The Energies of Love

by Donna Eden

  Because overwhelming emotion is not compatible with the signals sent to the brain during tapping, the signals turn off the emotion without distorting the memory. The memory becomes manageable and stops intruding into other areas of one’s life. This emotional processing and healing changes the person’s psychic landscape. From there, it was relatively easy to identify several of the most recent times that June had been obsessively worried about Ralph or one of the boys and to tap each down to zero. Finally, we worked with some situations that had not yet happened but that she imagined might be challenging. From that point on, she was able to send her men off to work or school with a smile on her face and a heart that was at peace.

  You do not need to have had a tragedy like June’s to fall prey to a self-defeating thought or emotional pattern that is hurting your relationship. If you are prone to excessive worry, judgments, comparisons, avoidance, or a sense of threat, your tapping can focus on the last time the pattern occurred. Freeing yourself from these echoes from your past using the energy psychology protocol taught in this and the following chapter can be a large step toward clearing the way for a relationship that is blessed by increasingly secure attachment.

  7

  Recurring Patterns, Triggers, and Other Inconveniences

  Reprogramming Responses That Hurt Your Relationship

  Love is everything it’s cracked up to be. . . . It really is worth fighting for, worth being brave for, risking everything for. And the trouble is, if you don’t risk anything, you risk even more.

  —ERICA JONG1

  Jeremy was thirty-six when he married Melissa. He was eager to help raise her sons, ages seven and nine. He had gotten to know them quite well during the year prior to the marriage; he had brought them to baseball games, zoos, parks, and other local attractions, and he had participated in their hobbies. The boys liked their stepdad and the attention he was giving them, and the new family was blossoming within an atmosphere of affection and promise. Melissa’s ex-husband, Steve, the boys’ biological father, had not been particularly eager to spend time with his sons during the marriage, but he also loved them. He had moved to another town several hours away after the divorce but had been reliable in taking the boys for the afternoon every other Sunday.

  During his courtship with Melissa, Jeremy had never met Steve. But now that Jeremy had moved in with the family, the twice-monthly visits became a fixture in his life. He was civil enough toward his new wife’s ex, but he avoided having much contact with him when the boys were being picked up or dropped off. During the first Christmas vacation after the marriage, Steve arranged to take the boys for a week, and the three of them flew to Orlando for a Disney marathon. The boys were so excited about it that they seemed to talk of little else for the week before and the week after the trip. When Steve came for the next Sunday visitation, Jeremy could hardly look at him. He began to criticize Steve’s parenting style to Melissa, point out his culpability in the divorce, and generally paint an ugly picture of the man who had fathered her children. At first Melissa acknowledged the truth in some of the observations, but over time Jeremy became increasingly vehement in his criticisms. This grew into a loaded theme in their interactions on the weekends that Steve would be arriving, and Jeremy began questioning the boys about their visits with their father, as if looking for more fodder for his rants. He was eventually unable to hide from the boys his disdain toward their father.

  Jeremy’s jealousy toward Steve continued to escalate, and the acrimony was seeping into other areas of the family. As Steve’s visits approached, tension would descend on the household. The boys were confused. Melissa began to judge Jeremy harshly. She had more than once called him a “spoiled brat.” This was the state of things when they scheduled a couple counseling session with David. Jeremy knew at some level that his reactions were not rational, but this knowledge could not compete with the strength of his emotions. When Jeremy was triggered, Steve was an evil man sabotaging all of Jeremy’s fine efforts with the boys and the family, and there was no other reality to consider.

  After hearing both of their renditions of the problem, David spoke to the part of Jeremy that knew his reactions to Steve were extreme. David explained that when intense emotions are triggered, they are very real, whether rational or irrational. He suggested tapping to take the edge off the intensity of Jeremy’s responses to Steve. Neither Jeremy nor Melissa had any experience with energy psychology, but the couple who referred them had worked with David and described the method, so they were game for anything that could help, however strange it might look. While Jeremy was not open to considering that his assessment of Steve might be wrong, he was interested in feeling less consumed by his reactions.

  They proceeded, following essentially the same steps you learned as the Basic Recipe in the previous chapter. The scene that Jeremy chose for his subjective units of distress (SUD) rating was from the previous Sunday, watching as Steve’s car pulled into the driveway. It was a 10 on the zero-to-ten scale. After four rounds of tapping, it had gone down to a 7, but even after further tapping it seemed to be stuck there. David asked, “How do you know it is a seven?” Jeremy said that he felt pressure in his chest and a tightness in his throat. David asked him to explore the feelings in his throat. Jeremy said it was almost as if he were trying to hold back tears. David asked if he could recall one of the first times he had that feeling. Jeremy immediately recalled being ten when his parents brought a foster boy into the family. It was to be a temporary arrangement until a permanent placement could be found, a favor for a relative of the boy, but it changed everything for Jeremy.

