How to Heal Yourself When No One Else Can

by Amy B. Scher

  An example set-up statement might look like this:

  Even though I have no idea what is holding me back from healing, I give my subconscious permission to release it anyway.

  For the rest of the tapping points, focus on whatever issue you are clearing, trying to incorporate the emotions you feel and any information you have.

  Tapping through these points might look something like this:

  “I don’t know what’s making me anxious.” “Maybe it’s _______ (insert any guesses).” “My subconscious knows.” “I just can’t figure it out.”

  Just keep tapping and talking out loud, which will trigger your subconscious into pulling up whatever it needs to help you clear.

  Incorporate Metaphors

  As you’ve learned, symptoms are metaphors or clues from our body. They are our body’s language. Using the guide I’ve given you, and your own intuition, you can work some of these ideas into your tapping.

  How-To: Incorporate any metaphors or clues that might apply to you from Chapter Six into your set-up statement and tapping.

  Here are a couple examples of what a set-up statement might look like:

  Even though I can’t digest what happened to me when _______, …

  Even though I’m so mad that this grief from _______ is suffocating me, …

  Even though Mom stabbed me in the back, …

  Remember that the more you practice using EFT in various ways, the more comfortable you’ll become using it. There’s no right or wrong way to do it as long as it’s working for you.

  In the next chapter, we’ll be learning how to release harmful beliefs, which often come from the unprocessed experiences we’ve just worked with.

  Prevent Unprocessed Experiences in the Future

  Now that you understand a lot about unprocessed experiences and how they get stuck in the body, let’s talk about how to prevent them in the future.

  First and foremost, be conscious of how you’re feeling. Really allow yourself the opportunity to feel your feelings and acknowledge your emotions. Don’t give in to the temptation to tell yourself, “It’s no big deal!” even if you wish it wasn’t. Acknowledge how you’re feeling and accept it, even if it doesn’t make logical sense or you don’t like it. In her book Bird by Bird , Anne Lamott shared this advice from her therapist: “She said to go ahead and feel the feelings. I did. They felt like shit.” This says it so beautifully because feelings aren’t always pleasant; but if we can allow and accept those feelings anyway, there’s a much greater chance that they’ll feel like shit only temporarily instead of for a lifetime.

  You can also use EFT during moments of stress, as we just discussed. This immediately helps your body calm down instead of going into, or staying in, fight, flight, or freeze mode. In addition to EFT, other practices that help our bodies release emotional energy are massage, meditation, hot baths (especially with essential oil), dancing, deep breathing, and exercising.

  [contents]

  10 . Candace B. Pert, PhD, Molecules of Emotion , New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999, http://candacepert.com/where-do-you-store-your-emotions.

  11 . Gary Craig, “What Is EFT? Theory, Science, and Uses,” Official EFT , www.emofree.com/eft-tutorial/tapping-basics/what-is-eft.html.

  Chapter Eight

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  Release Harmful Beliefs

  Science teaches that we must see in order to believe,

  but we must also believe in order to see.

  —bernie s. siegel , love, medicine & miracles

  Harmful beliefs are where I find the jackpot with most clients. Most of us, and I was no exception, have many reasons not to heal. This is because our challenge may actually benefit us in some way, or we believe deep down that it does. I know that might sound a bit ridiculous, but by the end of this chapter you’ll understand it very well.

  In this chapter, you’ll first become familiar with what harmful beliefs are and how they might be showing up in your life. Toward the end of the chapter, I’ll teach you two techniques to help you clear those beliefs that are blocking you:

  • The Sweep

  • Chakra Tapping

  While doing the work to uncover these beliefs can be painful, if you add some humor and curiosity to the process, it can actually become entertaining. I consider myself a harmful beliefs detective now, and soon, you will become one too.

  How Beliefs Can Block You

  Do you have a pattern of feeling worse the more you try to feel better? Have you tried everything and it feels like nothing is working? Do you begin to improve and then suddenly have a flare-up of your emotional or physical symptoms? Do you struggle with a pattern of self-sabotage, even finding it difficult to help yourself when you know you need to?

  If this describes you, I can almost guarantee that you are getting in your own way of overcoming whatever your challenge is. I know this may be hard to swallow. Just stick with me and I promise this will be the best truth you ever entertained the possibility of.

  Your subconscious mind might be blocking you from not only your treatment efforts but also your healing ability. One reason this happens is because, at some level, you actually have an inner conflict about healing. This type of inner conflict occurs when one part of us wants to change, but the other part (often the subconscious) does not want to change because it believes the change is not good for us. Simply put, it’s a resistance to your goal, which sabotages your efforts.

  Even though your conscious mind is doing everything it can think of to heal, your subconscious mind may be holding what it thinks are very good reasons not to heal or overcome your challenge. Part of you may see the challenge or illness as an upside or benefit, which is better in some way than being well. This means you perceive there is a benefit to your challenge.

  Exploring harmful beliefs was the single most important action I took in my own healing journey. It has proven over and over again in client sessions to be essential to the healing process for others, too. In the same way you unsubscribe to emails that don’t feel good, create stress in your life, or have views you don’t want to be connected with, you can unsubscribe to your own beliefs.

  As you learn about harmful beliefs, the most important thing to remember is not to judge yourself for them. We make meanings from the world around us; those interpretations and perceptions are recorded by the subconscious mind and then become the beliefs or rules by which we live—often without us being aware we are doing so. The problem arises when we carry these beliefs into our adulthood.

  Many of the beliefs that are blocking you won’t make logical sense, at least at first. In fact, some could probably be categorized as shocking. All of this is awesome news, though. As with my own healing, you’ll be discovering blocks you never thought of. This will give you the opportunity to work on things you never knew existed, taking new directions and getting results you’ve never gotten. The big-picture idea here is to slowly release all the subconscious reasons that your body, mind, and spirit have to not heal. There will probably be a lot of reasons , and that’s okay. We’ll get through them, one by one.

  Illness or emotional challenges often arise after we’ve been living in a way that’s not true to who we are. This would include being in a relationship we know is not healthy, “dimming our light” or softening our personality for others, or doing a job we feel is unethical or not in line with our true selves. A lot of times we are living in this way because there are harmful beliefs driving our train.

  Early childhood experiences are the first way we get ideas or beliefs about life and ourselves. Beliefs are not fact. Beliefs are based solely on our generalizations from the past, experiences, other people’s messages about us, and the meaning we make from those experiences. Unfortunately, we don’t consciously decide what we believe—which means a lot of B.S. is stuck in those brains of ours.

  Let me show you how this works. Let’s say you are four years old and you draw something you are very proud of. You arrive at home excited fro
m preschool and show your mom, who is busy trying to finish her own stuff and take care of your baby sister. She smiles and abruptly tells you to go put it away and get ready for dinner. This type of scenario plays out in a few different scenarios that week because your dad is out of town for work and your mom is preoccupied with all her responsibilities. You may feel rejected and perceive not that your mom is simply busy, but that you are a terrible artist. You then start looking for evidence of this as you grow up. Your subconscious mind takes in that new rule you’ve made: I am terrible at art. Then you go through life with that perspective, directing your behavior according to that belief. This experience might translate to you being closed off to your creativity, feeling ashamed to express yourself, and more. Healing is, in part, about unlearning or unbelieving anything that doesn’t help you feel good. Your younger self saw things in one way, but now you’re older. Unless you would allow a four-year-old to run your life (oh my!), it’s probably time to update your mental records.

  The subconscious mind is not critical or judgmental; it does not analyze or reason. It simply gathers data and then acts according to the conditioning, programming, instructions, and messages it receives. Thousands of these interpretations of experiences from when we’re young become beliefs that then become rules for our lives. Our subconscious mind uses these rules to direct our behavior. As we keep going back to those memories, experiences, and interpretations of the past, we create new cells along those neural pathways reinforcing that old belief and response pattern. These beliefs are one of the largest impediments to healing. The good news is that releasing these beliefs can help create new, healthy patterns.

  Harmful beliefs work like this:

  • They create a tainted lens through which we start to see our lives and ourselves, skewing our perceptions.

  • This lens keeps us stuck in life-limiting thoughts and patterns.

  • Believing these limits, we continue to live within the confines of them, further fulfilling that belief, which helps create our reality.

  • Beliefs create a pattern of self-sabotage.

  Let me give you an example of this phenomenon. Joe was a new client who was also new to energy work. He’d been married to the love of his life for ten years, but had been experiencing some anxiety and severe digestive issues. His wife sounded really fun, and he described her as the “life of the party,” often stealing the show in any group setting. This was something he really loved about her, as he tended toward the shy side. However, as Joe and I got talking, he admitted that he became shy after an experience at a school dance when he was young. All the other kids were in groups, and no one invited Joe to join them. He spent the entire dance hanging out around the food table alone, going to the bathroom, and even tying and re-tying his shoes just to look busy.

  I have heard various forms of this story from many, many clients, and I think most of us can relate to it. Ever since then, Joe had been uncomfortable in social situations and terrified of being excluded. He felt like it was time to get back to being his true self and not being the “dud” at parties. We worked on releasing the unprocessed experience of the school dance in our first session. This experience could have created a belief such as “I’ll be abandoned at parties.” I muscle-tested to check a few beliefs, including that one, and we got a “no” for everything I could think of. So then we came up with some other ideas that were not related to that specific dance.

  As we brainstormed, we muscle-tested one belief that I see often: “If I am my true self, it will threaten a relationship.” Yep, that was it. His body gave us a “yes.” So we started muscle-testing for relationships and found out that his body was linking this fear to his wife. Joe told me that this belief actually resonated at a conscious level, too, so even without muscle testing, we may have eventually gotten there. He was actually blocked from moving past this because deep down he believed that if he was his true outgoing self, it would threaten his wife and her big personality. He believed at a subconscious level that they couldn’t both be the “fun ones.” He told me that he could have perceived this from his own parents’ relationship, where his mom was the “talker” and his dad was the one who stood by quietly. When his dad would speak up, his mother would berate him in front of others. Whether this turned out to be an actual issue in his own marriage or not, it was extremely stressful to Joe’s body to be suppressing his own personality for the sake of his wife.

