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.

Sorting Myself Out First

We've been having a bad couple of days; the first bad patch for 8 weeks. There are numerous reasons (aren't there always) but chief amongst them have been my husband's struggling to complete some work that he took on months ago, and some emotional fragility on my side brought on as the result of my trying to tackle some of my long-standing demons with EFT.

The EFT started with me, and my husband feels strongly (and I've now agreed) that I'll have to work on myself first, and my husband second. I have a huge backlog of issues from my past that mean I react badly to many of the things that ME throws up in our lives. EFT is really helpful in allowing me to deal with those issues as they arise, but it seems a whole pile of ancient history is arising now, practically queuing up to be dealt with, and as I have also taken on pretty much 100% of the household chores, I've been feeling quite overloaded at times, and have reacted badly, a couple of times, to my husband snapping at me when he is tired.

Recovery from ME is not a smooth path, so this isn't a setback. In the end, I hope it will prove to have been a positive development, a way of making progress. I'm desperate for my husband to be well again, but desperation is a negative emotion, and creates a sense of pressure. So I'll see if I can tap away my desperation, as well as many of the other negative emotions that loving a man with ME brings up in me - all of which are rooted in my childhood (where I was routinely misunderstood and underappreciated).

I'm still very sure that EFT is going to be our way out of this. It's remarkably powerful, and I feel the benefit of it every day. Yesterday, some melted plastic dripped onto my thumb knuckle when I was stoking a fire, and even though it blistered up instantly, I managed to tap away the pain in less than a minute. Emotional pain is more knotty and multi-faceted, but I am making progress there too, piece by piece, event by event. It's just going to take some time. And when I'm more solid, I'll be in a much better place to help the man I love.

On No Longer Being Useless

One of the things that used to really get to me about my husband's ME is that I couldn't do anything about it. No matter how hard I tried to help him, I couldn't make him better. I felt so helpless (and hopeless) in the face of this relentless illness that for the last two years I have often avoided being with him when he has been at his most ill because hanging around his ME was so frustrating and depressing.

Particularly, I'd be working (I work from home) and would hear him having a sneezing or coughing fit - a sure sign that he was having a bad day and getting worse - and I would just try to blank it out and plough on with my work, knowing that when I emerged, he would most likely be angry and miserable. I knew he would want me to stop and take over the childcare, but I was resistant. ME would have me doing childcare 24/7, and who would earn a living, pay the bills? I did what I could but I also felt that what I could was pretty much nothing. Barring giving up my life completely, what could I do? ME had already swallowed his life - I'd be damned if it swallowed mine too. Damned if we fell into debt for it, lost the house. And anyway, it seemed that no matter how much I looked after our daughter, my husband would continue to be chronically ill.

EFT has changed all that, because now I feel there is something I can do that genuinely helps. When I hear him sneezing, or notice some other symptom that is the start of the daily downhill slide, I stop what I am doing, go to him, sit him down, and encourage him to do some EFT. He feels cared for, I feel useful, and above all, we have something that helps him feel almost immediately better.

Last night he had a severe headache; when I got in I relieved it with EFT in minutes. As always seems to happen after a late session of EFT, he then relaxed into an unusually deep and solid sleep, which helps him enormously. It is my goal to tap him every evening if I can for just this reason, if I can.

He's doing a little EFT himself but it seems much more effective when I tap him than when he taps himself, and I'm very happy to be in the position of "healer" rather than "person running away and exacerbating the illness." There is a long way to go, of course - and we are miles away from core issues, which he will come to when he feels ready - but for now we have drug-free instantaneous pain-relief, refreshing sleep and healing at our fingertips.

EFT is empowering - not only because it's so good to be able to help him, but because it helps me banish my own negativity and health problems, leaving me more able to cope with anything extra his ME might need me to deal with. So even though he is still unwell, he is a great deal better than he was a couple of weeks ago, and I am thrilled to be instrumental in healing him.

I am hopeful that he will be considerably better by Christmas. Time will tell.

Energy and the Lack of It

As you might have noticed, I haven’t been blogging. For the last few weeks I have been putting my energies exactly where they are needed, which is into sorting my husband out. While he was being Brian, his angry, depressed, illness-centred alter-ego, spending more time with him and giving up six to eight hours a day to childcare and housework wasn’t in the slightest bit appealing. But we finally reached the bottom and both had something to kick against. We are on our way up, and I have every hope that we will be surfacing in a matter of only months. Not from depression and marital strife – that has happened already – but from ME.

