EFT Tapping: Why Focus and Tap Through Your Negative Feelings
I’d like to address the very common concern about tapping through negative feelings while using EFT tapping.
Recently someone who has viewed my EFT tapping videos wrote to me and shared that she did not enjoy the experience of tapping her negative feelings. If she has a choice, she would prefer to tap and just use positive affirmations. In fact, she reported how nice she felt while tapping through the positive statements along with my video.
(For those who don’t already know, EFT tapping is a method whereby we use our finger tips to lightly tap on specific meridian points on our face and body for emotional release. It is otherwise also known as the emotional form of acupuncture but without the needles, since we are using our fingertips.)
Well, she wouldn’t need to tap through any negative feelings if it is indeed true that she had none. Hopefully she is not in denial of any actual negative feelings. May I concede that many of us are not comfortable with bring attention to our negative emotions. In fact, I used to have the same resistance myself.
When I was first introduced to EFT tapping, I was afraid that I would be reinforcing the negatives. I was concerned that I would start to feel worse with bringing attention to my negative feelings. It felt like a counter-intuitive thing to do when I was desperately trying to feel better.
Why Bring Attention to Our Negative Emotional Story When Doing EFT Tapping
Well, there are reasons why we would want to bring attention to the negatives. Here’s a simple analogy that can make things easier to understand.
Say for instance, you are having pain in your stomach.
Your pain got so bad that you have to pay a visit to your doctor.
In the consultation room, your doctor asks, “what are you feeling and where is this pain?”
How would you respond?
Would you be telling the doctor, “I don’t want to be talking about my pain and I don’t want to bring attention to where the pain is. Let’s just talk about how my ideal life is going to be like.”
In all likelihood, no.
You are probably going to describe what your problem is and where the pain in your body is.
See my point? The doctor has to know what is your issue in order to help you overcome it.
It is the same way when we do EFT Tapping.
The protocol for EFT tapping is designed to help us release emotional stress or pain.
When The Power of Positive Thinking Fail to Work
Is it even possible to forget about using EFT but use the power of positive thinking in order to achieve what we want?
Well, it doesn’t work for everyone.
In fact, when we don’t address what we truly think and feel, these negative emotions and thoughts are still in our subconscious. They don’t just disappear. Thus, they could be in the way of our well-being and success.
We can attempt to “will” (or force) our minds to think positively but the mind often works with a negative bias. These negative emotions sabotages our best effort. It is like we are carrying a ton of weight (our emotional baggage) even as we try to scale a mountain to reach the top (where our goal or dream is). The ton of weight slows down our progress. We add unnecessary struggle to ourselves.
Society emphasises positive thinking, and does not emphasise enough on processing our negative emotions.
From an early age, we have been taught not to cry and to put on a strong front. We have been encouraged to look on the positive life, be optimistic, be grateful for what we have and find the silver lining behind the clouds.As a result, we rarely acknowledge our hurt, grief or traumas adequately. Over time, we build a huge backlog of unprocessed negative emotions.
How EFT Tapping Prevents Emotional Bypassing
Fortunately, EFT tapping sessions offer an excellent opportunity for us to work through this backlog.
With EFT tapping, we start by identifying what the problem is. We acknowledge how we feel and we bring attention to the intensity, location and the sensation that we are experiencing in our body. As we apply the tapping action using a light pressure with our fingertips on specific meridian points on our face and body, a neurotransmitter is being sent to the brain. It is when the negative emotional charge gets released.
What’s Key: It will be great if we can allow ourselves enough time to work through our negative emotions before tapping using positive affirmations.
If we tap using positive affirmations too quickly, we short-circuit the natural process of letting go, releasing and then moving on.
How we can tell whether we have done adequate releasing work or not is via using the intensity score. We assess the intensity to what we feel at the beginning of the tapping session and after applying tapping rounds, we check in again to determine what the score is. If the score has come down to a 3 or below (out of a level 10 intensity), we can safely assume that we are ready to apply some positive reframes or affirmations.
In a nutshell…
EFT sessions (done properly) prevent the problem of emotional bypassing.
Finally, we like to end off an EFT tapping session on a more relaxed/or positive state. We do this through tapping and verbalising positive reframes and affirmations at the same time. It is a nice way to center ourselves in a better way forward while feeling more at ease, relaxed and free from our emotional stress.
Hope my explanation helps. Let me know if you have more questions, I’d be glad to assist. Subscribe for updates and articles on EFT tapping, Self-Love and Manifesting Abundance or sign up for a free EFT tapping intro course here.
I wish you much success in your tapping sessions.
Love and abundance always,
Evelyn Lim
Certified Advanced EFT Practitioner
Abundance Coach
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