by Donna Eden
On to Chapter 6
As you saw with Elizabeth, Raul, and Vern and Gloria, tapping on acupuncture points—the core physical procedure in energy psychology—can be applied to overcoming lapses in your relationship skills while strengthening the foundation of your bond. These focused efforts can also help with many other aspects of your relationship and, not just incidentally, with your own personal evolution as well. Chapter 6 introduces you to the basic steps of a simple but powerful energy psychology protocol.
6
Changing Your Future by Not Repeating Your Past
Tapping Your Way to a New Brain Chemistry
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
—MARCEL PROUST1
Based on our three decades of teaching Energies of Love seminars, our editor at Tarcher/Penguin asked us to write this book. We found it an exciting invitation, but we had a somewhat superstitious hesitation. We have known several couples over the years who have written books on couples work whose marriages dissolved shortly after their book was published. We did not want to tempt the relationship gods. Along with the personal catastrophe and awkward embarrassment that would be involved, we were wary about the arrogance of holding ourselves out as a couple who had somehow “figured out” the sweet and not-so-sweet mysteries of love.
And sure enough, as soon as we were earnestly discussing the book with the publisher, our relationship took a serious downhill turn. Our organization happened to be exploding at the time, growing exponentially. We were both under tremendous pressure. Not surprisingly, given the chasms between the ways each of us approaches the world, we weren’t seeing eye to eye on many of the critical decisions we were making that would shape the future of our organization and our life’s work. To make it worse, the sensory systems that are our defaults when under stress (chapter 1) seemed to be getting so exaggerated that misunderstandings were amassing. Donna, as a kinesthetic, is highly expressive emotionally while David, as a digital, wants to crawl into his interior cave and regroup at times of distress. So Donna would feel unmet and discounted, and this would of course escalate her sense of distress. Feeling pressed to not retreat, David tried to center himself for each hot topic we would encounter, but he began to respond in a way that “I could hardly believe was me.”
With unrelenting stress between us, and both of us locked into our threat response styles, David would be pushed over the edge of his calm defenses. He would begin to scream at Donna, swear at her, and generally escalate a situation that was already too escalated. Yes, even a die-hard digital can lose it. Your Energetic Stress Style is a way of processing information, but pushed far enough by the one you love and your reasoning abilities can regress to roughly the equivalent of a four-year-old during a tantrum. That your partner can send you down the rabbit hole into another encounter with your rough edges seems part of nature’s grand plan to help you evolve.
After each incident, David would will himself to not get triggered the next time. He would use all the techniques he knew. He could bring to mind the last fight and use tricks to decrease his emotional response while recalling it, and that seemed to help. He would then enter the next encounter centered, clear, and confident, but within five minutes find himself screaming again and slamming doors. What ominous portents for writing our magnum opus on relationships! One day after it had happened for about the fifteenth time in three months, he went out to the hot tub of the condominium where we were staying. Fortunately, no one else was there. He decided to try a mindfulness practice to go deeper into his understanding of what was happening. Here is his account of what occurred:
I set my intention on noticing the texture of my experience at the time of these explosions and right before them. With that in place, I simply followed my breathing and noticed what emerged. At first there was a lot of inner chatter, self-justifications, self-judgments, anger at Donna, seeing Donna’s sweet countenance having turned fierce in frustration and anger, fear of being discovered to be a fraud, images of the headline in our energy e-letter announcing the divorce of the self-proclaimed relationship virtuosos. I just noticed each and let it go. Back to the breath. Then a very vague image emerged. But I was able to place it. It was the bus stop where I was left off every day after school during first grade. Another boy and I were the only two left off there. Unfortunately for me, he was the class bully, a wiry but very strong boy who for some reason was called Pudgy. I remember that his father was a police officer and that he was the toughest kid and the best fighter in our class. I, on the other hand, was tall, skinny, highly uncoordinated, painfully shy, and socially awkward—the perfect target for bullies of far less stature than Pudgy. So it wasn’t a big rush for him to beat me up, and I usually got away with just a punch to the stomach or jaw, just enough to make me cry. Once he was satisfied that he had done enough damage to reaffirm his dominance, he would turn away and walk home.
But on the day that came up in my vision, something ominous had happened in school. The teacher was angry at the class for being particularly unruly. She kept us in instead of letting us go as usual to the playground for recess. But she had to deal with us needing a bathroom break, so she had all the boys line up in one line, all the girls in another, and marched us to the boys’ and girls’ lavatories. But first she gave a warning that if even one of us spoke, the entire class would have to put their heads down for thirty minutes afterward, a most unwelcome punishment for children with growing, restless bodies. If we retained perfect silence during the bathroom break, she would instead read us a story we were all eager to hear. After I finished at the urinal, I walked up to the sink to wash my hands and another boy walked up to it at the same time. I stepped back and invited him to go first. At that unfortunate moment, the teacher happened to glance into the boys’ bathroom, saw my mouth moving, and that was that. The whole class spent the next interminable half hour with our collective little heads on our folded little arms on our uncomfortable little desks. The teacher did not announce the name of the culprit, but she said it was someone she never would have suspected. Of course, by the end of the school day, everyone knew it was me. I could not have been more humiliated or felt more ostracized.
