Sweet Miracles

I managed to convince my mum in giving me half hour on Sun morning for me to do EFT on her issues relating to my dad’s dementia. The half hour was really just an arbitrary no. and both of us were not looking at the clock so i’m not sure how long it lasted in the end.

The gd thing about doing it with my mum at home, is that we have my dad around to trigger my mum off. My dad was in the living room as well, and i asked my mum to look at my dad while talking about how his dementia takes up her time and energy, how it is unfair for her, etc. I was surprised that my mum seemed quite unemotional about it. I thought she would cry, because she is the kind of person who bottles her feelings up, and once she talks about it, tears would often come. She even managed to talk abt her frustrations in a singsong manner – perhaps little boy’s presence also kept it in a lighthearted mood.

From what i have read and heard of EFT, it works on a subconscious level, so as long as the person set the intention of healing that particular issue, it’s ok for the person not to be fully experiencing the emotion or the issue. After all, Borrowing Benefits and Tearless Trauma Technique do not require the person to focus on his own issue during the tapping, so i felt it would work for my mum even if she chooses to talk about it in a dissociative manner.

I was also surprised at how coorperative my mum was in repeating after me and adding her own complaints during the tapping. She didn’t even ask me when the session was going to end. On hindsight, i should have continued the session for as long as she would allow me to. Instead, i stopped at one point as my dad was starting to look grouchy with all the complaints my mum was voicing in front of him, and decided to work on him with my mum watching. A part of me hoped that something would come up that might be healing for my mum as well. In the end, my mum fell asleep while i was working with my dad. It was Sunday morning and she normally doesn’t sleep during this time, so i took it as a sign that the session had worked, and the energy balancing was taking place.

With my dad, i’m so glad that i attended the recent courses Creative and Experiential Art Therapy and Master Class, both of which brought home the message on the importance of just being present with the client. Otherwise, because my dad wasn’t making much sense in the beginning, i would have overwhelmed myself with frustration due to my own need to understand what he was trying to say. I realise it is quite a common thing in counselling, and as i’m now thinking abt it, i am seeing two extremes on this continuum of understanding between the counsellor and client. One extreme is the counsellor not questioning and clarifying at all because she simply assumes she know what the client is talking about, even though we often put different meanings to the same words. The other extreme is the counsellor trying too hard to question and clarify so that she can see it picture perfect in her mind. My supervisor refers to this as video talk.

My take on this is that video talk can be useful, as far as it helps the counsellor to gain empathy for the client as well as to gather impt info that can be helpful for the counsellor to decide on the intervention. It is very helpful in approaches like CBT and SFT.

But for EFT, video talk becomes unnecessary and may even be a hindrance, because the client is his own healer, and the therapist only the facilitator of that healing. And in healing, more often than not, you do not need to understand for it to work, neither do you need to understand how it works. While i greatly admire Gary’s art of delivery and learnt tons from watching him in action, because of my experience at the holistic fair when i saw results happening even with the briefest questioning and limited time, i realise that it is easy for the therapist to believe that he is a very impt factor in the healing process, and really, it’s not. The client is the real healer, and so long as he is ready for healing to happen, it happens, regardless of how inexperienced the therapist is or how basic the session is.

I say this because i helped clients even when i was an attachment student, and when i first started counselling in this present centre. I say this because of my experience at the holistic fair. I also WANT to say this because i think this will help me get my ego out of the way. As a therapist, it is easy enough for the ego to shoot to the sky because i will think, oh i’m helping so many pple, i must be very wonderful, etc etc. As a result, i go for all this training and feel good about myself when the client seems to feel helped, and feel lousy when the client didn’t seem to feel helped.

But it really has so little to do with me. I wldn’t go to the extreme and say i have nothing to do with it, cos if that is so, i might as well quit my work now! And i will still continue to go for professional development because skills and techniques do play a part in this picture too. But let me put it this way. If the client is ready and receptive to healing, does it really matter who he goes to and what healing method is used? Conversely, if the client is NOT ready and receptive to healing, would anyone be able to help him to heal?

