Worries about self esteem afflict millions of people worldwide. Too many of us worry about how we measure up compared to all the other beautiful, athletic, insightful and artistic people around us. We live in a goal-oriented society where our ideals of perfection, heaped on us by the media, are unattainable by most. In wasting time worrying about our shortcomings, we lose the opportunity to use each moment for the joy of appreciating our lives as they are.

When I was a child, I was shy beyond what I’ve seen in anyone else. I let my sister do the talking, feeling I couldn’t compete with her conviviality. I never knew what to say to people I’d recently met, and kept to myself as much as possible. I wondered what more popular girls had to talk about; I saw them chattering together incessantly.

I was worried I might say the wrong thing. I stressed over having nothing to say. My power of speech was blocked. I wasted precious moments in shy, suffering silence when I could have been speaking freely, enjoying friendships, and living a normal child’s life.

Since enjoyment of life makes everything worthwhile, boosting self esteem should be of primary importance to anyone who is concerned about issues such as not feeling loved, feeling inadequate, extreme shyness, or feeling a lack of success in life. Many if not all feelings of personal failure are tied into self esteem issues.

Boosting self esteem is easy with Emotional Freedom Techniques, EFT.* It helps to have confidence in the EFT process, but as we know, EFT often works whether you believe in it or not, and when nothing else produces results. EFT could have helped that shy child to learn to speak freely and without fear. EFT could help anyone feeling blocked socially, financially, or artistically.

One of the worst emotional problems I had when I started using EFT over a year ago was that I felt unworthy of being loved. I felt inadequate, which created a huge abyss in the relationship I was trying to build with my new boyfriend. In fact, for a while it looked like we wouldn’t make it through the forest of my fears and inadequacy feelings. Many of the issues I initially tapped on concerned my buildup of low self esteem feelings. I explored the reasons for my fears, and tapped on each of them in turn.

In my case the problems originated with my relationship with my older sister, who I considered in all ways better than me. She was the oldest, the pretty blonde one, the talkative one, the mother-child who tried to take care of us all. She got perfect grades in school and had the perfect boyfriends and the car and the college education and good career. My life has been a perfect contrast to hers! I had a lot to tap about, but working through these feelings of inadequacy was crucial to recovering from the fears that made my relationship-building incredibly frightening.

My first EFT sessions may have started something like this: “Even though my sister did better than me in school, I deeply and completely accept myself.” Or: “Even though my sister talked freely and I couldn’t because I was shy, I deeply and completely accept myself.”

When doing EFT for issues like these, other issues come to mind. While I’m doing the tapping process, I often have some secondary issue bubble up from my sub-conscious, and I take mental note of it. When I’m done tapping, I take a deep, slow breath, and meditate for a moment to see how much the original issue still bothers me. If I’m over it, I can go on to the next issue that occurred to me. In this way I can tackle many aspects or facets of a problem in one session.

When doing EFT it is important to address each of these aspects separately, and to tap on any individual hurtful events of the past that come to mind. Years later, we may still be psychologically reeling from the impact of painful or shocking events. Some things sink in and never totally go away, leaving us feeling blocked energetically and in our outward lives. EFT is a method for removing those blocks, restoring our health, and giving us back the emotional freedom to live life fully without fears or pain.

So if you are feeling anxious or fearful about life and think you’re not doing as well as others, take a few moments to explore the roots of your feelings. Write a list if you need to. Then start tapping.

I worked through the painful old feelings and thankfully, my relationship with my boyfriend is still thriving. Just yesterday we had the best day ever; we drove to Mt. Shasta for shopping and dinner out. Two women spent time talking to my boyfriend and I didn’t get stressed at all – I enjoyed seeing him have someone new to talk to for a change. I didn’t waste any time thinking I wasn’t good enough because I wasn’t able to talk exactly the same way they did.

* Learn EFT at home! Get Gary Craig’s FREE e-book now!

I’ve had a fear of crossing bridges for a long time. It started with a fear of heights which eventually included bridges, possibly starting around the time of the Loma Prieta earthquake in 1989. If you recall that tragedy, it included the collapse of a double-decker freeway I’d been on many times as I was raised in that area, as well as a section of the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge.

Last year I started doing EFT and one of my first projects for emotional freedom was to recover from my fear of bridges and cliffs. I live in a long, deep river valley and there are several highway bridges east of here that have frightened me for years. With the encouragement of my boyfriend, Bob, I did a lot of EFT and recovered from my fears, at least, while he was driving. *

Just yesterday I was driving on a road west of here that I’ve called “The Five Bridge Road” for six or seven years now. It involves driving along high cliffs and there are five bridges, two of which have frightened me severely, so much that I’ve avoided that road by driving a little further and taking the freeway to go around it.

My boyfriend doesn’t believe in driving further and spending money on driving over Anderson Pass just to get to Yreka. “Why not take the short road - it’s only eight miles!” He is so practical. So yesterday while I was driving I decided to do just that, hoping that my fear of bridges was gone thanks to EFT.

I had no problem getting over the first two bridges, but as I approached the third, my old feeling of tightening up around my arms and heart started, and I pulled off the road right before crossing the bridge. “I can’t do it,” I said.

“Why not?”

“There’s something I didn’t tell you,” I said to him. “I found out this week that someone jumped off that bridge recently.”

I’d been at work a few days before when a co-worker, who was reading the newspaper, discovered that a friend of hers had died. She started crying, then made some phone calls. Before long she found out that the boy, who was only 18, had jumped off the Pioneer Bridge. Now there I was, looking at the place where a sad and dejected gay teenager had jumped off, and it was like another aspect of my fear came to me. Someone had told the girl I worked with that lots of people had jumped off that bridge in the past, and I was wondering if my long-standing fear of this place had anything to do with my sensitivity. Maybe I’d been picking up the feelings of despair and depression around the bridge, and that’s why it had always frightened me so badly.

My boyfriend got out of the car as I sat there doing some emergency EFT on the feelings I was having.

Setup phrase: “Even though I’m afraid to drive across the bridge because of what happened here, I deeply and completely accept myself.”
Tapping: Distress over what happened…

I had to repeat this twice, then I knew I could do it. My boyfriend got back into the car and I drove across the bridge, without a twinge of fear. There was a wreath hanging in the middle of the bridge, a sad testament to the tragedy that had taken place and the suffering of the people he left behind.

* Learn EFT at home! Get Gary Craig’s FREE e-book now!

Something else I wanted to mention, is that when I do EFT I always turn off my computer screen. Something about the brightness of it, or electromagnetic energy, seems to distract me.

I’m going to start using this blog to discuss something very personal – and that is the EFT I’m doing on myself, to solve my own long-standing personal problems. Perhaps I should have started this many months ago when I first started using EFT. Since then I’ve overcome many problems including fear of driving on cliffs and high bridges, and a general fear of abandonment.

I like to do a little personal EFT self-improvement every day. Today my effort will be to give myself more confidence as a Reiki healer – something I’ve just begun. I got my Reiki level one attunement earlier this month. Actually it was the second distant attunement I’d gotten for level one but I asked to do it again because the person who is attuning me now will take me through the Master level and certify me.

Here’s my EFT for this issue:

Setup phrase: Even though I’m new to Reiki and haven’t used it much, and feel unsure of my ability to do so effectively, I deeply and completely accept myself.

Tapping: Reiki Confidence (using the Basic Recipe version of EFT *)

After going through the tapping process it is my habit to sit back and relax, and take a few breaths. I center myself this way and meditate a bit on how I feel about the issue. In this case, while I was doing the tapping it had occurred to me that my real issue is about effectiveness, not just confidence. I will do the procedure again, this time concentrating on effectiveness.

I’m at about a 5 re: being unsure of my ability to be effective as a Reiki healer.

Setup phrase: Even though I’m still unsure of my ability to be effective as a Reiki healer, I deeply and completely accept myself.

Tapping: Reiki Effectiveness

During and after doing this procedure for the second time, I had a light-hearted feeling – something that alerts me to the fact that I’ve had my emotional break-through. I got happy and then thought ‘how silly – of course you’re as effective as anyone!’ And now I’m at a 0 level of concern for this issue. I feel that I’m as effective as any Reiki healer with only a few weeks experience – in other words, someone who is at the beginning of being a level one Reiki healer as I am.

Another EFT success!

* Learn EFT at home! Get Gary Craig’s FREE e-book now!