Possible breakthroughs

I'm a few weeks into using EFT for myself now. It's without question the most powerful and effective healing tool I've come across. For physical pain it has proved itself consistently more effective than any chemical kind of pain relief (for both of us). But EFT's effectiveness on emotional issues is nothing less than profound. It can facilitate the kind of changes that our culture has led us to believe are impossible. The things EFT makes possible are not the sorts of thing you can tell people; it sounds like nonsense. A person has to experience EFT themselves, and feel it work.

My husband was fine with EFT until he realised it would mean digging up the past. Sometimes we think we have dealt with something, but it is still there. My husband was quite sure he had dealt with the "demons" that came out of his being bullied and racially abused as a child - and on one level he certainly had - but on another level (his subconscious) he hasn't. Our subconscious mind controls more than our conscious mind ever can, especially in terms of our automatic emotional responses. We haven't had any effective way of rewriting the software of our subconscious minds before now - counseling, for example, makes you aware of why you react the way you do, but is close to useless in helping you change those reactions. I've found EFT to be brilliant for this, by comparison. In the last couple of weeks, backing up what I was learning through EFT, I read Bruce Lipton's The Biology of Belief; an astonishing, eye-opening book if ever there was one. Here, a cell biologist explains the science behind my new appreciation that we can choose not to be the helpless victims of our childhoods, or of our "incurable" illnesses, or of our DNA.

I found EFT only, in the first instance, because I was looking for us to find a way out of my husband's illness. Not just the depression which goes along with ME, but the ME itself. And is the ME lifting? The answer is yes, but not because my husband is practicing EFT himself. I've been doing EFT daily on myself, but in the last two weeks I've also been tapping surrogately for him (now that I've a better grasp on the whole thing), because he felt "unready" to go any further with EFT after initially finding it very helpful for symptom relief.

If you don't understand how EFT works, I'm sure this'll sound weird, but towards on Wednesday last week I tapped for his fear of whatever it is that is stopping him from doing EFT, and within hours it all came out (which wasn't, for me, a pain-free experience; be careful what you wish/tap for!). The upshot - his revelation that he no longer trusts me since I wasn't able to stop working when he needed me to - is not easy to deal with. But now that it has been acknowledged, it has cleared the ground between us. We've had a weekend of being closer together and he feels ready to move forward.

He is already a lot better (i.e. less exhausted, less allergic, less in pain, less clouded by brain-fog) than he was a few weeks ago. He openly wondered at the weekend whether part of this was due to the fact that I had been working on him remotely (he understands how and why that is possible) and I admitted that I had. He wasn't upset about this; he was enjoying feeling better, and he'd already intuitively worked out where some of that might be coming from. He has now decided to pick up EFT again and start working actively on clearing the ME himself.

In the belly of the whale.

I have to help myself, and I have to do it alone. I can’t help my husband be alright, I can’t break through his defences in any way right now, but I can at least provide as much support as possible to myself. If that means me spending hours away from here, down here, trying to heal every hurt that life is throwing or has thrown at me, then at least that is doing something positive. If I can find a way of handling his anger, resentment, fear, negativity, rejection, withdrawal, irritation, criticism, depression, sickness, suffering… then I will be doing the best I can do.

EFT is a genuine route to a sense of well being and personal peace. In the last month I’ve achieved this, for hours and sometimes days at a time, through EFT's simple self-administered tapping routines, and know that continued use of EFT will help me make sustain and expand these profound positive changes. Yesterday was one of the happiest days of my life, and the happiness was from deep inside me, its release facilitated by my progress with EFT. Though I have often depended on others to make me (or keep me) happy - which my husband doesn't have the resources to do right now - real happiness can only come from the self, as we all know. It's brilliant to have found a tool that makes genuine, from-the-inside-out happiness so accessible.

But it's hard to accept that when I am suffering and desperately need the man who was once my closest friend to reach out to me, he can't . That’s why I have been practising EFT and expanding my knowledge of it so fervently – so that I can be okay without his support. Sometimes just get through the day, but other times thrive. Unfortunately, right now, only one of us is in a position to inject some positive energy into the marriage and into the family, and that’s me.

EFT is helping me enormously me to help myself, but I can’t help him. Right now, and this is related to depression rather than ME, he doesn’t want to get better. He’s seen the chink of an open door and not only can he not go through it right now, he has turned his back on it. His illness is clinging onto him, and he is clinging on to his illness.

It is very familiar, a very close cousin of the depression in which I found him when we first met, only he can’t see that, because he is still in the darkness. As he always told me (in the years after he conquered his last depression), people keep themselves ill, they cling on to their depression, argue for it, take courses of action that sustain it, because it feels safer than facing their problems. And yet, as he knows from his three previous bouts of severe depression (and has repeatedly advised depressed friends when he is well), once faced, the problems are never as huge and scary and insoluble as they seem when you push the door shut again and turn your back to it and lock yourself in the darkness.

He has been watching The West Wing relentlessly for two weeks now. He started on the first episode of series one and is now on the second disk of series 7. He won’t challenge himself on this. He says he needs it. He does it in every spare moment he can; the minute I leave the room he resumes it again from the point where he paused it when I came in. He watches it for hours every day, and when he is looking after our daughter, he sits *her* in front of DVDs for hours at a time so he can watch *his* on the laptop. He says it is helping him. He says that watching West Wing is his way of thinking about where he is and sorting himself out. Except I know from watching West Wing with him the first time through that the dialogue is so fast-paced it fills up your brain and doesn’t allow you any time to think at all, which, when you watch three or four episodes back to back like he does, is its purpose. It is his way of sorting himself out, he says.

And how much less ill is he 6/7^ths of the way into the West Wing? He is, of course, exactly as depressed as when he started, and significantly more withdrawn. Connection between us became increasingly fragile and has now has broken down. Tonight, we had a serious row.

In a small calm between his outbursts of anger, my attempts to find a bridge to him, and my copious tears (and utter despair) when those attempts hit wall after wall, I did at least get some sort of agreement from him that he will watch the EFT DVDs with me [which he previously refused to do, saying he had to read the rest of the manual first. When I asked him, as gently as I could, when he thought he might have a go at continuing to read the manual he said he didn’t know because he can’t really read because he’s too ill. He said he wanted to understand how and why it works before he did any more of it (even though it helped him feel better)... but then stopped reading the manual, began to suffer again, and is now, he says, too ill to read. It is the perfect circular argument for your own prison].

Anyway, he’s softened on this one point (a point on which he was adamant before tonight) and has said he will, but I can’t be sure it’s going to happen any time soon. Chances are he’ll find ways of avoiding it. He would be angry with me for saying this but my strong sense is that he needs his depression, and spends what little energy he has fighting to sustain it. He can’t get better from ME without getting out of depression first, but he has withdrawn further into depression (and ME) because the fear of what will be uncover in the proces of tackling it (including the void of what comes after) is overwhelming. I know EFT can help him. We have already seen it help him. But he got scared. He is, I suspect, deeply afraid this will prove to be another massive disappointment, a last hope smashed against the rocks, leaving him powerless forever. So he pre-empts the assumed non-solution by simply turning away from it, saving himself from the imagined pain.

This is me trying to understand what is happening; he would vehemently refute most of it. Depression is not a place where one can think straight or find insight. It is hard to see something clearly when you are locked inside it. He doesn’t recognise that this is depression, even though he has had severe depression several times before.

And I do understand, because I’ve been the same when I was depressed. It’s hard to recognise the familiar monster that has swallowed you, when you are in the darkness of its belly.