For the first time in two years, I genuinely believe he is going to recover now, and that we will be able – at last – to fully live the life we deserve. Enjoy a healthy, happy, life together.

When we first visualised his recovery, some time ago now, I pictured (as positive thinking demands) the image of us that would signify his recovery. I said going on holiday and being able to do the amount of walking and sightseeing and doing that we both want to. Venice (our honeymoon) was ruined by the ME. It was the first time realisation really dawned. He had been ill for six months but both of us were in denial. Neither of us wanted it to be ME. So it wasn’t. We didn’t want to talk about. But just a short walk out to get breakfast and see one sight would exhaust him. We’d go back to the apartment (a beautiful apartment not far from the fish market and The Rialto Bridge) for lunch and he’d go to bed for the rest of the afternoon. As I think I’ve mentioned before, I came back from my honeymoon an expert level electronic solo backgammon player. I think that was probably the time I started getting (ever so gently, and deniably) depressed.

ME is all about energy. Lack of it. And with all I’ve read about this illness, all I have thought about it over the last three and half years – coming at it from many angles, both physical and psychological, has benefited from what I already know about human biology (which I have to degree level), and my interest in energy fields and energy moving, and my yearning to understand, and to able to allow something you might call “spirituality” despite my scientist side.

In ME, something is wrong with energy-generating capacity of the body. At the cellular level, research has shown that the mitochondria (the energy-producing organelles) of people with ME don’t function normally. Under stress (such as the exertion of exercise) they fail and even die.

Energy medicine is where all my research seems to come together.

This post was written six days ago, when my husband was very ill, meaning I didn't have the time to finish it.

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.

Losing Sleep For The Right Reasons

Sometimes you have to get to the very bottom of things before it gets so desperate that there are no further choices: it’s decide to end it all (your current state of life) or start going up.

We descended to the bottom through layers of increasingly bitter shocks. There was the Venice honeymoon blighted by his ability to walk for any time or any distance before needing to sleep all afternoon while I got disconcertingly good at, and addicted to, playing solo electronic backgammon. There was the first time he said “Fuck You” and didn’t start laughing after a few seconds. Really meant it. Locking myself in the car once, because he scared me. Shocks of all shapes and sizes, constantly surprising, all slaps in the face. That was all him (or ME) shocking me. Waking me up to what this illness is and does. Once I was fully awake, we were miles apart, and he was furious with me. He was a stranger: angry, and resentful, and insecure, and full of rage. I dreamt his ME as a poisonous substance-abusing lodger called Brian, who we'd inadvertently invited in as a friend of a friend, who refused to move out, and now we were stuck with heavy drinking and emotional warfare. After that dream, I woke up to the realisation that my husband had become, was enveloped by, Brian.

But I never stopped wanting my first husband to return. Desperation pushed me to my own edges, until I started to do things that shocked him back. Six months ago I responded to the launch of another verbal assault by throwing a glass of water in his face.
Ever since then, by slow levels, we have been ascending to the light. Shocks from me to him help us surface.

Last week, realising the extent to which I was drowning without his emotional suport, I finally began to feel that if I couldn’t have it, when it came down to it, that I should start making progress, in a very real way, out of the marriage. I didn’t want him to move out; it isn’t that I don’t love him any more, because I do. Painfully so. But I had begun to feel that he treated me so much better when we weren’t married, and since treating me better was what I wanted him to do, I reasoned that maybe the best thing to do was to stop being married to him.

When the woman you love is lying there awake next to you at four o’ clock in the morning, and says, quietly, that she wants to get a divorce, it’s a one of the bigger shocks. What is telling is how a husband reacts, and mine reacted like my real husband. Became, in less than an hour of talking, my original husband, the man who genuinely loves me and is horrified to wake up in the middle of making his wife so very unhappy.

He came in a few hours later while I was reading people's comments on here and I didn't hide it. "It really makes me sad," I said, "that there's a bunch of people you've never even met who knows more about what's going on in my head than you do." We talked. I cried. He held me, and said sorry; he was truly, truly sorry.

This was last Thursday morning. It’ll be a week tomorrow, and things are feeling firmer and safer day by day. We’re getting better at being happy with each other, and enjoying having our connection back. We’re losing sleep for the right reasons instead of the wrong ones. For a long time now, my husband’s insomnia was lodged upstairs on a sofa, watching movies, passing the hours in draining isolation. For the last week we’ve had more positive forms of sleep-loss: long talks in each other’s arms, and kissing. We are lovers again, as we were right back at the beginning.

I’ve been wrong before. But let's hope I'm not.