This morning, I was coming out of the shower when my husband came down to tell me that our dog (13 years old) had just collapsed, peeing a little in the process. He said he'd heard the scrabbling of feet, exactly the same sound that had preceded our last dog (this dog's mother) dying about five years ago. When I got to the dog, he was looking very unwell, too weak to stand. He had peed, it seemed in shock, and was lamely, really sadly, trying to lap it up (something he would not normally do with his own pee - but it was like when animals eat their own sick, perhaps they are trying to clean up. He looked really embarrassed, ashamed, as well as being shaken and clearly unwell.
I started doing EFT on the dog very early on, after only about 6 weeks of using EFT on myself; first on his kennel cough, which seemed to me to be associated with his loneliness (and so keeping him on a lead, as the vet advised, was actually aggravating it). I wasn't sure if it would work, but I hugged and held him and concentrated mentally on his tapping points. The cough went away. Could be fluke, obviously.
But he was booked in for a castration at the time because of a prostrate problem; and at just this time I started reading accounts of people healing their animals with EFT and I just knew I didn't want him to go through that operation (poor old man), the pain and humiliation, if it wasn't necessary. Let alone the fact we don't have £200 to throw around in this house. So I figured it was worth a try. I read a particularly useful account about a woman working with her cat, made a mental note of the technique, and then - while I was walking the dog one night - I just focused mentally on all his points, doing as best I could to mentally "tap them" while saying affirmations for him about his frustrated desire for local bitches (he'd had a particularly teasing encounter with an alsation in heat the previous day and was due, I suspected, another flare up.) I also worked for a couple of rounds on the physical pain, his swollen prostrate gland. What harm could it do?
That's two and half months ago, and his prostrate hasn't flared up since. Previously it was happening every time the chemical castration injection wore off. He hasn't needed to go the the VET since I took up EFT. A couple of other problems have been observed, worked on and disappeared: weakness in his spine and backlegs, an infuriating itch in his back. So this morning, as soon as the dog collapses, I'm called for. It's lovely to be able to help him - gentle, and simple.
He was well enough, within fifteen minutes, to get up and go for a big drink of water. We took him out for his usual walk - I went along to check he was fully better. He's right as rain now, and curled up snoozing in his basket.
Wednesday, 28 November 2007
My Ordinary Everyday Reality
I'm not going to come on here and tell you things are all roses and will forever be, but there is a sense that the drama has died down, and we are more aware of each other. There is much mending to be done, after the ragged damage inflicted on us by the last two years.
You'll see I've changed the Profile blurb for this blog... this blog is no longer about ME, because this is no longer the largest feature of our lives. It might at times be about trying to mend a marriage that has been ravaged by the pressures of the last four years (since our daughter, youngest of my brood, was born, which included my husband's chronic illness (brought on, I've no doubt, by the stress of overwork). But more often, I suspect, it will be about the positive impact on our lives of the extraordinary healing tool that ME led us to.
It's been nearly four months since I first learnt EFT and I have to remember constantly that to other people it seems very weird. To me, now, it is becoming increasingly ordinary - although I am constantly gratified (and still, sometimes, surprised) by the positive effects it has on me and on the people around me.
Some of it sounds a little crazy, I know, but you're just going to have to take my word for it - I'm completely sane. The fact is, you can not only heal yourself with EFT, but you can heal others. If you read the science around EFT, you can understand why this might be possible - but it is still something many find hard to accept, because it is so new (and yet, which might worry them most, is as old as 2000 years ago).
I know, if you're not doing EFT, all this is bound to sound odd, and you might think I've ever so softly and harmlessly flipped. But this is a true account of every-day reality in his household. And you know, as realities go, I vastly prefer it to my previous one. And so do my husband, children, and pets.
You'll see I've changed the Profile blurb for this blog... this blog is no longer about ME, because this is no longer the largest feature of our lives. It might at times be about trying to mend a marriage that has been ravaged by the pressures of the last four years (since our daughter, youngest of my brood, was born, which included my husband's chronic illness (brought on, I've no doubt, by the stress of overwork). But more often, I suspect, it will be about the positive impact on our lives of the extraordinary healing tool that ME led us to.
