They might say things like: “I’m so angry”, or “I feel lonely”, or “No one listens to me”

These are straightforward, clear descriptions of the felt experience of their problem, and they give us an easy place to start.

More often, our clients give us a mixture of straightforward descriptions of what is going on for them and hints about what might be going on that they might not even have noticed.

We can often miss or dismiss these hints and implications as less important than the straightforward descriptions, but I think being able to spot implications and unpack them can be a helpful skill for the practitioner.

The most common kinds of implication that I see are: comparatives, negatives, and wants / needs.

Comparatives

As you tap, the emotional state of the client changes. What was problematic becomes less problematic. If you are an EFTer the SUDs levels go down, for example from an 8 to 3. This change usually feels good to the client, what previously felt uncomfortable becomes much more bearable.

Grateful for the relief, the client will say something like “I feel less stressed” (compared to where I started). This is indeed progress, but they haven’t said “I feel no stress”. At this point, they may be happy with the change and want to move on to something else, however if you are a diligent tapper and want to clear up all the stress and distress your client is experiencing, you need to take it further.

If they feel less of something, then logically they must feel some.

It might be useful to find out what is left and process that so that the client can get the full benefit.

If the client says: “I feel more relaxed”, you could say “Great! So what’s left that’s not relaxed?” Or if the client says “I feel less stress”, you could ask “Great! So how much stress is left?” or just “Great! So, what’s left?”

Notice the structure of the question, “Great! So what’s left?”

The “Great!” is an acknowledgement that they have made progress, just before you ask “So, what’s left?” Just asking “So, what’s left?” might be interpreted by the client that they have failed to completely let go of whatever it is in just one round of tapping and that’s somehow a failure.

Many clients are sensitive to the idea that they fail, so acknowledging their success helps soften that anxiety. It’s probably better that your client experiences your session as one (small) success after another, rather than one failure after another.

Negatives

Sometimes clients will tell you what they do not feel, rather than what they do feel.

If a client says, “I don’t feel comfortable” they are telling you what they don’t feel, but not what they are feeling. Their statement implies there is another feeling present, which is not feeling comfortable, but it doesn’t tell you what it is, and you can only tap on things that are there.

Rather than trying to tap on what’s missing, it would probably be more useful to find out what they are thinking or feeling and tapping on that.

For example: if your client says, “I don’t feel comfortable”, you could say, “Ah, if you don’t feel comfortable what do you feel?” Or if they say “I don’t feel safe” you could say, “OK, so if you don’t feel safe what do you feel?”

Notice that once again the question starts with an acknowledgement of what they said in the form of “Ah”, or “OK”, before asking them to explore what they do feel or think.

It’s easy for us to think the answer to the question is obvious, if someone doesn’t feel comfortable, they must feel uncomfortable. You might be right, but they could also feel under pressure, exposed, shamed, or something else.

It’s better for us to ask to find out what is really going on, rather than make faulty assumptions about someone else’s inner world.

Wants and needs

When someone tells you what they want, they are telling you that there is something unsatisfactory in their experience. Why else would they want something different if everything is OK?

If someone wants to feel safe, they are experiencing something that isn’t safe. We can find out what they do have to by asking: “OK, if you want to feel safe, what is it that you are experiencing right now?”

Some other examples: “I need to be comforted”, you can say “OK, if you need to be comforted, then what is it that you are feeling right now?, or if they say “I need him to apologise for what he did?” you could say “OK, if you need him to apologise for what he did, then what are you feeling right now?”

Wants and needs are future oriented, we imagine getting what we want or need, therefore “what do you feel right now?” at the end of the question is to help bring them back into the present moment from that imagined future.

You may have noticed that in all the examples that I am using the clients’ words as closely as possible to respect their experience and then have them segue into what they might not be noticing.

P.S. If you are a tapping practitioner and would like more content like this subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

Image by Tove from Pixabay

Abstract (adjective): – existing as an idea, feeling, or quality, not as a material object.

When our clients come to us, they describe their problems so that we can try to help them, but some descriptions are more useful than others

For example, here are three common problems described in two ways:

• “I have claustrophobia”
• “When I step into a small room, my heart beats faster and my palms sweat”

or

• “I am a people-pleaser”
• “I say yes even when I want to say no to things my friends suggest”

or

• “I procrastinate”
• “The closer I get to finishing the project, the more I avoid doing the work.”

