When it comes to using EFT “for everything,” here is an unusual story about this directive that was shared with me by Hank Krol, a counselor at Stairways Behavioral Health, which is an outpatient mental health clinic in Erie, PA that deals with severely disturbed patients.
He recounted a rather puzzling, self-proclaimed result of using EFT, as experienced by one of the depressed patients he had been treating.
“Claude” (not his real name) sought help at the clinic following a prolonged hospitalization for major depression. When commencing to treat him, Hank followed the recommendation to demonstrate the efficacy of EFT, right away, to a new client. He began by using EFT with Claude on relatively minor issues completely unrelated to his depression.
The first application was for a shoulder and lower back pain for which the tapping brought immediate relief. Claude’s pain (on a 0-10 scale) came down from an initial “7 or 8” to a “1” by the end of the session, and Claude conceded that EFT was effective.
Claude used EFT several times in the interim and managed to keep his shoulder and neck pain minimal. When Claude returned for the next therapy session, a week later, he asked Hank, quite out of the blue, if he thought EFT would, “help me with my fishing.”
Claude was semi-retired and one of his favorite pastimes was going down to a nearby stream where a number of experienced fishermen assemble daily. Following his discharge from the hospital, his girlfriend had introduced him to fishing and he took to it right away. Being somewhat of a perfectionist, he bought all the right equipment (the very best) and carefully observed the other fishermen, making sure to use exactly the same bait that they did, to fish in the same area, and so forth. While on the one hand he looked forward to his new hobby, it soon became extremely frustrating for him.
There were usually a good number of other fisherman along the banks and, according to Claude, almost all of them managed to catch large numbers of BIG Steelhead Trout each time they fished. By contrast, although the stream is known for its exceptional trout, Claude would consistently leave at the end of the day with only a couple of “small fish,” if any, in his pail.
This was particularly frustrating because, to his knowledge, he was doing nothing differently from the other fishermen, but rather following their procedures “to the letter.” He recalls that he fished with minimal luck on at least 15 to 20 different occasions and did not experience a single successful day during that time.
Claude was persistent, however, and he kept on fishing. In fact, he was wearing his fishing boots at his session with Hank and was preparing to return to fishing right after it. When he asked Hank about using EFT for fishing, Hank’s response was, “Let’s try it.”
It is important to note, however, that Hank did not instruct Claude to address his fishing problem as “the problem”— that is, he did not suggest that Claude tap on, “Even though I’m a failure at fishing…” or similar statement. Instead, he questioned Claude about his EMOTIONAL REACTIONS to the failure and asked him to tap only on his feelings.
Claude was able to identify three primary emotional reactions to the situation — “jealousy,” “embarrassment,” and a feeling of “lack of confidence” – emotions quite familiar to him in other situations as well. When he tapped on “embarrassment” his intensity was originally a “10” and after three rounds it had come down almost to zero. “Jealousy” was substantially reduced by the end of the session, and “lack of confidence” was similarly lessened. Claude was pleased with these results and marched out to test them.
When he returned for his next session he exclaimed (something to the effect of) ”I can’t believe it, but that tapping worked for the fishing!” Here is his account of what happened.
When he went to the stream after his therapy session, the other fishermen were out in full force and as usual and were pulling in fish after fish. Claude set up his fishing tackle and waited. But this time he didn’t have to wait long. The fish began biting soon after he arrived there, and he found himself, to his amazement, bringing in so many Steel Head Trout that soon he had caught more than he could possibly use — and they were big ones too!
This was the beginning of a new era. Claude systematically used EFT each day before he fished, and each time that he tapped away his embarrassment and jealousy and lack of confidence he kept on having successes. He estimated that since he began using EFT he experienced 30 to 40 truly “good” fishing days, and only 12 days that were “not so good,” a remarkable record for him. At the writing of this report, his success at fishing had continued and contributed greatly to his self-esteem.
When asked how he explained his extreme lack of success before he learned EFT, Claude said that he attributed it to “bad luck” and that he had been “unlucky” all of his life. While he also lacked as much experience as the other fishermen, the fact that there was an immediate turnaround on the very day he commenced using EFT, strongly suggested to him that “bad luck’ really didn’t have much to do with it. He said that when he tapped on the three issues (embarrassment, jealousy, and lack of confidence) before he went fishing (he did this religiously) that he would go to the stream expecting to catch fish and that his lack of confidence was gone.
Claude continued to experience major problems to confront in his life, many of them stemmed from his extreme under evaluation of himself, but at least his confidence with respect to fishing seemed to be handled. And, under the guidance of Hank, he continued using EFT for some months for an even more basic issue in his life – his lack of self-esteem. Interestingly, he reported a marked improvement in his self-esteem since using EFT. Measured on a ten point scale, with 10 representing a maximum sense of “self-worth” and 0 a complete lack of any sense of self-worth, Claude estimated the following:
When he was in the hospital with severe depression his sense of self-worth was a zero on the 10 point scale. When he was discharged from the hospital his sense of self-worth rose to a 4 on this scale. Then, (in March, 2002), after several months of treatment using EFT with counseling for this problem, he rated his sense of self worth as 7 on that scale and, as a consequence, his depressive symptoms became manageable for the first time.
In regards to his improvement in fishing, we can speculate on the reasons for the unexpected outcome, although none of us can know exactly how EFT worked to achieve its results from the standpoint of the FISH. Since using EFT for this issue, could Claude have been engaging in some uncharacteristic behavior when fishing that turned the outcome around for him, even though he was not aware of behaving differently? Obviously if he was doing something it was not apparent to him, and it is hard to imagine how confidence, or lack of it, might have been conveyed to the fish in a way that made them take the bait or not.
The Universal Energies Around Us
Those who have studied the operations of energy fields have observed that subtle energies are not confined to the individual but can impact many other organisms and sometimes even inanimate objects (as in the studies of the effects of thought on random number generators conducted by Robert Jahn, Dean of the School of Engineering at Princeton University). Reasoning from this perspective, one might possibly wonder if Claude’s much more relaxed and confident attitude about fishing was somehow being conveyed to the fish through means other than through the five senses. This would be, in some ways, similar to what happens during surrogate tapping.
All this is speculation. I leave it to you to decipher the mystery of the Steelhead Trout’s response to EFT. . . .
EFT Master Patricia Carrington, Ph.D.
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