It's been nearly four months since I first learnt EFT and I have to remember constantly that to other people it seems very weird. To me, now, it is becoming increasingly ordinary - although I am constantly gratified (and still, sometimes, surprised) by the positive effects it has on me and on the people around me.
Some of it sounds a little crazy, I know, but you're just going to have to take my word for it - I'm completely sane. The fact is, you can not only heal yourself with EFT, but you can heal others. If you read the science around EFT, you can understand why this might be possible - but it is still something many find hard to accept, because it is so new (and yet, which might worry them most, is as old as 2000 years ago).
I know, if you're not doing EFT, all this is bound to sound odd, and you might think I've ever so softly and harmlessly flipped. But this is a true account of every-day reality in his household. And you know, as realities go, I vastly prefer it to my previous one. And so do my husband, children, and pets.
Friday, 9 November 2007
The Dawn of Peace
To update this account of my own rather bumpy journey towards reclaiming my husband from this chronic and debilitating illness, we are being softer with each other. He watched the first EFT DVD yesterday, all the way through. As long as I give him some time to himself every day, he will spend some time doing EFT (which is what we both need him to do). This is held in balance against me needing to spend long hours sorting out my feelings at my desk before I start work (I work for myself, luckily, so I don’t get complaints from the boss). And then actually getting some work done, because I am being funded by public money and what I produce better be something good. It would be so nice to be able to get straight down to work, and then I could probably do everything I needed in half a day (as equality and fairness in this partnership requires). So that’s why EFT continues to be my daily necessity. It offers insights and new perspectives. It’s about developing the art of communication, and good communication is what we all need (both good broadcast and good reception).
I must get down to work now, but I thought I’d assuage any concerns about me. My husband has agreed this must be worked out in peace rather than aggression. The more progress I can make in reducing my own problems, the easier it is to just be there for him.
Monday, 5 November 2007
This Demon Doesn't Want to be Exorcised...
I am down here in my basement office, and Brian - yes, Brian, my darling husband's violent alter-ego - is upstairs polishing off a bottle of whiskey. He is very, very angry (at the throwing things stage) so I have left him to it. At the end of the last post I said I thought things would be alright so long as he kept tapping. He stopped tapping just after I wrote that post.
Had this been a few months ago, after all the verbal assaults that have just come my way, I would have been down here crying. As it is, I am typing very calmly. Why? Because EFT works.
Why, then, has my lovely husband disappeared and Brian returned? Because EFT works, and Brian is very, very angry about that. Angry, so he shouts at me tonight, that he has been looking for some kind of spiritual answer all his life and I have found it. He can't accept that I should be the one to find something that works. He likes to find answers for himself.
What could I do, though? He wasn't looking for a way out. He was accepting his illness and the massive impact it had on all our lives (there are six of us in this house). He wasn't trawling the internet for anything that might help (as I did almost daily for three years). Even if he had been looking, brain-fog prevented him from reading. And even if he had been able to read, he hates "other people's answers". He has always despised self-help books and those who read them. He hates "being told what to do." Hates school and anything that looks like school. He doesn't believe in learning from other people. He doesn't believe in "easy answers" so how can he accept this one, even when he has proof that it works? That it worked for him (as far as he was willing to tap, which isn't far) and is working daily (and profoundly) for me. The more he can see that it works, the more he has drawn away from it.
He stopped tapping because he said he needed to understand better how it worked, and until he understood how it worked, he didn't want to tap. He hasn't made any attempt to get any further with finding out how it works (and the understanding is out there, if you want to learn) but he now says he is "suspicious" about EFT. For a while just me tapping on myself, and surrogate tapping on him, was helping him get better. He kept saying he would start tapping again when he had finished reading the manual. He would watch the EFT DVDs when he had finished reading the manual. But he would rather watch lots and lots of Top Gear videos than read the manual. He made it an extremely low priority, and is no further on in the manual (which took me two hours to read) than he was a month ago.