  As an only child, Jeremy had enjoyed his parents’ full attention and affection. Suddenly that was history. The foster boy had many problems, both of Jeremy’s parents held full-time jobs, and the limited time and resources they had available shifted from Jeremy to the new boy. Jeremy, at ten, did not have words or concepts that could help him come to grips with the loss. He felt emotionally abandoned by both of his parents, he could not fathom why they had brought this troublesome person into their home, and he hated the foster boy. He began starting fights and creating acrimony wherever he could. This strategy seemed to eventually work. After about a year, the agency found a permanent placement for the boy and Jeremy never saw him again. All of this was buried in the recesses of Jeremy’s psyche. He hadn’t thought about it for years, and no other circumstance in his adult life had triggered his unprocessed feelings around that chapter from his childhood. He had never thought to mention it to Melissa, but the parallels between the foster boy and the situation with Steve became immediately obvious to all three of us.

  We tapped on every aspect of the memory we could identify, staying with each until it was down to a zero: Jeremy’s loss of his parents’ attention; his many times having held back his tears when he felt lonely and abandoned; his confusion and puzzlement about what he had done wrong to deserve having all the attention withdrawn from him; the invasion into his family; his hatred for the new boy; the fights they had; his being punished for starting them and feeling like a bad boy after ten years of being a good boy; and even his confusion when the new boy suddenly disappeared.

  Fortunately, each round of tapping takes only a couple of minutes, so all of this was accomplished within that first session (David generally schedules two hours for initial sessions with couples). Jeremy was by then able to talk lucidly and calmly about the foster boy and the boy’s invasion into his young life. And he could reflect on how Steve’s visits with the boys were bringing up feelings that traced to his experiences with the foster boy. He was entertaining the possibility that his sense of Steve purposefully trying to destroy the family Jeremy was building had something to do with this earlier scenario. Focusing again on watching Steve’s car pulling into the driveway, Jeremy gave it a SUD rating of 3. A couple more rounds of tapping and it was down to a zero. We then briefly focused on Melissa’s horror and sense of betrayal about Jeremy’s shif
t over the recent months from an apparently ideal stepfather to an angry, jealous, irrational force in her home. Witnessing Jeremy’s work had already put all of this into a welcome new light, and by the end of the session, she was able to review the strange course of their young marriage with no emotional charge.

  On a follow-up session two weeks later, the issue had vanished. Jeremy was not triggered by Steve’s next visit, the strong relationship Jeremy had established with the boys and with Melissa was back on track, and David had lost customers who could have easily spent a year or two in counseling. Such are the risks a therapist takes when bringing an energy approach into the consulting room.

  Can You Try This at Home?

  How effectively you can use the techniques taught here to change patterns that really matter to you and to your relationship depends on many factors, but we can tell you that innumerable individuals and couples have gained strong benefits from using energy psychology techniques on a self-help basis. If they don’t work, then you will have wasted a bit of time and effort and perhaps gotten frustrated—but you will know you gave it your best shot and it may help you determine that professional assistance is warranted to optimize what you have together. If they do work, you have not only solved the problem at hand, but you have also been building tools for navigating through whatever emotional challenges you may face in the future.

  Chapter 6 presented basic energy psychology procedures that can bring about deep transformation. It listed seven areas of relationships where these procedures can be particularly effective in helping couples: (1) moving through emotional intensity without escalating; (2) shifting the way you respond to behaviors in your partner that had been triggers for anger, hurt, or resentment; (3) tracing emotional challenges that play themselves out again and again in your relationship to formative childhood experiences; (4) healing those emotional wounds; (5) transforming the patterns that grew out of those wounds; (6) completing any other “unfinished business” in your emotional life, including “baggage” from earlier relationships or from an earlier time in your current relationship; and (7) establishing a strong mental vision of how you want yourself or your relationship to change and rewiring your brain to support that vision.

  In this chapter, we will describe how energy psychology can be applied in each of these areas. We wanted an example to illustrate each topic. While we could have drawn from couples we’ve worked with, we decided to keep it alive and at our own personal edges. The following describes our personal use of the techniques you are learning, conducted specifically with this chapter in mind. The commentary instructs you on how to work with the theme being explored, and it also includes fresh discussion of the dilemmas in working with one’s partner as they emerged for us during our little experiment. David’s bullying issue was a theme in the previous chapter. In this chapter, we turn the spotlight on Donna.

  The theme you will see Donna focusing on throughout the remainder of this chapter traces to a core decision she made early in her childhood that she would not cause trouble for anyone. Her sister and her brother required a great deal of attention from their parents, and Donna took on the family role of being the one who wasn’t a source of difficulty. It is not like she had never before been aware of this issue or worked on it. Rather, as we evolve and reach higher levels of consciousness, certain basic themes may reemerge to be resolved in new ways. We are each a work in progress.

  Personal development has, in fact, sometimes been likened to an upward spiral where you revisit the same issues, again and again, but because it is an upward spiral, you meet them from a higher vantage point, a new level of personal evolution.2 The more effectively you deal with the issue during the current round of the spiral, the more the issue becomes a source of experience and wisdom rather than limitation, at least until its number is up again on your life’s journey. Donna’s theme of not causing trouble had gone through several rounds of the spiral during her life, and it seemed to be up again, just in time for the writing of this chapter.

