Cognitive Reframing: EFT Tapping has a Hidden Gift

     People come to clinical EFT tapping deeply invested in their life story. They have their likes and their dislikes, their world views, their gripes, their lines in the sand, and a strong sense of their own strengths and limitations.  Even when this life story is the clear source of their anxiety, depression, and general stress, they cling to it because, at a very deep level, they believe that they are that story. They have identified so strongly with their story that losing and part of it feels like losing a part of themselves and so their personality fights against it.

     As we work together, we go deeply into the pains of the story, providing pleasant stimuli and self-acceptance as we tap the charged feelings out of our nervous system. As this happens, everything starts to change. The most common change is a cognitive reframing, where suddenly the client is aware of their life story from a completely different angle. In an instant, they can see what they couldn’t see before because they were too invested. The whole picture changes and their system of issues and conflicts has to rearrange itself.

     But what does this mean? If something can be so real one moment and then completely different an hour later because of something as simple as connecting with a feeling while tapping, what does this say about your life story and its system of issues and suffering?

It says that, at a deep level, your story isn’t real.

The fact that you have told a story is real. The fact that you’ve constructed scenarios to live through and those scenarios live in your nervous system is real. But the meaning you’ve assigned to them is not. This meaning is the glue that holds your worldview together and this is what EFT has addressed when you find yourself suddenly seeing an entire issue from a new angle. It is a reshuffling of a deck of cards that becomes more refined each time you shuffle it. The refinement comes from the weakening of your overall investment in your story as an independent “reality”, each time you watch that “reality” forced to rearrange to accommodate a bigger picture.

I bring this to your attention because you’re going to see it over and over again. The sooner you understand what you’re seeing, the faster your investment in painful stories will wane. Before you know it, you will be living in a world of malleable meaning and personal freedom; a world where you move your mental ideas around as necessary to help you become who you were meant to become. That is the Path of Clinical EFT and the BodyMind Tapping Systems.