Not surprisingly, therefore, and with a sense of depressing inevitability, I have watched him slowly become overwhelmed, again, by the negative emotions that have been trapped inside his body ever since he was 11 years old. I've watched his face grow slowly more fearful and less friendly, more tired and locked up, putting up his defences against me so that even warmth and friendship can't penetrate. An increasingly number of miscommunications were occurring, and I could sense he was projecting stuff on me from his past, and reading me wrongly. Seeing me as the enemy. I handled all this much better than usual (thanks to EFT) but that seems to have made him even angrier.
Again, as before, he's started telling me (both explicitly and by his behaviour) what a shit person I am. Yesterday, he thundered down the stairs in a rage, accusing me of "breaking promises" to our daughter, because I had put a few dishes into the dishwasher before coming upstairs with her warm milk (but I was making the milk even as he thundered downstairs). And this was at the end of a day spent together with our daughter in the countryside; a good day, and I spent the last hour playing piano with her on her mini-keyboard, Mary Had A Little Lamb over and over again, singing loudly. We were having fun. He pretended to be having fun right up until the last moment when it turned out he was at the end of his tether.
EFT works, but only if you do it. I've been doing it every day, and it's been extraordinary. A week ago, for example, I was out for the evening (we were supposed to be out together but he cried off at the last minute) and halfway through the night my nose started running, my eyes watering, and I had the repeated urge to sneeze, and I could feel something "coming on" - that horrible lurgi that one of my friends (who I insisted on hugging even when she was ill) kept assuring me I would get. I went to the loos to get a whole load of loo-paper for the running nose, and did two rounds of tapping while I was there. Within 15 minutes, all the symptoms disappeared. I had directed my immune system to spring into action and - bless it - I guess it did. The next afternoon, symptoms returned briefly but I tapped them away again and haven't had a problem since. Yes, that's right, ladies and gentlemen, a cure for the common cold.
No wonder my husband hates me. From his perspective, I'm starting to look like a witch.
I did realise about three weeks ago that me doing EFT (while he steadfastly avoided starting it) was putting distance between us. I am really sorting out some serious stuff, getting a real sense of control over my life and that emotional freedom the name of the technique promises. It has been so immensely helpful in getting me through the difficulties of every day that I made the decision that I could not abandon my use of EFT, even if it increases our distance. He will (until he decides to take steps to do otherwise) continue to go through these cycles of depression, rage and self-destruction whether I'm able to handle it or not. I choose to handle it, and EFT works where crying and despairing never did.
I really wanted him to come with me on this; I asked him to. I wanted us to do it together; doing EFT together brings you closer. He refused. So I was obliged to make this journey alone when I'd have much, much rather had his company. Had he come with me, we wouldn't be having these problems now.
So my husband isn't languishing with ME any more, but he's about a million miles from okay. I'm not happy about that, obviously. I would like the other husband back, please, the one who loves and appreciates me and who can see me as I really am, the one who isn't blinded by his rage and jealousy and sense of injustice. But I can't make the man tap. The solution's right there if he wants it, but he doesn't want it, because he's afraid it'll take away his anger and he feels his anger - at me - is justified. (He thinks everything in his past is "dealt with".)
He's wrong of course. This anger should have been levelled at others. At the boys who bullied him and chased him and beat him up and called him "paki", at the parents who didn't notice their son was too afraid to leave the house for five years, the mother who smothered him with her anxiety and fears for his safety (don't climb on that wall, don't go near water, don't do anything adventurous in case you get hurt) at the same time as calling him "scruffy" and "lazy", the father who he knew as "the man dozing in the chair on Sunday afternoons" and who, these days, bulldozers his son with his incessant one-sided conversation, and God knows how many other people that have pissed him off or let him down or abused his good nature in the last forty years.
Unfortunately, he is not in a position to see any of that. Unfortunately, all the anger that should be associated with the people from his past is now associated (in his mind) with me.
There's nothing I can do, then, but look after myself, keep tapping for my own emotional and physical health, and hope this crisis will bring him to some kind of awakening.
Had this been a few months ago, after all the verbal assaults that have just come my way, I would have been down here crying. As it is, I am typing very calmly. Why? Because EFT works.
