I work with a group of extremely traumatized people: parents whose children have been taken - often unjustly - by child protective services. Some will eventually get their children back but the entire family will still be trauma victims in need of emotional healing. Others will never get their children back, and will carry the scars of extreme loss for the rest of their lives. There’s no trauma worse than the loss of a child, and when that loss is inflicted by a government agency that claims a parent is unfit, the emotional trauma is increased with shame, stigma, extreme grief, a sense of frustrated helplessness, fear for the well being of the child, and perennial anger.

Parents, grandparents, and others in similar traumatic situations need healing from emotional trauma - otherwise they will deteriorate from unresolved stresses. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) causes exhaustion, impatience, aggravation, agitation, lack of ability to focus, and emotional outbursts. If left unresolved the grief of extreme trauma can lead to further stress on the body including increased risk of heart attack and stroke. Whatever injury harms our mental or emotional bodies will probably have an effect on our physical bodies as well.

These traumas must be dealt with, and EFT is one way to do it. EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Techniques. By resolving energy blockages in the meridian system we can clear past traumas and promote emotional stability. As we heal our emotional body, the mental and physical bodies respond as well.

Here are some articles that explain more about how to heal trauma and PTSD using EFT tapping techniques:

An EFT Formula for Specific Trauma
EFT After an Attack in the Street
Healing Emotional Trauma & PTSD From a Car Accident
Healing Trauma Caused by Childhood Molestation & Incest
The EFT Story Technique Can Help in Healing Emotional Trauma and Clearing the Past
Using the Story Technique to Heal Emotional Trauma After a Rape
The EFT Story Technique for healing Emotional Trauma After a Bombing
Healing the Trauma of a Car Accident With EFT
Healing Emotional Trauma Caused by Date Rape
EFT to Heal Trauma After a Miscarriage
EFT Self-Healing After Witnessing a Violent Crime
Healing PTSD Caused by Domestic Violence
Using EFT to Heal PTSD of a Paramedic
How a Doctor Used EFT to Heal Abuse Trauma
Healing the Trauma of Guilt After Witnessing a Child’s Death

* Learn EFT at home! Get Gary Craig’s FREE pdf e-book or buy the DVDs now!

Melancholy can be defined as free-floating sadness, something like a dark cloud that obscures the sun of happiness from your consciousness. It brings forth emotional mind-wanderings and distress, and is a precursor to actual deep depression.

We must not let melancholy take over our lives! Life is meant to be enjoyed, not looked at through a fog of discontent. So let’s EFT it away.

How, you say?

Perhaps you don’t know the source of your melancholy. If this is the case, start there.

How much do you feel this? Assign a number, 1 to 10. (1=barely;10=extremely)

Setup phrase:

“Even though I don’t know why I’m feeling sad today I deeply and completely accept myself.”

Repeat three times. If you’ve been reading Gary Craig’s free e-book or watching his outstanding EFT DVDs, you’ll understand exactly how this is done.

Tapping: “Sadness”

Breathe deeply when you’re done tapping. How much do you still feel this? Assign a number, 1 to 10.

…

Perhaps as you tapped you realized some specific event that saddened you, and that’s the next thing to tap on.

Keep going. Tap out all the aspects.

Examples:

Aspect one - your mother called and reminded you of some stupid thing you did when you were ten.

Tap on it.

Aspect two - you’re reminded how your first marriage broke up because of your mother saying similar invasive and depressing stuff to your spouse.

Tap on it.

Any other thoughts that come up while you’re tapping on something - remember, that’s usually an aspect that needs to be resolved.

Tap on it.

Restore your joy. You were born to this world to be happy, and not to suffer.

* Learn EFT at home! Get Gary Craig’s FREE pdf e-book or buy the DVDs now!

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!

I’ve been studying EFT - Emotional Freedom Techniques - for over six months. I originally bought Gary Craig’s DVDs so I could overcome some of my own emotional difficulties and my fear of heights. I love the program so much, I’m now studying to become an EFT practitioner. EFT consists of a method of tapping on energy meridians (the same ones used during acupuncture) to eliminate emotional reactions. EFT has been used for a multitude of problems including trauma, abuse, fears, depression, headaches, and other physical or emotional ailments. Most recently I used EFT to get through a difficult day at the local dental office.

