An even more tearless trauma technique

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Hi Everyone,

Our popular Tearless Trauma Technique has been an extraordinarily useful method for addressing very intense emotional issues while (usually) minimizing pain. In essence, this process asks the client to guess at his/her emotional intensity rather than drag themselves through a painful memory. For an extremely intense issue, the mere mention of it can send some clients off into a tailspin before you can apply EFT. Here is where this useful idea by Rod Sherwin (from Australia) comes into play. For those of you with NLP backgrounds, this is a borrowed "pattern interrupt."

Hugs, Gary

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By Rod Sherwin

I was recently working with a 60 year old client, 'Vera', with a particularly violent child abuse memory. This memory was so severe that even guessing at the intensity of the memory without thinking about it, as in the existing Tearless Trauma Technique, was enough to reduce her into quivering foetal position where I couldn't even reach over and tap on her. The memory would suck her down straight away even at the slightest brush on the memory.

Thankfully, the idea came through me of asking her about a favourite pet which in this case was a dog. The memory of the dog and the tricks it performed was a happy memory.

Now, if the traumatic memory started to take hold of her when I asked her to guess at the intensity, I would immediately ask her to think about her pet dog and this would snap her out of it. When she was at least able to tap, we were able to tap around the feelings that she had brushed across in the memory and gradually get deeper and deeper into the memory.

I used the memory of Vera's dog quite often during the 2 hour session to pull her out of the trauma of the memory and thankfully at the end of the session she was able to recount the memory without being reduced to tears and the foetal position - something she had never been able to do before in her whole life.

I have since used this technique with another child abuse client. In this case we used the thought of a friend who always made her laugh. Whenever the memory got too intense, I would ask her to think about her friend and this would interrupt her state.

Many of you will recognise this as a 'pattern interrupt'. Having Vera change her focus from the traumatic memory to thinking about her dog interrupts the emotional pattern and allows her to access a more resourceful emotional state in which we can tap and clear the feelings.

Note that at the time I came up with this idea, I wasn't thinking in terms of pattern interrupts. It was only later that I analysed what I had done and how it worked. At the time it was very much a case of 'through me, not by me' as Gary teaches.

Regards,

Rod Sherwin

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