  1. Moving through Emotional Intensity without Escalating

  The first step of the Pact (chapter 3) is to STOP your discussion the moment the emotional intensity between you is beginning to escalate. Tapping on the points shown in Figure 6-3 gives you a preventive tool that may keep it from escalating beyond the first emotional bumps. Our close colleague and friend Dawson Church gives this advice to couples:

  The moment you feel a rise in emotional intensity with someone you love, immediately start tapping. [This] instantly tells your body that there’s no need to go into the fight/flight/freeze response, that the current situation is not a threat to your physical survival, and that you’re not traveling along the same dysfunctional neurological highway you’ve constructed in the past.3

  Dawson is suggesting that you both tap while continuing the discussion. He explains that for many couples, well-traveled pathways in the brain are so deeply established that the couple gets “sucked into the same old lose-lose situation”4 even when they know they are going to crash if they travel along that path. Tapping intervenes at the level of your brain chemistry. It signals safety, slows emotional reactivity, and allows you to take a breath and, in that moment, to look at your partner through fresh eyes and actively listen rather than just react in old ways.

  The first time we tried this with this chapter in mind, it worked beautifully. Donna was in a situation where, due to unforeseen circumstances, she had to change some plans without consulting with David. She knew this had caused “trouble” (inconvenience) for him, and she was already on edge when they talked about what had occurred. Part of her “no trouble” pattern was that when she did cause “trouble,” she expected the other person to be hurt, angry, or upset. Besides this anticipation in itself having a self-fulfilling quality, it was so rare that Donna did inconvenience the people closest to her that they tended to feel surprised and hurt if she didn’t meet their expectations. So, as she began the conversation with David, she already felt upset that he was (presumably) irritated, as if there could never be any room for her to make her own decisions when they might inconvenience someone else. This of course has the effect of bringing out a defensive emotional response in the partner.

  Hearing the tone in Donna’s voice, David said, “Whoa! This is the moment we’ve been waiting for. I’m going to start tapping [on the points shown in Figure 6-3], and I hope you will too.” David was indeed a bit put out by the inconvenience of the change in plans, but he hadn’t gone into the reaction Donna was anticipating. Her essentially accusing him of having gone there did not, at least this time, hook him. He of course doesn’t know what would have happened if he weren’t tapping, but he later reflected that listening while tapping seemed to help him receive Donna’s emotional charge without taking it personally. As Donna tapped while explaining the circumstances, as well as when listening to David’s response, she recognized that he was taking her in deeply and understood what occurred, and we were both quickly done with it.

  The next time we entered a situation that had an emotional charge and used this “tap while you talk, tap while you listen” method, however, we found that there is a strong caveat. It made things much worse! An effect of tapping while telling a story is that it helps you go more deeply into the story, uncovering emotions to which you did not have access. If the incident you are tapping on touches into a theme that has a great deal of unresolved emotion, you may simply escalate the situation, uncovering layer after layer without resolving a thing before the next unresolved emotion or memory has surfaced. Then the next, and then the next. If you find that continuing the conversation while tapping is escalating the negative emotions or starting to spin out of control, it is time to change strategies. Immediately!

  Here is how that played out for us. One of the dynamics in Donna’s theme of causing no one any trouble is that her needs, desires, and preferences are not always made obvious, so she often feels dismissed by David, the one who is
closest to her. At the time of this writing (we are at this moment no further along in writing the chapter than you are in reading it), there is some heated disagreement between the two of us about this. How much is it the issue that David actually dismisses what Donna has conveyed to him and how much is it that Donna feels dismissed though she never really expressed her thoughts or needs? When David presents his side of this particular argument, Donna of course feels dismissed even further. We can’t wait to see how this one gets resolved! Anyway, we have been planning a teaching tour in Europe to correspond with the release of one of our books. Donna felt that David had put the plans into motion without having adequately gone over the details with her, and she was upset about it. When she received the actual itinerary, she was hit particularly hard. The conversation began something like this:

  DONNA: “This wasn’t my plan. This isn’t what I want to do. I thought I was so clear about what I wanted. I thought you heard me” (voice escalating).

  DAVID: “Another opportunity for tapping, I see” (as he starts to tap).

  DONNA (now tapping as well): “I feel so betrayed. You didn’t hear me at all. You sold me out here! I feel invisible and dismissed. It’s just like when . . .”

  This led to an intensifying list of unpleasant incidents, each of which we remember quite differently, and we were both getting hooked. David finally said, with due sarcasm about the process we were planning to write about: “Isn’t this going well! What was it that we were trying to demonstrate? That we can be as petty as the next couple?” We both agreed it was time to shift out of the nosedive. So we invoked our standby, the Pact (chapter 3), and got beyond the acrimony. Feeling tuned in again to our collaborative alliance, we made a date to return to the issue using the Basic Recipe rather than random tapping.