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Trauma

Childhood

A creative way to uncover a traumatic childhood event

Important Note: This article was written prior to 2010 and is now outdated.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

Did you ever have one of those clients who repressed their "stuff" so thoroughly that they could not get intense about ANY past event, even when you KNEW a major experience was involved? If so, EFT Master Rehana Webster from New Zealand shows us how to bring such intense memories out of the mental basement so we can handle them properly. The repressed item shows up about half way into the story.

Hugs, Gary


By Rehana Webster, EFT Master

A recent client (we will call him Chris) came in feeling ‘down’, depressed, unsure, unmotivated and was reliant on drugs to change his present feelings.  He often felt a knot in his stomach which was very uncomfortable.

We explored his life history and Chris felt that because he was adopted he had never bonded with his family.  There were several incidents in his life that he wanted to let go.  He referred to these incidents as his broken records.  Chris identified several negative patterns in his thinking and kept a diary for our sessions so we could easily see how often during a single day Chris would delve into the broken records.

He would ‘awfulize’ and ‘catatrophize’.  Meaning that he would take any event or thought and make up negative outcomes.  He could get really creative with this.  A perfect candidate for EFT!

One of the earliest events that he could recall was when he was about 5 years old.  His parents would lock Chris and his younger brother Brent into their bedroom at night.  This was to prevent them from getting up before the parents and getting into mischief.  One morning Chris and Brent awoke and once again found themselves unable to leave their bedroom.  For some reason Brent took his toy plastic boat and stuck in into the old fashioned electric heater.  The plastic quickly melted, and the room became filled with foul smelling smoke.  Chris remembers screaming and shouting for help and banging on the locked door.  He said that it seemed to be ages before his father appeared through the door, went to the heater, picked it up and threw it out of the window.  Then father went back to bed.

I asked Chris for an intensity rating on this event and he said that it was low.  He didn’t feel much.  So I asked him to imagine what it would have been for a little guy…how would the 5 year old have felt.  Still the same…’not much’ he replied.

I decided to do the story technique, followed it up with the black and white movie, putting music to it and then rewinding it.  I tapped on him while he concentrated on the variations of the movie.  Suddenly he became very red in the face and started to gag and choke.  Chris said the he felt sick to his stomach and his throat hurt.  I asked him if that is how he had felt as a little kid in that room.  YES, he has a knot in his stomach from fear, the fear of not getting out of that room because the door is locked and he can’t breathe because the air was so foul!

‘So where do you think the intensity was?’  ‘10++’ he replied!  The somatic response was stored in his body and this was one of his earliest memories of fear.

We continued then to turn the event into a cartoon movie, starring Fred Flintstone, Bambi and Pebbles.  Very appropriate I thought.  After a couple of rounds of cartoons and music, we rechecked his intensity rating which had fallen to 0 now and he said he could’t believe what a wonderful technique this was.  He was looking forward to doing the tapping and movie technique on several other incidents he had listed in his homework diary!

The knot in his stomach had completely disappeared as well!

Rehana Webster

FOR MORE EFT HELP ...

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