Why, then, has my lovely husband disappeared and Brian returned? Because EFT works, and Brian is very, very angry about that. Angry, so he shouts at me tonight, that he has been looking for some kind of spiritual answer all his life and I have found it. He can't accept that I should be the one to find something that works. He likes to find answers for himself.
What could I do, though? He wasn't looking for a way out. He was accepting his illness and the massive impact it had on all our lives (there are six of us in this house). He wasn't trawling the internet for anything that might help (as I did almost daily for three years). Even if he had been looking, brain-fog prevented him from reading. And even if he had been able to read, he hates "other people's answers". He has always despised self-help books and those who read them. He hates "being told what to do." Hates school and anything that looks like school. He doesn't believe in learning from other people. He doesn't believe in "easy answers" so how can he accept this one, even when he has proof that it works? That it worked for him (as far as he was willing to tap, which isn't far) and is working daily (and profoundly) for me. The more he can see that it works, the more he has drawn away from it.
He stopped tapping because he said he needed to understand better how it worked, and until he understood how it worked, he didn't want to tap. He hasn't made any attempt to get any further with finding out how it works (and the understanding is out there, if you want to learn) but he now says he is "suspicious" about EFT. For a while just me tapping on myself, and surrogate tapping on him, was helping him get better. He kept saying he would start tapping again when he had finished reading the manual. He would watch the EFT DVDs when he had finished reading the manual. But he would rather watch lots and lots of Top Gear videos than read the manual. He made it an extremely low priority, and is no further on in the manual (which took me two hours to read) than he was a month ago.
Not surprisingly, therefore, and with a sense of depressing inevitability, I have watched him slowly become overwhelmed, again, by the negative emotions that have been trapped inside his body ever since he was 11 years old. I've watched his face grow slowly more fearful and less friendly, more tired and locked up, putting up his defences against me so that even warmth and friendship can't penetrate. An increasingly number of miscommunications were occurring, and I could sense he was projecting stuff on me from his past, and reading me wrongly. Seeing me as the enemy. I handled all this much better than usual (thanks to EFT) but that seems to have made him even angrier.
Again, as before, he's started telling me (both explicitly and by his behaviour) what a shit person I am. Yesterday, he thundered down the stairs in a rage, accusing me of "breaking promises" to our daughter, because I had put a few dishes into the dishwasher before coming upstairs with her warm milk (but I was making the milk even as he thundered downstairs). And this was at the end of a day spent together with our daughter in the countryside; a good day, and I spent the last hour playing piano with her on her mini-keyboard, Mary Had A Little Lamb over and over again, singing loudly. We were having fun. He pretended to be having fun right up until the last moment when it turned out he was at the end of his tether.
EFT works, but only if you do it. I've been doing it every day, and it's been extraordinary. A week ago, for example, I was out for the evening (we were supposed to be out together but he cried off at the last minute) and halfway through the night my nose started running, my eyes watering, and I had the repeated urge to sneeze, and I could feel something "coming on" - that horrible lurgi that one of my friends (who I insisted on hugging even when she was ill) kept assuring me I would get. I went to the loos to get a whole load of loo-paper for the running nose, and did two rounds of tapping while I was there. Within 15 minutes, all the symptoms disappeared. I had directed my immune system to spring into action and - bless it - I guess it did. The next afternoon, symptoms returned briefly but I tapped them away again and haven't had a problem since. Yes, that's right, ladies and gentlemen, a cure for the common cold.
No wonder my husband hates me. From his perspective, I'm starting to look like a witch.
I did realise about three weeks ago that me doing EFT (while he steadfastly avoided starting it) was putting distance between us. I am really sorting out some serious stuff, getting a real sense of control over my life and that emotional freedom the name of the technique promises. It has been so immensely helpful in getting me through the difficulties of every day that I made the decision that I could not abandon my use of EFT, even if it increases our distance. He will (until he decides to take steps to do otherwise) continue to go through these cycles of depression, rage and self-destruction whether I'm able to handle it or not. I choose to handle it, and EFT works where crying and despairing never did.
I really wanted him to come with me on this; I asked him to. I wanted us to do it together; doing EFT together brings you closer. He refused. So I was obliged to make this journey alone when I'd have much, much rather had his company. Had he come with me, we wouldn't be having these problems now.
