EFT & ME

Some of you will have heard about EFT. You can learn it for free from Gary Craig’s website. It sounds ridiculously simple to the point of impossible: you tap on the ends of the energy meridians (those that are used in acupuncture) while repeating an affirmation, and you can heal yourself: of emotional trauma and physical ailment alike. From toothache to Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Oh come off it, you say.

But it only takes two minutes to apply, it’s easy to do, you can self-administer at a moment’s notice. What if it works? And what if it can cure M.E.? I watched the 7 minute video and tears came to my eyes. I want my husband to be well. We have suffered his illness for three and half years, and its about time we clawed our way out the other side.

Over the last three years I have spent hours studying the condition in order to understand it better. I understand it is a severe physiological illness, involving the immune system, the nervous system, and pretty much every part of the body. But here is a man who says EFT has allowed him to completely recover from Multiple Sclerosis. How could I not give it a try?

I downloaded the free manual and read it in a couple of hours. I tried it on some shoulder tension (which usually leads me to headache). The shoulders seem to loosen and relax some. I tried it on my back pain. A couple of times. The back pain went. The next day I started to develop a headache. I tapped for it but it didn’t go completely away and after a few hours I had to resort to painkillers. I was disappointed.

The next day I was feeling really energised, having tapped myself to wake up for an early swim. About three in the afternoon I started to develop allergic cold symptoms (runny nose, sneezing). I thought about all the times this has happened in the past year or so and it is always on a day when I’ve been swimming in the morning. Then it dawned on me – it was the chlorine making me ill. I reread the section about why EFT sometimes doesn’t work, it became obvious that chlorine was acting as an inhibitor – because the day I’d developed the headache that wouldn’t respond to tapping, I’d also been swimming first thing. And now, I had the warning signs of a migraine.

I scrubbed myself thoroughly all over with water (no soap or detergent), got into clean clothes, and did two rounds of tapping. My migraine went away. In minutes. Without drugs. Since then I’ve had success with what you’d call recurrent infections: women will be familiar with these regular visitors. But I banished each one of them through a few minutes of tapping. Aren’t they supposed to be caused by infectious agents? Then how come I could heal them completely with my mind?

I desperately wanted to tap on my husband from the outset, but he was sceptical and when I talked about what it involved, got rather angry about it. It was the affirmations, in particular, that he found offensive. Which I do understand, but I also knew I was having some astonishing results. So I decided I should just carry on using it in my own life and see if at some point the patent benefits might intrigue him. I thought a change of heart might take weeks, but it took only a couple of days. There's a reason why they're called wisdom teeth.

My husband has wisdom teeth coming through, and has been in a lot of pain. He saw a dentist six weeks ago who said one tooth was so near the nerve that he was afraid to operate in case of nerve damage, so there was nothing for it but take painkillers and wait it out for weeks or even months. The pain had increased day on day, and now the painkillers couldn't touch it: my husband was in agony to the point that he couldn’t look after our daughter for even five minutes at a time, meaning I couldn’t work, so the whole house was ruled by his toothache. I, on the other hand was benefiting so hugely from using EFT (including ensuring that I didn’t fall ill myself) that I was able to handle everything he threw at me (not, I hasten to add, literally).

He could see that it was having a very real and positive effect on me, and finally, after I'd been tapping myself for a week, he asked me to tap out his toothache.

In five minutes it went from “severe throbbing in tooth and jaw” to “dull ache and throbbing in tooth and jaw” to “dull ache in jaw” to “strange feeling in my tooth”. Painkillers hadn’t worked, but EFT had reduced his pain to zero in a few minutes.

Ever since then I have been using EFT on my husband. He finds it hard to tap on himself and finds the effects much more powerful when I tap on him, which I guess would make sense given our very different energy levels.

We’ve been working symptom by symptom, to start with. Usually he’s in pain by the end of the day so it’s pains we’ve been eliminating, and I’ve been longing to get past these to his chronic fatigue: his having no reserves, his being so easily drained. EFT has appeared to help him sleep better (even though we haven’t tapped for that) which has helped him make gradual improvements over the week (he’s only been doing it for a week) so last night we had only a minor pain to tap for. So last night, at last, we tapped on his "feeling drained" and on his “fuzziness”. The key seems to be, as the EFT masters stress, find ingthe right words. We will do that more often, I suspect, as we get better at this.

We are on the way out of the ME nightmare. My husband's health is improving. It’s very noticeable. He woke this morning with more energy than he’s had in months, and so far, he has been able to sustain it. For quite a few months now, my husband – if he has slept at all - has woken exhausted. The last good spell was so long ago I can’t really remember when it was. He said the other day that he can’t actually remember what it feels like to feel healthy.

Today, he woke refreshed and feeling pretty good. It must be two years since he woke up not feeling exhausted. Five hours later he is still good - he can do maybe an hour or two of activity more today than he could do yesterday; he’s been up for five hours, and he seems in very fine fettle. A week ago, he was exhausted and in constant pain.

EFT has given us a way to eliminate pain and every symptom of ME that we have so far tapped on. But what’s more, it is – I am certain about this – relieving the underlying condition.

So we have peace and happiness here. We have tenderness, affection, and an enthusiastically renewed sex life. Above all, as we repeatedly experience the effectiveness on EFT on specific problems, we have hope.

The trick now is to my husband’s ME into its elements – its myriad specific contributors - and zap each one.