It started right after Christmas. My right upper gum swelled up and the pain was intense. I tried everything I could to make the pain go away. Because of the holiday, the local dental office was closed. Because I live in a remote area of the Klamath National Forest, it is the only dental office within seventy miles.

My home treatments included bathing the area in golden seal extract, and gargling with hydrogen peroxide. I don’t know what worked best, but eventually the swelling went down and the pain went away, for the most part. I knew that side of my mouth was still swollen - but not enough to cause pain. Every now and then over the next few weeks the swelling and pain would increase, but I managed to keep it under control.

Finally I convinced myself that it was time for a trip to the dentist. I filled out the paperwork last Thursday and saw the local dentist on Monday. This was my first visit to the Karuk Dental Clinic, which is owned and run by the Karuk Tribe here in Northern California. All the employees there were friendly and helpful. The dentist is a black woman, not a Karuk Indian, as the other employees there are. I was deeply impressed with her kindness and her ability to do her job efficiently.

She told me I had a large cavity in one of my molars and a huge abscess. I could have either a root canal or an extraction. “I’d prefer to have it pulled out,” I told her. “I’ll never have trouble with that tooth again.” I recall the tooth in question had been filled, and re-filled. I was tired of having such a trouble-making tooth in my mouth. This pain was the last straw.

On Wednesday I went back for the extraction. She went through the normal procedures to numb my gums, and I felt myself tense up with negative expectations and fear. Every muscle in my body was tense by the time she’d given me two shots. Then she left me alone for a while so the medication could take effect.

While she was busy with another patient, I remembered my EFT training, and started tapping on my energy meridians. I used the setup phrase, “Even though I am tense, I deeply and completely accept myself.” Then I tapped on all the usual EFT points (eyebrow point, face, fingers, etc.) and before long, I was feeling much better. I had to do two rounds of EFT, and then I felt totally relaxed.

When the dentist came back a few minutes later she pulled the tooth as I relaxed and enjoyed the moment. There was no more pain. It occurred to me that every dental office could use the help of an EFT practitioner specializing in dental patient concerns. If I’d done the EFT first, I would have been much more relaxed from the beginning, rather than panicking when I got the injections.
EFT, according to Gary Craig, “often works where nothing else will.” It has been used for pain management, addictions, weight loss, allergies, children’s issues, vision, headaches, panic, anxiety, asthma, trauma, stress, abuse, depression, dyslexia, carpal tunnel, anger, ADD/AHDH, fears, phobias, eating disorders, ODC, blood pressure, diabetes, neuropathy, and sports performance. EFT practitioners are taught to try it on everything.

For more information about EFT, see Gary Craig’s Website: Emotional Freedom Techniques

By Gary Craig
(used with permission)

There’s something scary about drugs that concerns a growing number of physicians and should wobble the knees of every patient on the planet. It’s obvious to any mathematician but somehow has escaped the general scrutiny of the health industry.

It has to do with combining meds.

Ever since I can remember I have been fed the perception that drugs are governmentally evaluated and thus are safe if taken under the guidance of competent physicians. However, even if we accept the presumed safety for the ingestion of one drug, we must ask ourselves how might that safety change if we take multiple drugs?

For safety assurances, proper testing should be done for every drug combination we are advised to take. If we take Prozac and Tylenol, for example, we should be presented with all the possible benefits and consequences before allowing these two foreign substances to mix with the chemicals our bodies already create. Same thing goes for combining Paxil with Viagra or Interferon with Lipitor.

The list of possible problems here is monstrously long because there are a b’zillion drugs and mega b’zillions of combinations. Nonetheless, I’ve never seen or heard of any studies that test any of these combinations … have you?

Thus, if you take two drugs, the odds of their combination having been adequately tested for safety are skimpy at best. But if you take 3 or more drugs the danger possibilities multiply even faster.

Here’s how the mathematics work: If you take 3 drugs then adequate safety testing of the various combinations require 7 separate tests. If you take 4 drugs the combinations require 25 separate tests. If you take 5 drugs it amounts to 121 tests. If you take 10 drugs the number of required safety tests total 362,881.

The conclusion here should be obvious. Namely, there is questionable safety testing if you take 2 drugs and nominal, if any, safety testing if you take 3. Beyond that you are clearly into the land of, “I have no idea what these combinations of drugs will do.”