So my husband isn't languishing with ME any more, but he's about a million miles from okay. I'm not happy about that, obviously. I would like the other husband back, please, the one who loves and appreciates me and who can see me as I really am, the one who isn't blinded by his rage and jealousy and sense of injustice. But I can't make the man tap. The solution's right there if he wants it, but he doesn't want it, because he's afraid it'll take away his anger and he feels his anger - at me - is justified. (He thinks everything in his past is "dealt with".)
He's wrong of course. This anger should have been levelled at others. At the boys who bullied him and chased him and beat him up and called him "paki", at the parents who didn't notice their son was too afraid to leave the house for five years, the mother who smothered him with her anxiety and fears for his safety (don't climb on that wall, don't go near water, don't do anything adventurous in case you get hurt) at the same time as calling him "scruffy" and "lazy", the father who he knew as "the man dozing in the chair on Sunday afternoons" and who, these days, bulldozers his son with his incessant one-sided conversation, and God knows how many other people that have pissed him off or let him down or abused his good nature in the last forty years.
Unfortunately, he is not in a position to see any of that. Unfortunately, all the anger that should be associated with the people from his past is now associated (in his mind) with me.
There's nothing I can do, then, but look after myself, keep tapping for my own emotional and physical health, and hope this crisis will bring him to some kind of awakening.
Friday, 5 October 2007
A Return to Normal Life
I have been hesitant to say this, as it is so often the case that the moment you start to relax and think things are going well that it all turns bad again. But for the first time since my husband's last major relapse in February 2006, we are living what feels like a normal life. This is something I've craved for so long it seems bizarre that we have slipped into it almost unnoticed. I have been scared to acknowledge it in case it turned out to be a mirage. But we have finally arrived at a place where I can book things into my diary without causing problems between us.
For a long time now, I have had to consider my husband's illness every time I try to schedule work; every date has had to be negotiated carefully, and gaps left for him to recover if anything I do will lead to him being overloaded with childcare. I could never, for example, do two days work (out of the house) in a row. Yet next month, I'm going away to Yorkshire for five days, with his blessing. The proof of that pudding will be in the eating, and I hope it's not a dangerous experiment, but its quite something that he feels strong enough to agree to it.
And after a year and a half of not being able to arrange an evening out because my husband is always too ill - too ill to come, and too ill to be left alone to cope with the children - I am finally getting back some kind of social life. For a long time now there has always been a price to pay for going out in the evening; my husband's illness would be worse for a few days; often, he would be angry with me about the position it put him in, the fact that he would feel worse as a result. Agreement to anything that would leave him alone to cope with putting our daughter to bed was given grudgingly; his ME always in precarious balance with my need to live "a normal life". (Something that, in my times of despair, I have mourned the loss of).
In the last couple of weeks, normal life has been there for both of us, as if it never went away. I've been out several times without it causing any kind of problem. I've been able to work full days and emerged to find my husband cheerful and in good health. Even though I've had a heavy week of work, he has managed to hold the fort, and not suffered any kind of setbacks. He 's only marginally more tired, at the end of the day, than I am; and occasionally, less. On Saturday, we going to a party together. It has been a long, long time since he has felt able (or been willing) to go to a party. I'm the gregarious type, and I've very much missed being out with him; being a couple in public.
He's picking up his life again. Friends are beginning to drop in us like they used to; he's started to develop some of his interests, now that he can do the research without getting brain-fogged. He did a full day's work yesterday - performance workshops with primary school children - the sort of thing that, not long ago, would have knocked him back for a week. Yet he was in a better state to get our daughter to nursery this morning than I was, and is currently working at a laptop on the kitchen table, with no sign of malaise or post-exertion fatigue. EFT consistently delivers things that look like miracles, so at some point I should stop being surprised.
I'm fairly confident, too, that he's not overdoing it (as has so often been his downfall in the past) - he is being careful now about what he takes on, and is still listening to his body and resting when he needs to. But his body is giving him less trouble than it has for a long time. No doubt there will be challenges, possibly even setbacks. But we are, at least for now, living what feels to me like the normal life I have been craving ever since his ME took over our lives.
