Table of Contents

Table of Contents Help

The tabs on the right are shortcuts to where you have been:

  • Previous Screen
  • Previous Articles
  • Previous Categories
  • Start Page
  • Hide Entire Menu

Swiping to the left will take you to the previous screen.

The folder icon indicates that more content is available. Click on the icon or the associated text, or swipe to the right to see the additional content.

Pain

Pain Management

Relieving menstrual cramps

Important Note: This article was written prior to 2010 and is now outdated.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

Hi Everyone,

Patricia Carrington, PhD has been in correspondence with Wes Gietz from Canada regarding the use of EFT for menstrual cramps. Wes, as it turns out, helped his client ("Virginia") with a SEVERE case of cramps, the details of which are given below.

Several things to notice here....

1. While cramps (even PMS) can often be relieved by applying EFT directly to the physical discomfort (e.g. "Even though I have these cramps..."), this particular case was resolved by addressing underlying emotional issues. This is a very important approach that active EFT students will want to study.

2. Wes introduces an approach using "emotional soup" which, can be very useful in some instances. It should not, however, be used across the board. I make some comments about it within the message.

3. The client, in this case, refers to her menstrual cycle as her "moontime". This terminology is reflective of her involvement with the Native population of Canada.

Hugs, Gary


By Wes Gietz

"Virginia" has had menstrual cramping since the age of 12. The cramping became incapacitating at age 15 and has continued that way. As she expressed it to me, the cramping was so severe and the onset so sudden that "I don't want to be in public when it happens." The time from the first slight discomfort to helplessness was typically about half an hour. She is now 26 years old. She was diagnosed through laparoscopy as having endometriosis at age 21.

Tylenol has been useless for the pain. She had been using Chinese herbs and acupuncture, but her supply of the herbs had run out just before she came to me. Her usual practice was to use the herbs for two weeks prior to and during menstruation.

She was not experiencing cramping at the time of the EFT treatment, so there wasn't any point in tapping for that. I asked her, "When you think about having cramps, what emotions come up for you?"

"Fear... I'm afraid of the pain."

"That's understandable, but not what I'm looking for... What emotions do you feel when you think about your body betraying you this way?"

She immediately identified anger (with a 0-10 intensity rating of 8) and shame (6), commenting, "Why should I feel shame?", then sadness (4) and fear (7).

I asked Virginia to close her eyes for a moment and experience this mixture of emotions as fully as possible. I invited her to experience the color, texture, and intensity of each emotion and to say "Okay" when she was fully into the "soup" of emotions. We then did two rounds of standard EFT, with me tapping. The result was a decrease in the fear, anger, and shame, but a surge of sadness during the second round. The overall intensity of her emotional disturbance did not decrease, in my observation.

GC COMMENT: I spoke with both Wes and Dr. Carrington about the use of this "emotional soup" approach and we all agree that it should be used with discretion....and by an experienced professional. Immersing a client into such a broad array of emotional issues can, of course, have the beneficial effects portrayed in this case. However, for some clients, it can cause intense emotional pain.

My preference in cases like these is to "sneak up" on the issue so that it can be more gradually diffused. For methods to do this look on our web site for....

How do I handle the "Big One?" (From the Frequently Asked Questions section)

The Tearless Trauma Technique (Under the Trauma section)

I also prefer to break down the issue into SPECIFIC EVENTS and handle those one at a time. For this I often use The Movie Technique (From our Tutorial section)

WES CONTINUES: At this point I invited Virginia to "get into the soup again", closing her eyes and indicating when she was fully in the emotions. A few seconds later, she said "Okay", and I then directed her to go back in her memory, to an earlier time when she had those same emotions.

Almost immediately she mentioned a memory from age "12-ish" and indicated that the shame had become much stronger again in conjunction with this memory. I directed her to go back farther, and after a few seconds she said, "Okay, I'm there." I asked how old she was, and she responded, "Five".

Again I directed her to look earlier. She could not find any memory before the one at age five that was associated with that mix of emotions, including the strong shame.

I did not ask for 0-10 intensity ratings of the emotions, as it was obvious from her tears that she was at a high level of intensity; nor did I ask what the memory from age five was. We did a round of standard EFT using "this experience" as the reminder, with Virginia doing the tapping for herself. I provided verbal prompts and modelled the tapping for her. After the first round there was a noticeable improvement, though she indicated that she was still in a state of some intensity.

We did three more rounds using the same reminder phrase. I looked at her and said "Okay?"

"Okay." (She was obviously "okay". Her entire demeanor had changed.)

And that ended the session.

It was six weeks later that I next saw Virginia, again at an outdoor event. She said to me, "I'm cured!"

She describes the experience, beginning with a historical note:

"The month before [our EFT session], I biked 20 minutes to my doctor's office on the third or fourth day of my moontime. Usually the cramps were on the first day of the cycle, so I thought I was in the clear, but when I got to her office, the cramps hit me. I could hardly breathe, and couldn't even lie down for the acupuncture. She stayed with me for about 15 minutes until my breathing returned to normal."

"After the EFT session, I was due for my moontime the next day. I had no problems except for a bit of discomfort, like what I get just before the cramps hit. That was after an hour-long bicycle ride. Then I went swimming, with no problem. I was waiting for the bomb to drop, and it never did."

Virginia has had one menstruation since this experience. She said, "I was shocked - I can't remember the last time I was surprised by my moontime!" She reported that there was no discomfort at all.

For me, the remarkable part of this story is that the successful EFT treatment essentially ignored the physical pain or the potential for it, dealing instead with an experience of many years ago that was linked with the physical pain only by emotion. The emotional "soup" provided a temporal conduit through which Virginia travelled in memory to the experience that was, I believe, the initial, though perhaps not the only, cause of her condition.

Note also that I did not, and do not, know what the experience was (though it's easy to make an accurate guess in such circumstances) beyond the age at which it occurred and the emotions associated with it.

I did not tap directly on Virginia except at the beginning of the session. I had had two previous successful sessions with her, where we also used the technique of verbal prompting and modelling. She is a delight to know and a delight to work with.

Followup

Four months after this session, Virginia called me and asked if we could do another session by telephone. The cramping had returned, and though it was not as severe as before, she wanted to be free of it. During the telephone session we dealt specifically with four more memories, one of which ( the most recent, five years ago) was a home invasion during which her life was threatened by a male. In each case the emotional impact was gone in one or two rounds. The last round we did was at my invitation, using "I've been afraid of men all my life" as the Reminder. When we were done with that, she expressed astonishment about how powerful the phrase was for her and delight about being free of that fear.

It's still too soon to know how effective the session was in terms of her cramping, but she sent me an email saying, "I should tell you that after I hung up with you I danced around the house for a while singing I am not afraid of men anymore (my partner thinks I'm crazy!) and it felt so good to say it, mean it, feel it. I have a relatively good handle of EFT now and I do it at school when I feel myself getting sucked in to the negativity."

Wes Gietz

FOR MORE EFT HELP ...

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