Which of these statements would give you a better place to start tapping?

You could, in theory, start tapping on “I am a people-pleaser” or “I have claustrophobia”, I think this is a hard way to start because you would be tapping on abstractions.

A concrete way of describing our problems is to say that they are thoughts, feelings and behaviours that do not work for us in particular circumstances.

Tapping works by changing feelings, thoughts and behaviours so that the client changes the way they are in the world.

Unfortunately, our capacity to think gives us ways to create abstractions and theories about why we are suffering. These theories, concepts, names, abstractions about our experience take us away from our sensory experience.

In one way, it may be less distressing to spend our time thinking about the problem, in another way it can get in the way of resolving the problem.

We talk about low self-esteem, co-dependency, procrastination, ‘borderline personality disorder’ and all the other conditions and syndromes that can appear on social media or in our Google searches.

While it might be useful to discuss diagnoses among ourselves or with professionals, such abstractions are not directly amenable to tapping.

Your client can’t show you low self-esteem, co-dependency etc because they are abstractions. They are labels for experience, not the experience themselves.

The further away from sensory experience we get, the more vague and untappable the problem gets.

Some things are just so vague that it is like wrestling with (or tapping on) fog.

So, how exactly do you tap on low self-esteem, procrastination, indecisiveness or all those other abstractions? These problems are very real to the people experiencing them, but they are difficult to tap on directly.

Tapping on sensory experience rather than abstractions.

Our experience is what we see, hear, feel, smell, taste, think, imagine, remember and do (thinking, imagining and remembering are seeing and hearing in our inner world).

When we tap, we are tapping on our internal sensory experience and how that makes us feel.

If you know about EFT, you will know one of the foundations of successful EFT / Tapping is to be specific about what you are tapping on.

When we talk about being specific, we are focusing on the sensory parts of our experience. The unpleasant feelings, the scary images, critical voices and painful memories that distress us, all happen at the level of sensory experience. (In ‘EFT speak’, these are sometimes called ‘aspects’).

If we spent all our time in our sensory experience our tapping would be simple, but because we can think and imagine, we can take ourselves out of our sensory world into the realm of abstraction.

As tappers, we aim to bring our attention to the realm of concrete experience so we can tap on things or the feeling of things.

How can you get from abstractions to something specific enough to tap on?

To make the intangible tap-able, we need to bring the problem out of the realm of the conceptual into the world of concrete experience.

From The Abstract To The Concrete

Step 1. State the problem.

Have the client state the [abstract] problem in a sentence.

For example: “I have low self-esteem”, “I am procrastinating”, “There is something wrong with me”, “My relationships are dysfunctional”, etc, etc.

Step 2. Go from the abstract to the concrete

One way of getting from the abstract to the concrete is to ask the ‘client’: “How do you know you have [problem]?”

For example: “How do you know you have low self-esteem?”

The answer to this question should bring you into, or at least closer to, the concrete world.

For example: “I feel worthless when I’m with other people”. This kind of answer is a description of concrete experience, if there is an experience there will be feelings, thoughts and behaviours, and they can give you something real to tap on.

If they say something like: “My interactions with people are strained” this is still somewhat distanced from concrete experience. What kind of interactions are we talking about, with which people, in what way are they strained?

If that is the case, ask the same question again, substituting the new description: “How do you know your interactions with people are strained”? Sooner or later, this question will bring you out of abstractions into sensory experience.

Another way is to ask them to remember a time when they encountered this problem, and have them describe what happens when the problem arises.

Step 3. Get sensory specific information

When they give you a description of a concrete experience, you can help them get more specific by asking some, or all, of the following questions.

• “When you are in this situation:”
  • “what are you seeing (in the world (externally) or in your mind (internally))?”
  • “what are you hearing (in the world or in your mind)?”
  • “what are you thinking?”
  • “what are you feeling?”
  • “what are you doing?”

Asking these questions forces the person to give you sensory-specific details of their experience.

For example:

“When I feel worthless when I am with other people”:

• “I see other people looking at me in a critical way”.
• “I hear my heart hammering in my chest”
• “I think they think I’m boring”
• “I feel worthless”
• “I retreat into myself”.