He's not as involved with EFT as I am, yet, but he has turned towards it, and is learning in his own time. He appreciates what it can do for him; for us. I think it's probably harder for people with ME to do their own EFT because of the energy-depleted state of the body; he reports the effects as being much weaker when he does it on himself than when I do it for him. But as his cells slowly repair, this should change.
I can't tell you what a relief it is to live like this; health is one of those things whose value you don't appreciate until you are forced to live without it. I'm actually a little afraid to trust that my husband is going to continue to be well, and be fully restored to me - at this stage, I'm holding something of myself back in case it collapses and proves to be an illusion. Trust needs to be rebuilt on both sides, and strangely, my husband is now rebuilding his trust more quickly than I am. But good and significant things are happening, and so long as he sticks with EFT, I believe we will be alright.
For a long time now, I have had to consider my husband's illness every time I try to schedule work; every date has had to be negotiated carefully, and gaps left for him to recover if anything I do will lead to him being overloaded with childcare. I could never, for example, do two days work (out of the house) in a row. Yet next month, I'm going away to Yorkshire for five days, with his blessing. The proof of that pudding will be in the eating, and I hope it's not a dangerous experiment, but its quite something that he feels strong enough to agree to it.
And after a year and a half of not being able to arrange an evening out because my husband is always too ill - too ill to come, and too ill to be left alone to cope with the children - I am finally getting back some kind of social life. For a long time now there has always been a price to pay for going out in the evening; my husband's illness would be worse for a few days; often, he would be angry with me about the position it put him in, the fact that he would feel worse as a result. Agreement to anything that would leave him alone to cope with putting our daughter to bed was given grudgingly; his ME always in precarious balance with my need to live "a normal life". (Something that, in my times of despair, I have mourned the loss of).
In the last couple of weeks, normal life has been there for both of us, as if it never went away. I've been out several times without it causing any kind of problem. I've been able to work full days and emerged to find my husband cheerful and in good health. Even though I've had a heavy week of work, he has managed to hold the fort, and not suffered any kind of setbacks. He 's only marginally more tired, at the end of the day, than I am; and occasionally, less. On Saturday, we going to a party together. It has been a long, long time since he has felt able (or been willing) to go to a party. I'm the gregarious type, and I've very much missed being out with him; being a couple in public.
He's picking up his life again. Friends are beginning to drop in us like they used to; he's started to develop some of his interests, now that he can do the research without getting brain-fogged. He did a full day's work yesterday - performance workshops with primary school children - the sort of thing that, not long ago, would have knocked him back for a week. Yet he was in a better state to get our daughter to nursery this morning than I was, and is currently working at a laptop on the kitchen table, with no sign of malaise or post-exertion fatigue. EFT consistently delivers things that look like miracles, so at some point I should stop being surprised.
I'm fairly confident, too, that he's not overdoing it (as has so often been his downfall in the past) - he is being careful now about what he takes on, and is still listening to his body and resting when he needs to. But his body is giving him less trouble than it has for a long time. No doubt there will be challenges, possibly even setbacks. But we are, at least for now, living what feels to me like the normal life I have been craving ever since his ME took over our lives.
He's not as involved with EFT as I am, yet, but he has turned towards it, and is learning in his own time. He appreciates what it can do for him; for us. I think it's probably harder for people with ME to do their own EFT because of the energy-depleted state of the body; he reports the effects as being much weaker when he does it on himself than when I do it for him. But as his cells slowly repair, this should change.
I can't tell you what a relief it is to live like this; health is one of those things whose value you don't appreciate until you are forced to live without it. I'm actually a little afraid to trust that my husband is going to continue to be well, and be fully restored to me - at this stage, I'm holding something of myself back in case it collapses and proves to be an illusion. Trust needs to be rebuilt on both sides, and strangely, my husband is now rebuilding his trust more quickly than I am. But good and significant things are happening, and so long as he sticks with EFT, I believe we will be alright.
Monday, 24 September 2007
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.
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.
Monday, 10 September 2007
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 6/7ths 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.
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