One of the greatest gifts that EFT has given me in my practice as a psychotherapist and coach is a total ability to trust the process of what is unfolding in my sessions with clients. In my psychotherapist training, it was common to hear the phrase ‘trust the process’, just ‘trust the process’.
And, on an intellectual level, I understood what that meant and I endeavoured to ‘trust the process’.
However, on an emotional and energetic level I didn’t actually trust the process. In some significant ways I was terrified of the process! I was terrified that my client would have an intense emotional reaction that I couldn’t ‘stop’. And I was terrified that if I dug deeply enough, my client would uncover a deeply horrifying traumatic experience that I would find overwhelming and not know how to handle and my client would be left further traumatized.
And so, I found myself ‘holding back’, not asking the questions that would get us to the core of the issue. Keeping the conversation at an emotionally supportive level but, not inviting clients to truly acknowledge and feel the depth of their suffering in a way that would allow them to release it.
I was being a ‘good enough’ psychotherapist but, without the confidence in myself, my skills and my modalities, I wasn’t able to bring my full self to my clients healing and growth process.
Eventually, the cognitive dissonance between knowing that truth and not knowing what to do about it, created an invitation to study Emotional Freedom Techniques and Energy Psychology.
Weird as it was 20 years ago, I realized pretty quickly that this was a modality that could be depended on, to bring clients (and myself) through any intensity of emotional dys-regulation, in minutes.
It took a few years more before I recognized the power of EFT to gently and quickly resolve the “stuckness” of traumatic events in the nervous system and how, working with EFT, we are able to reconsolidate upsetting memories in a fashion which facilitates post traumatic growth.
Today, I am enormously grateful to have a fast and reliable tool to use for myself to discover what’s going on when my professional confidence has taken a downturn.
And the ability to stay in a regulated body while working with a client who is accessing intense emotion and trauma is a priceless gift for me – and for them!