These questions may give a lot of information, so it is useful to assess what is most worthy of tapping.

Step 4. Start where it hurts.

Releasing the most charged aspect is most likely to make the most significant difference in the problem.

The simplest way is to ask the client: “What is most noticeable?”

The most charged ‘aspect’ of the situation will be the one that is most noticeable (we are good at noticing distress. See How You Know What To Tap On? )

For example: the person with low self-esteem may report that the most noticeable part of the experience is the critical way people look at him.

Use the most noticeable aspect to start the tapping.

For example:

If you are an ‘EFTer’ you could start with: “Even though they are looking critically at me, I accept myself and how I feel”, etc.

If you use Intention Tapping you could start with: “I release all my emotional attachments to them looking critically at me”

Step 5. Work through the list of sensory specific aspects.

From time to time, return to the list of concrete aspects and ask the client what is most noticeable now.

Repeat the tapping process on each aspect of experience as necessary.

It may be that resolving just one or two of the most noticeable aspects will relieve the others automatically.

Return to the list and find out what is now most noticeable.

Referring to the list of ‘aspects’ has the added advantage of giving you a way to test your work as you are going along and for the client to have a sense of making progress.

Step 6. Test your work

All good tappers test their work.

Invite the client to go back to the original concrete experience, in our example, “I feel worthless when I’m with other people”. As they imagine being with other people, what do they notice now?

Is there anything left of the concrete that needs to be processed?

If not, go back to the client’s original ‘abstract’ problem.

What is that problem like now?

It may have changed a little, a lot or not at all.

For complex problems, there are probably a lot of intertwined parts to the whole problem, so you will likely need to return to “How do you know?” to uncover more aspects to work with.

The Hidden Bonus

In addition to helping make the untappable more tappable, this process has another benefit.

One of the reasons some clients focus on abstractions is that losing yourself in abstractions and theories can be less painful than having to deal with the sensory experiences that underlie the abstraction.

By encouraging clients down into sensory experience, you are helping them get in touch with their life as an experience rather than a concept. By being able to connect and soothe the pain of the experiences, they can live in their mind and body, not just their mind.

P.S. If you are a tapping practitioner and would like more content like this subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

If you desire to dig a well to reach water, your efforts are more fruitful if you dig one 100-foot-deep hole than if you dig ten holes each 10 feet deep.
– Dan Millman

Have you ever had a client that doesn’t seem to be able to stick to the tapping task at hand?

Some clients are diligent and stay focused on the issue they are working with, other clients like to wander, tapping on one issue will lead to the next, and to the next, and to the next …

People are association machines, our minds love to link one thing to another, and to another, and another … this can be useful in many contexts. When it comes to a practitioner and client trying to work on just one issue, a client’s tendency for free association can be a problem

Gary Craig, creator of EFT, noticed that clients would start tapping on one thing and then end up on a thought, memory or feeling that was far away from the thing they started tapping on (he called these phenomena ‘daisy-chaining’).

Regular tapping seems to bring unconscious connections to the surface and make it easy for a client to follow those connections. More recent versions of tapping such as Steve Wells’ Intention Tapping (IEP) make use of this tendency to follow unconscious connections help the client unpack complex issues.

Traversing these unconscious networks of feelings, thoughts, meanings and memories is useful, but it can mean that a client can start with an issue that is important to them, but end up miles away from where they started in a short space of time.

If someone wants a result on one specific issue, but as soon as they start tapping they wander here, there and everywhere, how can they get the result they want?

How do we as practitioners respectfully, and elegantly, keep them on track?

Imagine you have a goat.

You probably wouldn’t just set it free to wander and feed where it wished. Goats like to wander and to eat, if they get free they would happily eat your neighbours’ vegetables, devastate your flower beds, even eat the clothes off a washing line!

To make sure that doesn’t happen, you could tether your goat to a post. When they are tethered, they can graze within the circle allowed by the tether, but wouldn’t be able to roam far and wide: your washing and your neighbour’s vegetables would be safe!

To help ‘wandering’ clients stay with a specific issue, ’tethering’ them to that issue can help them get the results they want.