I guess this realisation came to me when i was reading Caroline Myss’ book and others, and they all mention that there will be people who come to ASK for healing, but are unwilling to take the steps needed for healing i.e. not ready for healing. These are such well-known and respected pple in the field, and even they cannot help everyone. Which brings me back to the same point, pple do NOT get help from outside. Pple decide they want to heal, THEN they receive the healing. It’s like their intention to heal automatically links them up to the universe, and then it’s a matter of finding the physical means for the healing energy to come about. The best so-called healers out there are only the best, because their ego is sufficiently out of the way, for them to become the facilitator for this healing energy from the universe to come through.

So the more i think i need to do this and that to be a gd healer, ironically, the further i’ll be from being a gd healer. In the end, it’s up to the person, and it’s between that person and the universe. And there is always more than one possibility, on how the healing energy is going to come through. I heard recently on one of the EFT DVDs, which made a big impact on me. This speaker said, it’s the height of arrogance when we think that we are the only person who can help this particular person, hence we tell ourselves, oh we have to help him/her, and we brush our own needs aside and cannot say no. That’s not only egoistic but foolish as well. If the person is ready to heal, would the universe make healing be possible only through one single means? Obviously not. So go ahead (this is my own add on), be responsible to your clients, but don’t think that they need you, cos they really don’t. If you need to be available to yourself, and cannot be available to them, the universe will arrange for another person/whatever to be the facilitator of healing for them. I’m SO glad that i got this advice early in my counselling career, because this advice alone is going to prevent me from getting burnout… burnout from my own ego, hah!

Back to my dad. So i just went along with him and tapped on whatever he said, even though it didn’t make any sense to me. Gradually, his mood lightened, and towards the end, he was even smiling. I asked him to think about what can happen to help him be happy. He came up with the idea of keeping a pet, which i have never thought of, and honestly think is a pretty gd idea. He wanted a cat, a dog or a tortoise (later, he even said kangaroo and giraffe, but then he admitted that they would be too big for the house ), and i thought the cat and tortoise would be rather low-maintainence and seemed feasible.

Then i brought it up to my mum later, and she gave me her usual dismissive response, which effectively dampened my enthusisam (well, i have my own mother issues to work on of cos), so i have not followed up since. That’s the thing about working with your own parents. Follow-up is not so easy.

Nevertheless, my mum seems to be talking more nicely to my dad since. Of cos, she still loses her temper at him, and i’m not surprised cos even I don’t expect 1 short session to have her change overnight. But there seems to be a difference even in the intensity and duration of her losing of temper, and i wonder if the EFT session has some effect on me as well because i seem to feel less triggered by all that yelling. Or maybe i have just become immune.

Whatever it is, i guess i have at least taken the first step to be more involved in my dad’s healing – and my mum’s for that matter, so it wasn’t an empty promise to myself.

As an aside, i have been tapping myself on my sweaty palms and soles of feet, which i normally do not get but have been getting during my stay here. Even just lying on the bed as i nurse little boy can bring about the sweaty palms and soles, which is really strange. The great thing abt EFT is that i don’t need to understand what i’m tapping on, so i just tap away! Even though i have these sweaty palms and soles and have no idea why they are sweaty…. and sometimes, as i do so, i imagine my anxiety to be flowing out of me through my palms and soles, and i’m kinda sweating it out, so the sweat becomes a welcome thing, just like how you go to a sauna and you want to sweat cos it shows the discharge of the toxins.

I don’t know how much of my own healing this week is from this self-tapping, including the tapping on the fear of success, and how much from the session i got from the Master Class, and how much from the chanting i did. As i mentioned, there is no need to understand how the healing happened, except to be grateful that it did. Today and yesterday, i noticed a great difference in my actions and responses to pple ard me. In general, i felt more relaxed, more present, and more confident. I was able to participate in conversations because i wanted to, and i felt good about staying quiet when i didn’t have the need to say anything. I was able to look at pple in the eye more often, and i didn’t think to myself, oh someone doesn’t like me because he/she interrupted me, didn’t seem to be listening, etc etc, much at all.

Well, things are def going in the right direction, and i’m happy to go with the flow!