To me, this tosses our dedicated docs into a tenuous position. They have patients with problems who aren’t willing to exercise, eat right, do EFT for emotional issues or much of anything else to help their own health. Instead, the patients hope the physicians will produce a magic pill (or pills) to make their problems go away.

I have met many patients who are on several drugs and take some drugs to counteract the effects of other drugs. As a non-physician I look at this with a shudder. These folks are being fed chemical cocktails with little or no safety testing behind the combinations. Maybe I need some help with my perceptions here but, to me, they are playing drug roulette.

I don’t know if lawyers have picked up on the simple, but compelling, math here. But I do know that I wouldn’t want to be a doctor in court facing these clear facts.

In the 15+ years I have been involved in the health field, I have had the good fortune to count many physicians as my personal friends. With few exceptions, they agree that it is our lifestyles, diets and emotional stresses that cause most of our health problems … and … the vast majority of these problems would vanish if people would live common sense lives. Yet patients repeatedly abuse their bodies and ask for more and more “miracle drugs” as the convenient solution. I don’t envy the docs at all as I often hear them complain that this is a highway to NobodyWinsVille.

Maybe what we really need are good salespeople to persuade folks to take care of themselves. I suspect that, if truly persuasive, they would do more good than the ocean of drugs at our disposal.

Love, Gary

PS: The Free EFT Get Started Package can help any newcomer learn the valuable EFT process. If you want to save time and dive right in, get our low cost DVD Library.

I will keep track of the books I’m reading here. I usually have more than one book going at a time.

Currently reading:
I checked The New Diary out of the library a week ago and am enjoying reading it during nearly every spare moment. I’m a long-time journal writer and am having fun putting some of Tristine Rainer’s suggestions into practice. This book was originally published in 1978.


Currently reading:
I just finished reading the first chapter of Jung’s biography/autobiography this morning. I loved the way he introduced his childhood by discussing the visions, dreams, and snapshot memories he had from that time in his life. As to why this is both a biography and an autobiography, one must read the foreword by his editor, Aniela Jaffe. This was mainly her project at first, but he was inspired to contribute quite a bit. I’m enjoying the wonderful, conversational writing style and am impressed by Jung’s allegories.


Just finished:
Until recently I didn’t think much about entities or possession. I never believed in it though I remembered a book I read years ago, Always, Karen by Jeanne Walker, which described how some people new to the afterlife will try to reincarnate by inhabiting the body of another living person. Walker’s book stated that this was an injury to the soul of the person whose body was taken over.

[Note: After looking up Always, Karen by Jeanne Walker at Amazon, I was inspired to write a review there tonight.]

When I first started using a computer bulletin board system back in 1992, I chatted a few times with a young man who claimed that this was the case for him. He said he had another spirit using his body and that at times he had to move aside and let the other spirit take over. I didn’t know what to think about that but this is a fact: one night he said he had a sudden vision of what I looked like, and said I was wearing a red dress and had a streak of gold in my hair. I was startled because I was wearing a skirt and blouse that could have looked like a dress. They were a dark hot pink sort of color. Very close to red! But I denied that I had any streak of gold in my hair. “Yes you do have a streak of gold in your hair,” he said. He was insistent that his vision of me was accurate. I reached up and felt my head and suddenly realized that I was wearing a barrette. I took it out. It was a long, narrow, gold barrette. Definitely a streak of gold!

Yet for years I took this entity possession thing lightly. I read accounts of people who beat their children claiming they were possessed. In one such account a girl was killed. I had a child with behavior problems and the idea that she could have an entity was definitely not something I could believe. I was shocked and distressed that any parent could think such a weird thing.

This year, however, I changed my mind. My new boyfriend studies this and had a collection of books on the topic. This is the second book of his on entity possession that I’ve read. And something else - I’ve learned to put myself into a trance state where I can detect the presence of entities or fragments in myself and others.

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the topic. Sagan writes mainly of fragments - bits of the astral body that break off after death and seek a new host. I would love to be able to attend his Clairvision School.


Just finished:
I considered Trust Your Vibes by Sonia Choquette to be a coffee-break book. I enjoyed reading the chapters occasionally while on breaks. It took me a long time to get through this book because I savored the chapters - usually one at a time.

The book is a very easy read - the writing style is friendly and conversational. Choquette has lots of great ideas for enhancing one’s ability to pick up vibes or psychic impressions.