There are five steps in the ’tethering’ process.

1. Deciding where to put the post

The first thing you need to do is to find out what is the issue they want to work on.

‘Wandering’ clients often have many things they would like to work on. Unfortunately, you can’t work on all of them all at once, so you need to choose just one issue to focus on. This issue will be the post they are tethered to.

What your client chooses to work on could either be based on what is most important to them, or, if the client is vulnerable and the issues are intense, what is the safest thing to work on (see my article The Safety Ladder for more on this).

Choosing the most important, or safest issue, gives you the focus for the tapping session.

2. Securing them to the post

Now you have the post (issue), how are you going to ’tether’ them to that post?

The ’tether’ in this case is an explicit agreement from the client to focus their attention on just this issue.

This agreement is important because people (in general) want to honour their agreements, and that gives you a powerful way of encouraging them back to the issue if they stray too far.

For example:

Let’s imagine that your client wants to work on the way they feel intimidated when they speak to their boss.

You could say something like: “So we agree that the issue we are going to focus on for the moment is the way you feel intimidated by your boss, is that right?”

They can either agree, or choose something else to agree on.

Getting the agreement is securing the tether, don’t move forward until they have agreed on something: no commitment means no tether. If they can’t agree on what to work on, this may be an issue that is worth exploring in its own right.

Let them know that you will bring them back to this issue if they seem to be wandering off course.

Note: The ’length’ of the tether is up to you, if your client has a strong tendency to wander, keeping the tether short may help, if they need a bit more room to explore the issue, then they may need a longer tether. You need to experiment to find the optimum balance of freedom and constraint for your client on this issue. Different clients may need different levels of constraint, and the same client may need different levels of constraint on different issues.

3. Tapping and tracking

Start working on the chosen issue.

As you are tapping and the client is processing things, you may notice that they seem to be straying from the original issue.

It may be obvious from what they are telling you that the things they are focusing on at that moment are directly related to the issue they started with.

For example: if the person who feels like they are intimidated by their boss finds themselves working on a memory where they were punished by a school teacher, it’s not unreasonable to think this may have some relation to their feelings about their boss. It’s not the same, but it is probably related.

If you are not certain if it is related, you could say: “Ah, that is interesting, and how is that related to [the agreed issue]?”

This sentence acknowledges the importance of what they are tapping on and asks the client to assess how it fits in with their issue.

4 Gently pulling on the tether to bring them back to the issue

If the client seems to have wandered too far from where they started, you need to be able to bring them back to the issue they agreed on.

You can say something like: “Let’s go back to the original problem … What’s that like now?”

This brings the original issue to mind for the client, gives them a moment to tune into it, so they can assess what has changed and what still needs to change.

There are three possible responses to this question:

• The most likely result is that there has been a change, but there is still some work to do. Use the new information to guide more tapping.
• If the issue has been fully resolved, you can to move on to the next issue for the client.
• If the issue is still the same, you will need to change your approach.

5 Rinse and repeat

This process can be repeated several (many) times during the session, bringing the client back to the issue when they wander, while you work to address it.

The client may resolve the issue in one session, in which case you can move on to the next issue.

If the issue is difficult or tangled, you may only have made some progress in resolving it, in which case you can agree with the client to revisit it in your next session.

Tips

• If the client wants to change their issue because something more important has come up, that’s OK. Acknowledge it and set up a new agreement.
• If the client seems to have bitten off more than they can chew, you can soften your approach, let the tether grow longer or work on a different safer issue.
• If they can’t keep to the agreement and keep wandering off, perhaps that needs some investigation.

P.S. If you are a tapping practitioner and would like more content like this subscribe to my monthly newsletter.

What does mentoring / supervision mean to you?

Is it:

• just a ’ticky box’ exercise to keep your trainer or organisation happy.
• an unwelcome imposition that you don’t have the time or money for.
• something you don’t need because you know everything you need to know.
• a threat to be avoided because you might get found out, judged or challenged.
• a welcome chance to share, learn and be supported in the work that you do.

Being a tapping practitioner is hard

Being a practitioner is a lonely business; it’s just you and your client, trying to do the best you can in the moment with whatever the client brings.