It also gave occasion for Pudgy to give me an extra-vigorous beating that day. And that was the scene that emerged out of the initial vague image of the bus stop. I was surprised it came up right then, in part because I had decades earlier dealt with my relationship with Pudgy ad nauseam in psychodynamic talk therapy. I felt done with it, processed, complete. I particularly didn’t, at first, see any relationship between this memory and my arguments with Donna. But even as I kept bringing my awareness back to my breath, I had opened a portal that kept presenting different aspects of the memory and then connections to my current problem. While no one would ever see Donna as a bully, with the pressures on us, the complex demands of the organization, and the curse of having agreed to hold our relationship up as a model, we became about as acrimonious as we’d ever been in our thirty-three years together at that point. I felt I was giving my heart and soul to the organization, and Donna’s disagreement and judgment of my best efforts felt as unfair as becoming the class villain for having simply indicated to another boy that he could use the sink first.
The sense of unfairness and injustice was the invisible link between what I was playing out with Donna and what still was unhealed in my psyche. My sense of feeling bullied became the psychological context of our interchanges. I would simply be in a discussion with Donna about a sensitive issue and suddenly and uncharacteristically find myself screaming at her as if my life depended on it. I was desperate as each unresolved encounter was not only damaging our relationship; the unsolved problems were hurting our organization in ways that were making our lives more difficult. By “acupoint tapping” [the technique you will learn in this chapter] on the memory and on the theme of being bullied, the triggers lost their power, and my reactions to more
recent altercations could be neutralized as well. I’ve not been hooked in one of those discussions since. This had a positive domino effect. Now Donna could express her frustrations and be heard rather than fought, allowing genuine problem solving to occur, and we were soon back on track with one another. I have a large bag of clinical tricks, but acupoint tapping was what popped me through the doorway that eliminated this explosive trip wire from our marriage.
The steps David took when life had thrust him beyond his usual coping strategies began with identifying a childhood experience that was at the root of a current difficulty. This is where many transformational approaches, from Freud’s psychoanalysis onward, begin. The difficulties we run into with our partners often have an analog in our past, our attachment history. What is new is a deepened appreciation of the role of the body in matters of the mind. A powerful new order of psychological healing is emerging with psychotherapies that work with soma (body) as well as psyche. After all, we are, fundamentally, “embodied psyches.” The entire body—not just the brain—carries our memories, our conflicts, our life lessons, even the latency of the next stage in our evolution, and it does so in its energy systems.2 From the body and its energies emerges a whole new order of transformative healing, unavailable when psychotherapy was limited to psychological treatment. Bringing the viscera into the process of emotional healing opens a body-mind dynamic that has not previously been integrated, raising a whole new spiral of possibility.
How a Little Knowledge about Acupuncture Points Can Do a Lot of Good
The organs of emotion—such as the heart, stomach, kidneys, and liver—are energetically connected to points on the skin known as acupuncture points (acupoints). Simplistic as you may find it to be, tapping on acupoints while focusing on a problem is the most direct and potent route we know for involving the body in the psychotherapeutic process. It initiates a reprocessing of unresolved emotional experiences, allowing current patterns to rapidly shift, and it is one of the main interventions used in energy psychology.
Acupoints are gateways into the body’s energy system, acting like switches that can increase or decrease the flow of energy to specific areas of the body. The traditional use of acupuncture needles is not necessary. Energy psychology teaches you how to tap on or massage about a dozen points that influence your emotions while you think about specific scenes that are associated with a problem or a goal. The process shifts not only the psychological atmosphere that surrounds the situation being focused upon—reducing anxiety, increasing confidence, healing old wounds, and generally enhancing your freedom to move through the situation more effectively and more joyfully—it also changes your brain chemistry.3 With acupoint tapping, you can eliminate outdated emotional patterns by altering the neural pathways that maintain them.
Energy psychology practitioners, in fact, often comment on the way a client believes a particular issue was resolved in previous psychotherapy, only to discover that the old thoughts, feelings, and behavior are still intruding. After addressing the problem at the body level, in this case with acupoint tapping, the pattern is transformed at its neurological core. David had previously talked to therapists “ad nauseam” about the bullying he had experienced, and this did increase his insight and understanding. However, his visceral response during situations that brought up emotions tracing to his having been bullied was still occurring. The good news for us, and for you, is that by combining simple acupoint tapping techniques with current understanding about how the brain works, energy psychology is making available, to anyone, straightforward procedures for bringing about deep change. We can quickly and decisively shift long-standing patterns that limit us and our relationships.
