Ada couldn’t breathe. As she spoke of the previous evening, her throat closed up.
Each one of us organizes around our emotions. Emotional reactions are not a moment; they are a stream of experiences, consisting of a trigger, physiological sensations, meanings, action tendencies and actions. Often we are not aware of what we do; we just do it over and over and over.
Slowing down so we can see and tolerate our emotional experiences is such hard work.
And Ada was doing it.
Her early years were harsh. Her father died when she was a toddler. Her mother was grief-stricken and angry, and regularly left the children with her brother, who abused them.
Ada dealt with life by succeeding scholastically. At 35 she was a surgeon, completing her Ph.D. in public health, but she yearned for her own family, yet had never dated.
She’d met a man online, and they were three months into a relationship. The night before, he wanted to speak about being sexually intimate, and she froze.
When recounting what happened during our session, she spoke very quickly and in circles. She was confused.
Digging through the rubble, we discovered the trigger: when she brought up the topic of sex. Slowly she tapped, using body-based bilateral stimulation (BLS), easing her panic.
Once her breathing became rhythmic, we sowed seeds of attachment. Of course you want to be close, and this is so scary, so you freeze and run away. You’ve never had anyone touch you with kindness, and you cannot imagine asking for something for you.
Slowly we tapped out each segment in her stream of attachment-related emotional responses.
And slowly we moved toward her responsively engaging with him: “How is it to imagine asking him to be patient with you?”
Whoops. Too big a step on my part. She stopped breathing and shook her head. NO.
Again, slowly, we tapped it out.
Finding what was so scary about asking for something for her.
Of course you’re afraid. You’ve spent a lifetime accommodating everyone, and now you are asking for something for you, and pushing against his request.
How is it to imagine saying, “I think your needs are reasonable, and I am not there yet, and I don’t know what to do”?
She looked at me. “I can say that?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t have to know what to do?”
“No.”
That she could imagine saying, and we rehearsed it, using slow BLS, and she felt better. Later that evening, she texted me: “I did it!” And he was fine.
The power of EFT and EMDR never ceases to amaze me. This is why I dedicate my time to teaching courses to help other therapists.
Take good care, Kathleen