  Clearing the unprocessed experience of the dance using Thymus Test and Tap and Emotional Freedom Technique was a great start. We then cleared two other experiences he remembered about his mom embarrassing his dad for speaking up and trying to participate in conversations. We chose one by picking the earliest and strongest memory, and the other by using muscle testing to narrow it down. Next, we worked on the belief “If I am my true self, it will threaten my relationship with my wife,” using techniques you’ll learn shortly. This helped Joe feel much more comfortable in social situations.

  Because you now know how to interpret the body’s language in relationship to symptoms (from Chapter Six ), I’ll share this interesting side note. The digestive issues Joe was experiencing were very specific to this situation. Although the digestive system is greatly impacted by stress reactions of all kinds, Joe’s digestive system was also acting up as a protection mechanism, as it prevented him from going to places where he might have to wait in line for a bathroom. This was very convenient, in a way, as it helped him avoid situations that triggered his social fears. Can you see now how closely unprocessed experiences, harmful beliefs, and physical symptoms are connected? We are just complex puzzles that need to be lovingly solved.

  The subconscious mind can have programming that is making us believe that a challenge, symptom, disease, or problem is actually better for us than being free from it. Joe’s fear in social situations and digestive problems were manifesting in an effort to protect his marriage.

  Beliefs can affect us in so many different ways. As you become aware of the beliefs in your own life by observing your experiences that come up, be open-minded and entertain all possibilities. In my work with clients, I often hear, “Really?! It’s that?” when we find some of these.

  The Power of Belief

  I want you to see just how important it is to spend time on beliefs, as if your life and health depend on it. In fact, they do.

  One of the most convincing stories of the power of belief I’ve heard comes from the story of Sam Londe, who was diagnosed with cancer of the esophagus. 12 In 1974, this type of cancer was considered fatal. A few weeks after his diagnosis, Sam died. When the autopsy was done, it was revealed that Sam had very little cancer in his body, at least not enough to kill him. There were a few spots scattered around his body, but no cancer at all on his esophagus. Dr. Clifton Meador, his physician, stated, “I thought he had cancer. He thought he had cancer. Everyone around him thought he had cancer … had I removed hope in some way?”

  In 2014, the New England Journal of Medicine published a trial showing that mimicking surgery can be as effective as the real thing. 13 In this study, patients were candidates for knee surgery, with a torn meniscus and debilitating pain. When they arrived in the operating room, study surgeons in Finland performed either a meticulous repair of the torn cartilage or make-believe surgery. Incisions were made, and closed, with no other intervention. In case anesthetized patients could hear or understand, the doctors and nurses passed instruments making the typical sounds you’d expect, and pretended to do surgery for as long as the procedure would normally take. Patients who underwent real surgeries and patients whose surgeries were faked had equal improvement.

  In Bruce Lipton’s book The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter, and Miracles , he tells a story that demonstrates the absolute power of belief. Interior designer Janis Schonfeld took part in a clinical trial to test the efficacy of an anti-depressant drug. 14 The pills relieved her thirty-year experience with depression, and the brain scans confirmed
that the activity of the frontal precortex of her brain was greatly enhanced. Only at the end of the trial did Janis find out she had been taking a placebo and not the real drug. Her belief about what the drug would do for her was responsible for her improvement.

  There are endless findings now that demonstrate that our beliefs actually create our reality. Dr. Lipton’s groundbreaking research is perhaps one of the most awe-inspiring examples, proving that your mind will change the biology of your body according to your subconscious beliefs. Your body’s chemistry looks to that dominant part of your brain for direction. Do you see why it’s so essential that the beliefs you hold are good for you?

  Clearing harmful beliefs so you can be in total alignment with healing is your newest tool to freedom. Now, are you ready to start?

  Determine What’s Behind Your Beliefs

  We’ll learn to clear harmful beliefs at the end of this chapter, but first we need to figure out what’s behind your beliefs. As you work on discovering blocks, I recommend that you keep a notebook to use as your own I-can’t-believe-that’s-in-my-brain journal. Jotting them down as you think of them will help you start the flow of ideas and also create a list to work from as you clear.

  Beliefs that block healing, due to the subconscious not being in alignment with healing, are typically built around some main concepts.

  Safety (It’s unsafe to heal)— If part of us doesn’t feel safe to heal at a core level, it can act as a monster-size block. This is the block I see most often. I know this one seems illogical, as illness or emotional challenge typically makes us feel very unsafe. However, there are definitely ways that we perceive it does keep us safe, too. These types of issues often keep us out of the big, bad world and home in our safe zone, help us say no to things we otherwise might not, and more.

  Willingness (I’m unwilling to heal)— This covers the idea that we aren’t willing to do what it takes to heal, energy-wise, financially, or otherwise. This block has to do primarily with the “work” involved in healing. This is not a belief based on laziness, but often comes from being drained of gusto after a long dance with our challenge.