are repressing it and apply at least 10 full rounds of EFT from every perspective.
Some Thoughts….
By dealing with the negative SPECIFIC EVENTS in one’s life, and systematically EFT’ing their impacts out of existence, by diligently doing this, we can knock out enough table legs to collapse the tabletop (or pull out enough negative trees from our emotional forests that the forest dies) and thus eliminate major causes of our emotional and physical ailments. This, of course, propels each individual toward personal peace which, in turn, contributes mightily toward world peace.
Loretta Sparks 1996. www.selfcarepower.com 310 374-0440