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Successful EFT phone work makes major shifts for overwhelmed mother

Important Note: This article was written prior to 2010 and is now outdated. Please use my newest advancement, Optimal EFT. It is more efficient, more powerful and clearly explained in my free e-book, The Unseen Therapist™.  Best wishes, Gary

This detailed story by Marelon Bjorkaes from Canada not only shows what is possible with this all too frequent problem but also shows the step-by-step procedure for handling it. And remember ... she did it all over the phone. As Marelon concludes... "This may not be the end of our work together, but two sessions took this woman from a place of absolute desperation to a place of relative power and peace. That is just plain awesome!"

Note: Truly severe emotional cases should not be attempted over the phone (or otherwise) unless the practitioner is properly qualified to handle them.


By Marelon Bjorkaes

Hello Gary,

I wanted to share this story because ....

1) it involves successful phone sessions

2) it demonstrates just how far someone can shift in two sessions

3) it demonstrates that even complex and unavoidably ongoing life situations can be made much more bearable.

This is a demonstration of how EFT can work miracles even over the phone! "Jay" left an unsatisfying marriage about ten years ago, met and married "Nelson" and started a successful day care business in her home. Things seemed to be going along well until last year, when Nelson sexually abused Jay's teenage daughter. Jay has had an horrific year, she had to report her husband to the local police, get counseling for her daughter, and fight the authorities to keep her day care license, as well as deal with the betrayal and breakup of her marriage, all while running a business that keeps her very busy from 7am to 7pm.

When Jay called me a month ago, she felt completely overwhelmed, by the circumstances, by the pressure and demands of her business and by the demands of being a single mother of three. She was overwhelmed with the prospect of trying to make an enormous monthly mortgage payment to keep her home. She wanted to sell the home, but without it, she would not be able to continue running her business and therefore would have no income. She was exhausted, spent and burned out, and felt that she could not go on alone. She had strong feelings of being a failure as a mother, tremendous guilt because she had made decisions (to marry Nelson) that affected her children so negatively. She also was not taking care of herself properly, and found that her inner self talk was constantly beating herself up. She resented taking care of children full time, and she was full of resentment that her former husband now lives a fancy lifestyle while she is stuck with the children from that marriage almost all the time. She was worried about having run up her credit card debt and didn't know how to get her spending under control. Moreover, she was deeply frustrated with conventional counseling for herself: "All they do is tell me how well I am doing. But I know that I am hanging on by a thin thread."

Needless to say, this was a big and convoluted mess to tackle. However I had written down as much of what Jay said as I could and we just plunged in: After talking about many specific events underlying the problem she chose to address the problems more globally. She feel she could feel things better this way. Thus, using as many of her own words as possible, we tapped on...


- Even though I feel I cannot manage on my own any longer
- Even though I feel spent and burned out
- Even though I feel like a failure as a mother (this was the "global" approach)
- Even though I feel terrible guilt because my decisions affected my children so badly (here we worked with the specific issue)
- Even though it feels just too hard to take care of myself.
- Even though I feel very confused about my next step, what to do that is in my highest and best interest
- Even though I feel deep anger at myself for continuing to search for a "magic happy family"
- Even though I feel deep anger at myself for getting involved with Nelson because I was afraid to be alone when I knew I needed to learn how to be alone.
- Even though I feel a lot of resentment at "Don" (her former husband)
- Even though I am feeling stuck so that I haven't done any yardwork, plus other things that need doing.
- Even though I am feeling overwhelmed by my business work load
- Even though I feel out of control over money and credit card spending I now choose to remember that I am good at handling money and I can figure out how to get out of debt.
- Even though I find it incredibly hard to forgive myself for believing I needed to be with a partner and thus bringing Nelson into my children's lives

We were able to tap on all these issues in two 1-hour sessions on the phone. Some of them were tapped on using the EFT basic routine, some used Dr. Patricia Carrington's Choices EFT routine. I find the Choices routine especially useful for situations where a behavior needs to be changed for the positive, such as Jay's extreme resistance to looking after herself. Obviously this was tied into a semi-conscious desire to punish herself, but Jay didn't want to talk about that, feeling on the surface that she didn't deserve to be punished, so we dealt with that in the "choices" routine in this way:
Round one, tapped on "This resistance to looking after myself"
Round two, tapped on "I am worth looking after" and "Even though I made a mistake marrying Nelson I am still a good person at heart" and variations on that theme.
Round three, alternating "This feeling" (referring to her resistance) with a variety of positives such as "I now find it easy and enjoyable to look after myself", "I enjoy eating nutritious food in appropriate amounts" "I take time to do self-renewing things such as gardening (her choice)" "I release any possible need to punish myself for past decisions" "Even if I did contribute to this situation in some way, I made the best decision I could make at the time and I forgive myself for not knowing what the outcome would be. I had no way of knowing." and so on, going around and around repeating these phrases.

A week after our second session, Jay reported the following:

- she was eating and sleeping properly and had plans to buy supplements to help with nutrition and energy as soon as her month end arrived.
- she had cleaned up her entire front yard and felt very good about it
- she had reconnected to her pride in being exceptionally good at caring for children
- she had therefore decided to keep her house and felt capable of coping with the high mortgage payment due to full enrollment at her daycare. She felt a lot of peace with this decision.
- she had hired a bookkeeper and someone to help with housework and was looking at hiring help for house maintenance.
- all resentment toward her previous husband had disappeared
- when her "self-tormenting" thoughts started up, she had found herself automatically switching to self talk that was self-reassuring, e.g. "I did the best I could at the time and I'm doing the best I can right now."
- She had realized she needed to "clean out" the house's interior to remove (purge) all signs of Nelson particularly photographs, so that she could move on in her life.
- She had gone from feeling overwhelmed by a life of childcare to realizing she had an ambition to teach other people how to set up a successful daycare and how to be effective as a daycare provider.
- The feelings of being "burned out" and "overwhelmed" had become an awareness of the fact that she does carry a big load, but she feels strong enough to do it because it means keeping her roomy home, keeping her children, and being able to work for herself, three things that are vitally important to her.
- She had worked out a budget that would allow her to pay off her credit card debt within two years and yet would allow her to live reasonably well in the meantime. Once Jay has a plan, she sticks to it, so she was feeling wonderful about this budget, knowing she could handle it and that she'd be free of the payments in less than two years.

I think the most amazing part of Jay's journey is the speed with which it happened: two phone sessions a week apart and this diminutive woman was back in control of her life, aware of what was most important and why she had made the choices she had made. She had stopped beating herself up mentally for past decisions and she saw exactly how to make her life more bearable by hiring people to do the work that was eating up her time without providing any profit.

The bottom line is, two sessions of EFT did what a year of conventional counselling could not do: it took Jay from a place of feeling pulled in too many different directions, which will be ongoing until the court case is finished, to a place of feeling her strengths and knowing she will cope as best she can, one day at a time. This may not be the end of our work together, but two sessions took this woman from a place of absolute desperation to a place of relative power and peace. That is just plain awesome!

Marelon Bjorkaes

FOR MORE EFT HELP ...

Explore our newest advancement, Optimal EFT™, by reading my free e-book, The Unseen Therapist™. More efficient. More powerful.