You may remember I wrote about how I prepared to make a long overdue dental appointment more bearable by using EFT. Today I got an unexpected opportunity to see how long lasting those preparations were.
I was due a checkup this morning. I went expecting to get a quick once over to check how my fillings were holding up and to be sent on my way. To my surprise the dental hygienist asked me to put on the safety glasses, had my sit in the chair and approached me with one of those fearsome scraping implements.
I had no time to prepare I just had to ‘lie there and think of England’. Funnily enough it wasn’t that bad, I was fairly relaxed and the scraping, gouging & polishing all happened without too much difficulty. It wasn’t comfortable I definitely wouldn’t book it as a birthday treat but I survived quite well.
However I did have quite a lot of distracted and anxious thoughts during the process. As I look back at the check-up I would give the experience a score of 6 out of 10 for discomfort. For the purposes of an experiment I’ve decided to treat it as a ‘traumatic’ experience and apply EFT to relieve the memory.
Using the ‘movie technique’ one of the most useful techniques in EFT. First it clears up the memory, second I think it will soften the reaction to those triggers in future dental appointments, so I will be able to relax and ‘enjoy’ the experience even more.
I started with the general statement:
- Even though I have this check-up memory, I’m all right, I’m OK.. etc, etc
Using it to soften the overall charge on the memory, then I went through the memory step by step neutralising the following aspects.
- The dental hygenist handing me the protective glasses - 4/10
- The hygenist leaning over me with the scraper - 6/10
- The whine and heat of the ‘water drill’ as it scoured away the tartar - 6/10
- A pain at the base of my front teeth from the ‘water drill’ - 6/10
- All the worrying thoughts in my mind about ‘What will happen if …? ‘- 8/10
- The fact that I didn’t like it. - 8/10
Finally I replayed the scene to check that it was free of emotional charge, which it was. In three months time I have another appointment and I’ll be interested to compare how comfortable I am at that session compared to the last one.
It would be nice to think that just one session of EFT (or anything else) will completely resolve a problem. Sometimes it does, there are many tales of ‘one minute wonders’ on the www.emofree.com website, but many times we need to do a little bit, notice the results, do a bit more, notice the results and so on until we get to the outcome we want.
I don’t know if I’ll have got all the aspects of the visits to the dentist situation sorted out but I’ll find out in three months, and if I haven’t that just more information to help me get to a better result the time after that.
