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Other Physical Issues

Allergy

Common sense uses of EFT to clear food sensitivities

Important Note: This article was written prior to 2010 and is now outdated.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

This article by Jo Hainsworth is a treasure chest of ideas. Her client had previously seen 7 treatments with 2 EFT Practitioners without result for her food sensitivities. This is highly unusual and so we must wonder what seemed to be in the way. What mistakes had the earlier EFT'ers made? Read this one carefully.

Hugs, Gary


By Jo Hainsworth

By the time Diana contacted me for help with her food sensitivities, she had already had 7 treatments with two different experienced EFT practitioners.  Despite not having been able to deal with a fear of spiders successfully, she still felt EFT might hold the answers.  She contacted me after reading the article I wrote on healing my own food sensitivities.  After two sessions together, Diana is now enjoying wheat and dairy without symptoms.  Being a social person, who is often away at conferences for her business, this has made a big difference to her life. 

I have found through working with people with food sensitivities that they may be divided into two broad groups.  One group is those who have multiple food and/or chemical sensitivities and cannot trace a particular start to the problems.  Another group are those who have a small number of distinct sensitivities, which can be traced to having started at specific times.  Diana is in the latter group, and her sensitivities turned out to be quick to deal with using EFT.

For people with distinct food sensitivities like this, the quickest way I’ve found to resolve them is to ask the following questions (with thanks to Carol Look from whom I learned the questions):

  1. When did the symptoms start?
  2. What was going on in your life around that time?

The answers to each of these questions led Diana to being able to become symptom free when she ate the two foods that had troubled her for several years.  Her wheat allergy began after a miscarriage several years earlier, and while tapping she remembered that the first thing she ate after the miscarriage was some chocolate muffins because she was in a hotel and they were the only things available. 

With further tapping she recalled thinking, “I shouldn’t be enjoying these” as she ate the muffins.  It often helps to link the emotional issue to the symptoms, so we tapped on, Even though I have all this mucus when I eat wheat … and it’s been ever since eating those muffins after the miscarriage … and maybe it’s crying on the inside because I wasn’t able to really grieve at the time… 

While tapping Diana recalled that she hadn’t really cried, because she felt she needed to be strong for her husband.  We did some tapping on letting go of the grief and the need to cry on the inside, and associated it with the wheat, and Diana is now enjoying wheat every day without problems.

The dairy sensitivity took a bit longer to track down, as several things were going on in her life around the time it started.  After tapping and following the trail for a few minutes, it appeared that the actual symptoms started immediately after being told by a kinesiologist (someone who muscle tests) that she had a casein intolerance (a specific type of dairy intolerance). 

After that, whenever Diana ate any dairy products except ice cream and cheese - which have apparently been processed in a way that the casein is no longer an issue for those with problems with it - she had allergic type symptoms.  We tapped and I reframed the idea that it was unlikely that her body had suddenly gone from being able to handle dairy (she had always eaten whatever she wanted) to being casein intolerant.  We will never know if this was the only key to the issue, as we tapped on various other stresses in her life at the same time, but Diana is now enjoying dairy without symptoms.

This case holds several interesting learning points.  It’s easy to dismiss events that seem unlikely to be related to food sensitivities, such as the miscarriage.  I seriously recommend that while working with those with food sensitivities, do not dismiss any events that happened to them around the time the sensitivities started.  Instead be mindful of emotional links becoming apparent once you start tapping.

We won’t ever know why EFT suddenly started working for Diana, after not working at all during the 7 prior treatments; however I believe it was probably a combination of two things:

First, it became apparent early on that Diana had difficulty accepting herself.  I asked her to say the statement “I accept myself as I am” out loud and rate on a scale of 0 (no way – absolutely not) to 10 (absolutely), her initial emotional response to it.  She was taken by surprise to find that her response was “not quite absolutely not, but pretty close – a 2.” 

Because of this, we commenced the treatment with sorting out why she couldn’t accept herself.  I suspected this was preventing her from getting past the standard setup phrased used in the earlier treatments.  We worked on getting her to finish the sentence “In order to accept myself I need to…”  We also tapped on a couple of things about which she carried a lot of guilt from earlier in her life. 

Because she couldn’t use the standard setup ending, we used phrases such as I accept that that’s the way it is for me right now, and I open myself to the possibility of that one day changing. With doing this work, Diana started to feel her first ever shifts with EFT, and her confidence that it could help her began to grow.  After clearing these issues her rating on “I accept myself” soared and we were able to start working on the sensitivities and use the standard setup phrase.

Second, near the beginning of our first treatment, I asked Diana whether she was able to turn the event we were working on into a mental movie.  Her reply was something along the lines of, “You bet I can, I torture myself with mental movies every day.”  The movie technique is one of my favourites as it is such a great way of engaging different parts of the brain and flushing out all the aspects at once and her reply was a big clue that it would work well for her.  Diana mentioned during the second treatment that the previous practitioners had not introduced her to the technique at all, and she felt it was a big factor in her newfound success with EFT.  Talking had never had the same effect for her as viewing the events in her mind.

I feel that the following are valuable learnings from this case:

1. Persistence really does pay off.  If you aren’t getting the results you want to see, find someone else to work with, or try out some of the different EFT techniques detailed in the manual and on the website. 

2. If you aren’t making any progress on any issues with EFT, try saying out loud, “I accept myself as I am”, and rating it on a scale of 0 – 10 for how true the statement feels.  Take your gut response, the one that comes first - this is not an exercise for the rational mind (if your rational mind had the answers, you wouldn’t need EFT to deal with the issues!)

Even if you rate this statement high on a scale of 0 to 10, I recommend moving onto the next step anyway.  Sometimes people will rate themselves as 10 out of 10 with this statement, but in the next step will find that they only accept themselves conditionally.  The next step is to complete the following sentence, again with whatever first comes to mind.  In order to accept myself I need to…  Then start tapping with Even though in order to accept myself I need to…  I accept that that’s the way it is for me right now, and I open myself to the possibility of this one day changing. DO NOT use the standard setup statement ending here, as that will defeat the purpose.

Follow the trail as usual with EFT, and keep retesting by rating the first statement (say “I accept myself as I am” out loud and rate it again as above) and completing the 2nd statement again to see if anything has changed.  If the person initially rated the statement as a 10, the second statement may have still given clues as to why they weren’t unconditionally accepting themselves.  For example they may have said, “In order to accept myself I need to be helping other people.”  In this case, this may lead to a core issue that needs to be dealt with, before the standard setup statement will work.

3. If you have been using only verbal statements, try out the movie technique.  It really is very powerful, and engages more parts of the brain, and can clear huge trauma incredibly quickly.

EFT is an incredible technique, and this is clearly illustrated in the area of food sensitivities.  With persistence, and appropriate use of the tools available within EFT, food sensitivities no longer need to restrict someone’s life.

Jo Hainsworth

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