By Ruth Lembo, EFT-ADV

Hi Gary,

I had been working for several sessions with a client who had struggled with her weight for many years.  She was morbidly obese and considering gastric surgery.

In this particular session I asked ‘K’ which particular part of her body bothered her the most.  She replied, Oh, my stomach … always my stomach … if it was slim and all the rest of me was still as large I really would not care!”

I asked her to focus in on her stomach, and she pointed to the lower part of it and remarked that there was always a lead weight in there.  She rated it an intensity level of 8 out of 10.  She said that she had recently been looking at photos of herself as a slim young girl and teenager and she had always placed something over her stomach to obscure it in the photo, - a handbag, her arm, hide behind a friend.  She had never noticed this before, and was intrigued.  “Why would I need to hide my stomach when I was not fat?” she asked.

We began tapping on this, and it soon emerged that she could not remember a time when this lead weight was not present.  She realised that this meant the feeling had existed a long time before her weight problem began.  As we continued to tap, describing the feeling of the lead weight in terms of colour, shape, etc., a memory came up for her.

It was a very vivid recall of being a small girl, about 8 years old at junior school.  She was very quiet and a well-behaved child.  Around the time of the memory she had been suffering with constipation, and asked to leave the classroom to visit the toilet.  The teacher gave permission but told her to hurry up.

She remembered taking as much time as she needed, which was considerable because of the constipation, but having no particular concern.  On happily re-entering the classroom she was extremely shocked to be shouted and screamed at by the teacher, and reprimanded very severely; the teacher accused her of lying when she said she had only been to the toilet.  We tapped around the shock of this moment.

Even though I am so upset that she is shouting at me, I am a good girl anyway (we used the present tense as her level of distress was around 7 out of 10, and she felt able to handle the realness of the present tense setups).

Even though I am hurt that she doesn’t believe me, I know I have done nothing wrong.

Even though they (her classmates) are all looking at me and I feel stupid, I forgive myself for taking such a long time in the toilet.

Her level of intensity gradually dropped to around 2 or 3 out of 10, and I decided to ask her to re-run the movie, by re-entering the classroom again.  This particular client is a very no-nonsense and logical lady.  She said, “Of course it will feel different if I do it again, as I know what is coming this time!”  But she humoured me, and we repeated the tapping.

As she entered the classroom in her movie, she commented that yes, indeed, there was hardly any shock at all, just as she had expected.  But then she was most surprised, as she commented that whereas the first time the classmates had seemed to laugh and ridicule her, this time she noticed that they were as shocked as she was!  She realised that the impact of the teacher shouting had affected them almost as much as her.  She said that she wanted to reassure them, and we tapped around this feeling.

Even though it’s my fault they are so shocked, I choose to reassure them by smiling and being OK with this.

When we reassessed the lead weight feeling in her stomach we found it had subsided to an intensity of 2 or 3.  The final part of the session was the most surprising.  I asked K to repeat the movie one more time, and this time, to imagine she was swapping roles with her teacher.  As she watched herself come though the door from the teacher’s perspective, she suddenly gave a big incredulous gasp.  “I know why she was so angry!” she said.

It took a few moments for her to be able to explain, as she was so amazed by her new understanding of the situation.  The event had taken place around the exact time and place that the notorious Myra Hindley and Ian Brady had been abducting children in the North West of England, in the 1960’s.  She realised that her teacher had simply been afraid for her safety, as she had been out of the classroom for such a long time.  In this instant she completely forgave the teacher for all the hurt and shame she had felt.

By processing the emotions of hurt and shame at the beginning of the session, she then experienced the cognitive shift and accessed the information that really allowed the whole experience to make sense to her.  By the end of the session the leaden feeling in her stomach had vanished, and she was quite dumbfounded by the whole thing!

This client had many realisations following her session, regarding her previous lifelong patterns of shame and embarrassment regarding anything to do with her lower abdomen – patterns she had never even noticed before.  It made sense to her that her excess fat was a way of hiding her shame.

She went on to have more sessions that revealed other issues beneath her weight problem, and currently her steady weight loss continues.

Thank you Gary!

Ruth Lembo EFT-ADV