As well as the issue you are working on, there is also all the human stuff that is going on just beneath the surface: how you feel about what you are doing, what is being triggered in you by your client, and how you may be triggering your client.

As if that were not enough, sometimes your client will present you with issues that you have no idea how to handle. You do the best you can with the skills you have, but you know it could have been much better.

Finally, you may have to navigate ethical problems or need to manage issues of risk with your client.

All of this is going on right now in real time, and you don’t have much time to reflect on it or have a different perspective than your own; it’s hard to read the label when you are inside the jar!

For all these reasons, practitioners need mentoring so they can have the help and support they need to do an even better job.

Good mentoring

Ideally, a mentor will be accepting, supportive and experienced. They know how hard this work can be, and they understand the challenges because they have been through those kinds of challenges themselves. A good mentor will acknowledge your struggles and seek to collaborate with you as an informed colleague.

Mentoring gives you a chance to explain your challenges and questions to someone who understands. It allows you an accepting space to explore the implications of those challenges and possible ways of addressing them.

In mentoring sessions, you can get help on practical issues such as:

• what do I do with a client who …
• how to handle this specific problem
• how to structure an intake process
• etc.

Mentoring can also help you with ethical issues such as:

• what to do if you start falling in love with your client, or start to loathe them.
• what if my client wants to be my friend?
• what do I need to do if my client has disclosed abuse?

In short, mentoring can help you keep your balance, build your skills and confidence, and give you a broader perspective on this challenging work.

Types of mentoring

In one-to-one mentoring, you get the undivided attention of a mentor which allows you to go into more detail with the challenges you are bringing.

It allows a more thorough exploration of the pitfalls and possibilities of what you are working on.

It also makes it easier to be more open because you don’t need to worry what other people in a mentoring group session might think of you.

In group mentoring sessions, you can share your experiences with other people who may be working with similar challenges. Knowing that you are not the only one dealing with this can come as a great relief. In a group session, you get encouragement, different suggestions and ideas from the other participants, as well as from the mentor

If you are an inexperienced practitioner, a group gives you an opportunity to learn, if you are an experienced practitioner it gives you an opportunity to share your hard-earned wisdom and experience.

The problem of vulnerability

Everyone wants to be a good practitioner. We all would like to look professional, competent and skilful. We want to be doing well financially and respected by our trainers, mentors and peers.

Unfortunately, being a practitioner isn’t always plain sailing.

Sometimes things don’t go well. We are only human, and we do make mistakes, stumbling over our inexperience and blind-spots (this happens even if you are experienced.)

It’s difficult to deal with the problems ourselves because we don’t usually enjoy examining our ‘failures’, and we really don’t want other people to see our ‘failures’.

Unfortunately, to get the help we need, we have to expose our vulnerability and mistakes.

In a one-to-one mentoring situation that is difficult, but if you have a good mentor they will be as kind, straightforward and helpful to you as they would be to their clients.

Mentors are just as human as you are, but there are two traits that are not helpful, the first is obvious, the second less so.

1. You can do no right: this is the mentor that finds faults, criticises or condemns you. Mentoring is not intended to be a punishment. If your mentor is like this, find a better one.
2. You can do no wrong: this is the mentor who supports and praises you whatever you have done, they won’t, or can’t, challenge mistakes and hold you to account. Some problems can’t be solved just by good vibes alone. If your mentor is like this, find a better one, even though it might be hard leaving the praise behind.

The ideal mentor will be kind and supportive while you work through the challenges on hand, but they will be able to challenge you and hold you to account if necessary.

Vulnerability in group mentoring sessions

In a group mentoring situation, the problem of vulnerability can be magnified: no one wants to look stupid among their peers, and there is a lot of social pressure and expectation to have everything under control. Openly discussing a difficult client or mistakes you may have made under such circumstances can be very challenging.

However, if you have confidence in your mentor to keep you safe in the mentoring session, and you are comfortable and trusting with all the other mentees, it may be possible to broach difficult topics in a safe space.

This is risky, but it can be hugely beneficial to yourself and the rest of the group because once it is clear that human vulnerability is allowed and treated with kindness and skill it can be quite liberating for other members of the group not to have to pretend to be perfect. Trust and learning can be deepened.

Of course, if you are not sure, it is better to discuss your problem with your mentor on a one-to-one basis.

