Misha’s Story
“Misha” scheduled an EFT appointment with me because she knew she needed to market her new business, but she was procrastinating so much that no marketing was getting done. At our first appointment, I asked her to name a specific task she needed to do, and she said she had a list of people she needed to call to see if they might be interested in scheduling an appointment with her. I asked her to imagine that she was sitting with her list of prospects in her hand, and was about to make the phone calls. “What is the level of your resistance right now, on a scale of 0 to 10?” I asked. She said it was a 7. I asked her what she dreaded most about making the calls and she said that she didn’t know, she just didn’t want to do it.
We tapped on,
I just don’t feel like making the calls
I don’t want to do it
I refuse to make those calls and no one can make me do it
After doing one round of EFT I asked her what was coming up for her, if anything. She said that she felt like a failure, and that her marketing wouldn’t help her business anyway. At the same time, she also knew that marketing was the only way her business would get off the ground! Her resistance was still at a 7.
We then tapped on,
I feel like a failure before I even get going
What’s the point?
It won’t make a difference anyway
Again, her level of resistance did not budge after this round of tapping; it was still at a 7. I asked Misha where she felt the resistance in her body, and she said that she felt it in her chest as tightness. I asked, “If this tightness and resistance in your chest could talk, what would it say?” After a few moments, Misha said she was remembering a rape that had occurred to her about 15 years earlier, when she was 19 years old. She said it had happened so long ago that she didn’t really have any feelings about it any more.
She told me the story of the rape: She had snuck into a bar with friends, gone outside at one point to make a phone call, and been kidnapped by two men. They had taken her to a seedy motel in another part of town and raped her repeatedly. As she told me the story, I thought that it must have been terrifying to live through that experience; however, she did seem to have found healing over the years. I asked her what her intensity was as she spoke, and she said it was at a zero.
I asked Misha what was hardest for her at the time of the rape, and she mentioned several things: She had been afraid she wouldn’t see her mother again; she had been wearing a lacy minidress and felt that her choice of clothes had made the rape more likely to happen (at the same time, she was clear that she did not in any way deserve what had happened that night); she had cooperated fully with the rapists, even going so far as to pretend that she had enjoyed the experience; and one of the two men involved was especially cruel, and he had hurt her and humiliated her deliberately, even though she cooperated with him. We tapped on each of these aspects, and they all quickly went down to zero.
I then asked Misha if anything else stood out for her about that night, and she said no. I asked, “How did the experience end?” She explained that at dawn, the two men had put their clothes back on and left the rented motel room. She had quickly locked the door behind them and waited for awhile, and when she finally felt it was safe to leave, she put her lacy minidress back on and darted to the office. In the office, she told the person at the counter that she had been raped and that she needed to use their phone to call a taxi; by then, all she could think about was getting back home to her mother. The person behind the counter told her that she would have to use the pay phone. Since she had been kidnapped without her purse, she didn’t have any money with which to make the call, but the hotel personnel did not believe her story and flatly refused to let her use the phone. Finally, after pleading fruitlessly for several minutes, she completely broke down and sobbed in the office until they relented and allowed her to make a call.
Misha and I had finally gotten to the part of the story that still lived on in her psyched as trauma. She was sobbing uncontrollably as she sat in my office. She realized, in telling the end of the story, that she hadn’t expected kindness from the rapists, but she had completely counted on it from the motel staff, and when they had turned out to be cynical and unhelpful, she had been devastated.
When Misha was ready, we tapped on several aspects of the experience with the motel staff:
The people in the office were callous and mean
I deserve kindness and respect but they didn’t give it to me
I needed to be treated with love
I was shocked and hurt by the way they acted
I thought they would be kind
I had been through so much and they didn’t care
They treated me as though I was worthless
I know my worth as a child of God
After the tapping we did relating to how Misha had been treated by the motel staff, her level of intensity regarding the “phone call” part of the story was back down to a zero again. There was no part of the memory of that night that made her intensity go up again, even when she tried to magnify it the story in her mind.
At this point, I asked her to once again envision calling her prospects, and her intensity and resistance for this was a zero as well. Over our next several appointments, we continued to address several other old memories that stood between her and her ability to move forward in her business with confidence. She began making her phone calls and tending to business in other ways. She also reported to me an overall feeling of happiness that had not been present for her before.
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