Get Back On Your Feet

Mike is a cameraman who came to see me because he was leaving town in three days to do some filming. . .450 feet up in the air on a radio tower. There was just one small problem – he had a debilitating fear of heights. He had had to withdraw from another assignment in which he was asked to film something high above the ground, and he had a fierce desire to complete this assignment. EFT usually works quickly to take care of phobias, such as fear of heights, but there are no guarantees that it will be quick. I told Mike that I thought we could take care of his fear of heights within three sessions, but he said he only had time to come in once. No pressure!

When Mike and I met, we talked about previous instances when his fear of heights had kicked in. I asked for his first memory of fearfulness around heights. We worked on that memory but when we tested by having him imagine going up on the radio tower, the fear was still there. I asked more questions, and while he couldn’t come up with an earlier memory, he did realize that his fears were always triggered when he looked out over large amounts of open space. Observations of this sort tend to be extremely important and so we did some work on the fear of seeing large amounts of open space. And then he suddenly remembered: as a young boy of seven, he had been thrilled when his mother took him to a local amusement park. He wanted to try the roller coaster, and his mom gladly obliged him. As the roller coaster chugged up to the top of its hill, he looked all around him at open space. That memory, mingled with the terror of that last moment before one plunges downward on a roller coaster, was the nugget we were looking for. We cleared each aspect of the roller coaster ride that had stayed with him all these years and then ended the session.

Normally in cases like this I test my work by going to a location with my client that would have scared them in the past, to see if they are still frightened. In this case, there was no time, so I waited on pins and needles to hear from Mike. Several weeks later, I got the phone call I was hoping for. Although he had had a bad case of nerves, he had completed the assignment. Shortly after, he had gone rock climbing in Joshua Tree, something else that he had never been able to do. The rock climbing went great. Mike is now free of his phobia.

Click here to read Sophie’s story.