It’s OK to change mentors

Remember, you are not chained to any particular mentor, if you are not getting what you need from one mentor it is perfectly alright to look around for someone who is better suited to your needs.

There is a lot of value in experiencing different mentors in any case, nobody knows everything, and there are many ways to get good results.

Still not sure of the value of mentoring?

If you are still debating whether mentoring is a good idea or not, these points may help you decide.

Don’t go for mentoring if you’d like to:

• feel alone and unsupported in your difficult work
• keep making the same mistakes
• struggling with the same client issues
• lose clients and your credibility
• get into ethical problems you could have avoided
• keep fooling yourself that you are doing a good job all by yourself.

Do go in for mentoring if you like to:

• feel supported and part of a wider community of practitioners
• learn how to serve your clients to the best of your ability
• develop your skills and confidence
• avoid practical and ethical problems
• keep clients and develop your credibility as a skilled practitioner.

I hope I’ve made a good case for the value of mentoring (whether you want to do your mentoring with me, or not).

P.S. I’ve been tapping for more than 20 years and I still get a lot out of both providing and receiving mentoring / supervision.

95% of our problems talk back – Anonymous

Think of someone you don’t get on well with.

Just imagine for a moment that they are there with you right now.

What happens?

Did your stomach drop and your heart sink?

You are not alone.

In 1988 Dr Tom O’Dowd wrote a paper¹ in which he coined the term ‘heartsink patient’ for some of the challenging patients doctors see, he described the symptoms as the feelings felt in the pit of your stomach when the patients’ names are seen on the morning’s appointment list’.

In the lives of our clients (and perhaps our lives to) there will be ‘heartsink’ people whom they find challenging.

Perhaps it’s something these problematic people say, how they look, their tone of voice or ‘vibe’ that triggers our clients into defensiveness, powerlessness, fear, anxiety, anger or any other unhelpful emotional response.

Sometimes, when our clients think about such people, or imagine being with them, it can make our clients feel bad.

Changing our client’s unhelpful responses to these people could be very useful, but how can we do that?

We can hardly bring our client’s problem person (people) into the session with them because that would freak out the client and be kind of weird for the other person.

Fortunately, we don’t have to bring in the real person because our clients already have imagination.

Remember in the ‘heartsink patient’ quote, the symptoms were the “feelings felt in the pit of your stomach when the patient’s names are seen on the morning appointment list.” The patient didn’t even have to be in the room, just imagining them made the doctors feel bad.

We can use that same phenomena to help our clients (without exposing them to the problematic person, in person).

Just having the client imagine that ‘other person’ will probably provoke the responses that need to be soothed by tapping.

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IMPORTANT If the client’s response to this person is the result of past traumatic experiences, those memories need to be neutralised first.

If the client’s responses are the result of ongoing traumatic experiences, for example regularly being beaten up by a drunken spouse, etc. they need a different more immediate form of help than you might be able to offer.

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The Process

Ask the client to think of the other person, if their response is strong, then you may need to take the extra safety measures described below.

SAFETY MEASURES

If imagining the problem person causes a strong emotional response in your client, you can make it safer for them by letting them know that they are in charge of the process, and you will not proceed to the next step until they feel safe to do so.

When we are in the presence of danger, most of us will feel safer if that danger is far away from us rather than close at hand.

Ask the client “What would be a safe distance for that person to be?” this could be metres, kilometres, hundreds of kilometres away.

Invite them to: “Put that ‘other person’ at a safe distance from you, however far away that is”.

Ask them: “What is going on in you as you imagine them at a safe distance?”

Process their reactions, for example the fear, dread, disgust or whatever it is that they are experiencing. Process all those reactions before proceeding.

Ask the client: “What is a safe distance now?”, then invite them to put that person at the new ‘safe distance’.

Ask them: “What is going on in you when they are at this safe distance?”, then process those responses.

Repeat this process until they are just outside the room the client is in (you can have them close the door, or imagine a closed door).

Ask them: “What happens if you imagine opening that door to let that person in?”

Process those reactions (you may need to reassure the client that they are not going to ’let problematic person in’ until they feel safe).

When they feel safe, they can ’let that other person in’.