• THE ENERGY DIMENSION •
Acupuncture Points
More than three hundred points on the surface of the body, known as acupuncture points, fall along the meridians—energy pathways that were identified by ancient Chinese physicians thousands of years ago. The acupuncture points are vital spots on the surface of the body that have lower electrical resistance and greater sensitivity than other areas of the skin. They are situated on meridian lines that have been verified by modern scientists as corresponding with the body’s connective tissue.4
The way it works may seem simple, yet embodying psychological change via a body-based intervention such as tapping is a profound advance within psychotherapy. You bring to mind an emotional memory or trigger, tap on a sequence of acupoints, and a shift occurs in your brain, your energies, and your psyche. Old wounds heal. Destructive patterns lose their grip. New possibilities open. Improbable as this sounds, the science and clinical research showing how this is possible, why energy psychology is effective, are laid out in a journal article that was originally written for this chapter. It became too long and academic, but it is available as a free download from www.tapping.innersource.net.
My Beloved, You Are the Catalyst for My Growth—Thanks a Lot!
Psyches become intertwined in deep relationships. “Neural feedback loops” get formed that are so potent that two brains begin, in some ways, to function as one, as a single collective nervous system.5 The partners’ energies respond to one another before a word has been spoken. Attachment at work! One spouse begins to feel an emotional need, energetic signals are transmitted, and the other’s brain is activated in response to it. Sweet . . . assuming that your partner’s brain is inclined toward loving, attuned, and validating thoughts.
We do not, however, come into our relationship with a clean slate emotionally. Many of the psychological difficulties people have in their relationships trace to difficult emotional experiences from the past. These result in entrenched learnings that are at the core of emotional responses, behavioral patterns, and beliefs about ourselves and our world that can undermine our best intentions. They are the leopard’s spots of the human psyche, notoriously difficult to change. David’s closing down or striking out when a situation felt unfair traced back to his being unjustly blamed and bullied more than fifty years earlier. Such internal scenarios are often at the root of destructive patterns that follow people throughout their lives. David’s unprocessed experience regarding the bullying incident and the impact it was having on our marriage is a drama that repeats itself in untold varieties for all couples.
Your relationship has, in fact, an astounding capacity to re-create whatever issues are unresolved within you. Many couples suffer with the intrusion of the same persistent issues day after day and year after year. To protect themselves, they may—consciously or unconsciously—structure their interactions to try to avoid these painful areas. Our dear friend Peg Elliott Mayo, who was David’s first clinical supervisor in 1968, refers to this strategy as “wallpapering over the cockroaches.” Such “no-fly” zones may work to some degree, but when you draw lines beyond which you or your partner may not venture, your spontaneity and intimacy suffer as well. This limiting arrangement may descend beneath the surface and become embedded in the foundation of your relationship. A woman’s oversensitivity to criticism results in her husband withholding information that is vital for an intimate flow between them. A man’s hair-trigger anger causes his wife to hatch down her spontaneity with him. This decreases the frequency of his outbursts but does not eliminate them, and she is systematically dampening her spirit every day.
What was nature up to in arranging things so those we love most bring out the parts of us that are most difficult to love? The impulse is strong for our emotional wounds to be played out again and again in our deepest relationships. Perhaps this strange twist of Love’s plan is designed to make us catalysts for one another’s growth and healing? Old patterns repeat themselves—again and again—until they are brought to a new resolution.
While this new resolution is not automatic or guaranteed, healing old wounds that are at the basis of ongoing difficulties opens new vistas. Painful as it may be to enter this territory—even when mindful and armed with tools for healing—the
outcome can transform you as well as your relationship in many-splendored ways. Your partnership provides not only the context in which old wounds play out; it can also be a container for healing them.
What Tapping Can Do for You and Your Relationship
Some of the most potent tools for bringing about such healings involve working with your energies. Energetic patterns that trace to childhood carry into new situations. Think of how a magnet under a piece of paper on which iron filings have been placed will create a pattern. You can replace the iron filings with a totally different set of iron filings and you will still see the same pattern. Childhood experiences are coded in your body’s energies, and these energies act as templates that impose the same essential patterns—again and again—on the unfolding panorama of your life, even as the characters and circumstances change. Articulating the way this works was Freud’s landmark contribution, but the talk therapy he developed for transforming persistent themes tracing to earlier times was often not powerful enough to produce deep, lasting change. It turns out that energy fields, by organizing the brain’s neural pathways, provide the glue that keeps old patterns in place, and also hold the key for changing them.6
Energy psychology addresses problems at this level, impacting the energy fields that maintain outdated psychological habits. When you bring to mind an emotional problem—such as a situation with your partner that triggers irrational hurt or anger—you activate the energy field involved with that problem. Simultaneously, tapping on selected acupoints that produce calm shifts the internal landscape around the problem.
Can tapping really make that much difference? David’s reactions to Donna, tracing to his childhood experiences of having been the victim of bullying, were transformed in a single evening. Numerous studies have established the effectiveness of acupoint tapping in resolving a range of psychological difficulties quickly and permanently.7 Here are seven ways energy psychology can help improve your relationship: