By Chris Shaver

Hi Gary,

I wrote to you before about some successful surrogate tapping I did.  You asked me to recall the points I tapped on.  But the language I used is lost to me.  C'est la vie.

But I recently bought a few CD/DVD sets from you.  Borrowing Benefits produced amazing results for me and I wanted to share how it worked for me.

With the Borrowing Benefits process, I followed instructions and started with a list of 10 emotionally charged movies to work on, each in turn.  But doing this lead me to experiment in a different direction than your instructions.  Similar but different - and very fruitful. 

I offer the full session below.  It deals with a lot of childhood issues of emotional rejection and physical abuse that has lead me to decades of self-loathing and self-inflicted pain.

But first, here are the details on my experiment that lead to the breakthrough session.

Empathic Processing Goes Where It Will

As I watched the Borrowing Benefits DVDs, I noticed something else happening.  Whenever the subject on stage choked with emotion, so would I.  When the DVD paused and I replayed my "movie" to check intensity, there was always a lessening of my movie's issue.  But the emotion that choked me as I watched the DVD was invariably present and unresolved.  In fact, it was usually an unrecognized aspect, or an entirely different movie than what I'd written down or recalled.

The issue was that if I didn't deal with the new emotion right when I felt it, it was hard to bring it back up later.

So in day 3 of doing Borrowing Benefits, I decided I'd give my subconscious the freedom to guide me.  Instead of just writing down the new emotional issue as a movie title to deal with later, I just left the movie I'd chosen behind for the moment.  I'd let myself move intuitively into the new movie or aspect that cropped up.

I know this wasn't the way I was supposed to do it.  Your instructions are to tap down one issue at a time.  But the sense of other things being more important was very strong, so I gave myself a little leeway to experiment.

This led me to yesterday, when everyone was out of the house and I had 2 hours to myself.  I sat in front of my computer to go through another DVD.  Up until this point I'd been watching them on my laptop before bed.  Just working through one DVD episode a night in the dark - listening, tapping, feeling better - and then going to bed.

Visual vs. Auditory Processing

But yesterday, I not only decided to go free form and intuitively, I also decided to type down what I was feeling at each break - just free form type out my feelings - and really let things go where my subconscious guided me.

I think I did this because I saw how you used cues from the on stage subject's subconscious.  So I borrowed more than benefits.  I borrowed this technique from you, as well!

Using the keyboard was important for me because I am primarily a visual learner rather than an auditory learner.  And I am also primarily intuitive and not linear.  So combining this self-knowledge about how I learn was critical in helping me break into my issues.

As a side note, I think it's very worth noting that applying EFT using all or any one of the learning modalities - visual, auditory, kinesthetic - can be critical in breaking through.  When I watched you, Gary, drag a woman across the floor to kinesthetically recreate her emotional intensity of being dragged by her mother I immediately saw how important learning/processing modalities can be.

Multi-Voice Dialogue

My writing and visual processing worked for me, to open up a huge set of childhood issues.  So much so, that I stopped the DVD and just started tapping and typing.  Each time I typed, there was another set of emotionally charged issues to tap through and each of these had a level of intensity of 10 on a scale of 0 to 10.  The typing was a trigger for sure … a stream of consciousness way for my subconscious to pour out the issues that needed work.  It quickly migrated from a movie into a dialogue-driven way to get inside my issues.

To make the dialogue work, I just intuitively altered back and forth between a number of voices.  I started with my father's voice.  Slipped into my own present-tense voice.  My child's voice just naturally came out at moments of great pain. 

Then, Gary, I "borrowed" your voice for reprogramming ... using the techniques you demonstrated on the "Borrowing Benefits" DVD to reframe my issues, reprogram, and build a platform of understanding.  Each voice was important in finding new aspects or nuances of issues.  Each voice was itself an aspect of the current situation.  And one of the ways I knew that I had made progress was that, finally, at the end of a session, I felt the presence of a new, calmer present-tense voice.

By approaching the issue as a dialogue with these voices I was able to uncover a huge number of "table legs" as you call them, and take them all from emotional extremes of 10 out of 10, down to 0's or 1-2's out of 10.  I've been rereading the dialogue this morning and tapping down the unresolved emotions that crop up as I go through it.

Try EFT At Home - But Seek Help If You Get Overwhelmed

Gary, your Borrowing Benefits DVD is a very powerful self-healing tool.  But it can also kick up some huge issues.  In every paragraph of my self-induced session (below) I kicked up two or three 10-rated emotional triggers that overwhelmed me when they popped up.  I think I could deal with them because I went through EMDR last year - 5 months of it.  In that process I became very familiar with huge volumes of incredibly intense emotion and how to deal with it.  With EMDR I lived with painful emotion every day for five months.

So this gave me the practice I needed to deal with intense emotion and peel them off one small piece at a time.  I think if I hadn't had that practice yesterday's session would have overwhelmed me.

This is a long way of saying that anyone who uncovers a huge number of deeply intense emotional issues should find an EFT practitioner to help them work through them.  It will be a more efficient and a more kind way to deal with the issues.  Don't go over painful and tough ground alone.  You deserve all the help you can get!

In any case, here's my dialogue which started out as a movie.  Hope it’s helpful.

Movie - You Brushed My Wrong Hair Wrong

Father's Voice

Your hair is all wrong.

We’ll wet it so it becomes less.

You will become less.

Not a hair out of place.

You will be perfectly invisible to me then.

Me as a Child

I’m different!

Father's Voice

You’re not one of us.

Your hair is uncontrollable

Your hair is not like ours

Everyone is like us but you.

I can’t figure you out.

I spit on your hair to control you, and it,

And everything about you.

Not a hair out of place.

No hair out of place.

Me as a Child

Why can’t you just let me be?

Why do you have to make me feel so small and wrong?

This is who I am.

Present Tense Me

Who is this man who can’t see me?

What is the writing on his walls that won’t let him see me?

He has to be perfect in front of the neighbors, perfect at church, perfect all the time.

He almost doesn’t laugh, never laughs.

Me as a Child

You’re so quick to hit me, to make me cry.

So quick to grab me by the arm and drag me off.

So quick to hit me.  To pull my ear and hurt me.

All the time you hurt me.

Gary's Voice

Dad’s father was all about control and looking bigger than he was.

Present Tense Me

Your father hung out in bars with a roll of bills in his pocket while his wife was crippled with arthritis at home in the dark without even a TV to watch.  He wouldn't buy her one.  He must have been mean and cold to you, too.

Gary's Voice

Someone must have really put him down somewhere along the way.

Present Tense Me

Just last month, for the first time, Dad said his father wanted to squash him under his thumb.

My father wasn’t honest with me about his father when I was little.

He shielded his feelings so I couldn’t see what was really there.

He projected all his pain out onto me.

His father was cruel to him.

Me as a Child

I couldn’t protect myself.

I was too little.  I just sucked in the pain whole.

Not being good enough.  Never being good enough.

Present Tense Me

Living with him was like being out of control all the time.

Like being twirled in circles by someone who would let go.

(Author's note: This triggered a long-forgotten memory of a neighborhood kid twirling me around holding my arms, but accidentally letting me go.  My father was on the other side of the lawn and I blamed him for everything that happened.)

Me as a Child

He wouldn’t hold onto me

He let go and I went face first into the grass.

Goddamn it hurt to hit the grass face first.

To have the wind knocked out of me.

To have my knees bleed.

To hear the kids laugh when I hit.

Gary's Voice

Too much pain leaking out all the time

Trying to find a way to control everything so nothing would hurt.

Present Tense Me

And god help me if I added to my father's pain

Or made him look bad ... reminded him of his huge pain

The pain he inherited from his father.

Me as a Child

I’m different!

I’m me!

Can’t you see me?

I have so much love to give you and you’re locking me out

This is more painful than any spanking you could give me.

That you can’t feel my love

(Authors note: If every other paragraph was a level of intensity of 10 out of 10, this previous paragraph was a 40.  It also happens to be the core issue that has caused me enormous pain with my wife who has been going through seasonal affect, bi-polar episodes untreated.  When she goes very low, I feel like she can’t feel my love and it makes me alternately angry-furious and out of control - then completely numb to my emotions.  This issue presented quadrupled intensity and overwhelmed me, but I just tapped through it … and will continue to probe around this table leg for others like it.)

Me as a Child

Daddy, you are so locked up inside.

Your father beat you so bad that you can’t feel my hugs.

So locked up inside that I never feel like I can connect.

Locked away from me.

Locked away from me.

Deep and far away from me.

Gary's Voice

It’s not your fault … I know that.

You were raised by a man who was bruised and beaten himself

Gary's Voice

I forgive you.

I forgive him, your father.

Present Tense Me

I forgive myself for turning it all inwards into anger

Into anger, into anger, into anger.

Me as a Child

Only hurting me.  Making me less.  Making me invisible

Like your father made you and you were just unconsciously passing this on.

New Calmer Voice

And I accepted it….but now I don’t.

I’m free to choose.

Free to stop turning all disappointment to anger.

Free to stop turning anger into my body

Free to stop feeling justified by anger

Free to stop tearing my body down with anger.

Free to stop using food to sedate my feelings of anger.

Free to stop being rigid and needing to be right.

I don’t have to be right.

I am all right.  All right.

The Morning After

The morning after this session, I went into the bathroom after I woke up, I picked up a brush and brushed my hair while looking in the mirror.  This is unusual because as you can imagine, this act of brushing my hair is a huge trigger.

I never brush my hair - and I never look in the mirror when I wake up.  I just throw on a hat and get on with the day.  If I had to deal with my hair for business, it was always incredibly painful for me, as I would be filled with self-loathing and disgust when I looked in the mirror - feeling like I was conforming - erasing myself - so linked into the emotional memories.

But this morning I just brushed my hair, and looked into my face with calmness and emotional acceptance.  I looked older than I remember me looking before, sure.  Going through this has been hard.  But I didn't hate myself anymore.

I felt compassion for myself ... approaching ... but not all the way to deep love and acceptance.  Which felt so good.  Feels so good.

There are other issues here to tackle ... other legs to kick out from under the tabletop - but the issue about my Dad not being able to receive my love is among the biggest.  Nice to be facing it square on and reducing it ... especially as my wife is now a trigger for this issue.  It's huge to think I can prevent more emotional upheaval as I help her face her own issues.

Peace and love to you Gary, and your blessed work,

Chris Shaver