General instructions

Ask the client to put that imagined ‘other person’ at a safe distance (more than one arm’s length away) and ask them to pay attention to their internal experience.

For example:

• they (the problem person) looks angry, sad, frustrated
• I don’t know what to do
• I feel trapped
• etc
• etc

Use the tapping process to soothe whatever is going on in them.

Ask them, “What happens as you look at this person now?”

Keep processing whatever comes up about the problem person, or themselves, until the client can be calm in their imagined presence.

Testing for the future

If your client is going to see the problematic person again, there are extra steps you can take to help your client be at their best when they do.

Ask your client when they will next be seeing this person, have them imagine that situation and notice what happens.

As they go through this mental rehearsal, process any emotional blips that arise.

When they can imagine meeting this person in a calmer, more resourceful way then you are done.

Remember, as a practitioner, you are also human. If you have some ‘heartsink’ clients, you might find this process helpful for yourself.

References

1. O’Dowd TC. Five years of heartsink patients in general practice. BMJ. 1988;297(6647):528–530. doi: 10.1136/bmj.297.6647.528.

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Image by Gerd Altman from Pixabay

People are used to trying to think their way out of problems because their thinking mind thinks it knows what is going on and what to do about it.

However, the fact that this person is coming to see a practitioner suggests that this strategy is not working too well, because if they could have thought their way out of their problems they would have done that already. Despite the evidence, our thinking mind still thinks thinking is the way to solve all problems.

Luckily for us as practitioners, some people are very in touch with their inner worlds, they know what they are feeling and may even have valuable intuitions about what is really going on. These clients are usually easy to work with because they can ‘point’ the tapping practitioner to where they need to go.

Unfortunately for us as practitioners, some people tend to live in their heads: thinking and analysing. These clients might not be so easy to work with because, for whatever reason, they are not so connected with their inner world.

Some people are just used to operating on a thinking level, they may have highly analytical professions in which thinking becomes their default way of interacting with the world.

Other people may also use thinking as a defence mechanism to keep them out of their feelings. If you have been ’trained’ from an early age not to feel things, or express those feelings, what is really going on may be buried deep down below the level of consciousness and not easily accessible.

Unfortunately for these clients, the things that typically keep them stuck are a web of connections between memories, learned responses, beliefs, etc, etc that are hidden below the level of consciousness. This presents a problem for the tapper because the client cannot tune into their inner world because it is unfamiliar or because it does not feel safe.

How can we side-step the (over) thinking mind?

Fortunately, there are ways of dipping below the surface of the thinking mind to access useful information.

One of my favourite approaches comes from a therapy called the Comprehensive Resource Model (CRM) created by Liza Schwartz. CRM is an elaborate and powerful therapeutic process for repairing early traumas and attachments, but one of its simpler techniques is a novel way of asking questions.

So, if you want to ask a question that goes below the surface, you can preface it with the instruction Ask your body not your mind … ¹ to invite the client to access a deeper understanding of what is going on.

For example:

• Ask your body not your mind what is the most important thing to work on?
• Ask your body not your mind what is the safest thing we could work on right now?
• Ask your body not your mind what stops you from moving towards your goal?

Note that the phrase: Ask your body not your mind is an instruction, not a question itself. It is designed to direct the question that follows it to the client’s unconscious mind.

I have found this a very useful way of accessing information from clients who are stuck in the realm of thinking.

There are some useful guidelines to get the best out of this approach:

1. Use the phrase as if it were a perfectly natural part of the question. If you think about it, it’s a weird thing to say, but if you deliver it with a natural tone that expects an answer it will help the client access the information you need.
2. Do not make it a question itself, if you say “Can you ask your body not your mind …”, your client might honestly answer “No!” and then what are you going to do?
3. When you have asked the question, be quiet, it may take some time for your client to access and express the answer. Don’t get in the way of the process.
4. If you think your client might have trouble answering the question, you can add "… and, whatever comes to mind is just fine" to the original question to let them know whatever ‘weird’ answer arises (and their conscious mind may well judge it as weird) is valuable information. If the client starts their answer saying something like “This is really strange”, or, “I’ve no idea where this is coming from”, you are probably onto something important.

I hope you find this approach as useful as I do.

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Image by Dean Moriarty from Pixabay