EFT for Sexual Trauma
How working on a "simple" goal can tap into trauma and how to deal with it.
This post is written with the express permission of my client, “Gabrielle” who is happy to share her story with the intention of educating others about the impact of sexual trauma.
Like me, she is passionate about the need for EFT practitioners, psychologists and therapists to be more than “trauma informed”. Those working with people who have experienced significant trauma need to know how to skilfully use EFT to handle trauma gently when it arises, and how to process the traumatic memories offered up by the unconscious mind.
This session is a perfect example of how working on a “simple goal” like wanting to renovate your house, can uncover traumatic memories for processing. And how when these memories are dealt with sensitively and appropriately, there is the potential for great progress on core issues, limiting beliefs, and lots of growth and healing.
All identifying details changed to protect privacy.
Background :
This is a very long-term client of mine who initially came to see me for assistance with the impacts of her complex trauma (PTSD). She was severely sexually, physically and emotionally abused by her alcoholic father throughout childhood. As well as becoming a high achieving professional, and a mum, she went on to become an alcoholic herself for many years. She experienced only abusive relationships with men. Gabrielle has now been sober for a number of years and avoids relationships with men, knowing she still has lots of internal work to do.
In this way she considers herself “Closed For Renovations”.
“Gabrielle” is a great single mum to her children, and is very aware of not repeating the dysfunctional patterns she experienced in her own family of origin.
When I first met her, Gabrielle had abandoned all traditional forms of therapy, as she found that therapists made her feel like she was a failure because she was not getting better. Strangely, doing the positive affirmations each night, as suggested by the last psychologist, was not actually helping her.
So she stopped, and her psychologist then said she was not really trying. She experienced a great deal of re-traumatisation in therapy over many years, from the re-telling of her horror stories of abuse with no opportunity to somatically process the trauma and emotions held in her body.
This woman has done a lot of EFT with me, and she practices it regularly on herself. Her progress as a result has been nothing short of incredible. She now comes monthly, and in this recent session, she said she was feeling so good that she decided to try and work on a goal.
This is quite rare, as usually there is some very intense emotional reactions to recent events that we would work on in a session, and the goal would be just to reduce that intensity, or work towards responding in a different way to her ex-husband, her boss, or whoever that person triggering her might be at the time.
EFT for Trauma Tip: Safety First
It’s important to do some screening to find out about your client’s trauma history, which they may think is irrelevant to the problem they want help with. This way you know what you may come up against in the sessions, and whether or not you ought to proceed as the EFT practitioner (if you are a coach) or refer out to someone who is also a licensed mental health professional / therapist.
It is also worth noting here that when you work with people who have experienced a lot of trauma, you can spend a lot of the early sessions just keeping your client regulated emotionally and physically whilst finding what to focus on as a presenting issue.
At this early stage, your priority is developing safety trust and rapport with your client. And explaining to them that this is “the work” for you and for them, because if they do not feel safe emotionally in the session, and are not regulated physiologically, you will not be able to work on anything much. Trauma work is different in this way.
This is why traditional talk therapies basically fail people who have experienced a lot of trauma, as just talking about events can bring up so much in the body, and that can be terrifying. And if there is nothing somatic (meaning to use the body - like EFT/ tapping) offered by the therapist to help a client with these extreme sensations in their bodies, the experience can be awful, which can put people off seeking help in the future.
A common somatic response for people who have experienced sexual trauma is feeling like the throat is constricted or closing over when they start to talk about their experiences or feelings. Trauma affects the part of the brain responsible for speech, known as “Broca’s area”, so the simple act of talking about problems can become extremely difficult. This can prevent the person physiologically from being able to talk at all, let alone express deeply held emotions, which can be frustrating for them or make them feel stupid or embarrassed. Because they want help, but they cannot express themselves.
Things that may seem little or insignificant, including the “wrong” words from you as practitioner or not using their exact words, can trigger a lot of strong emotion with people who have experienced significant trauma. And they may find it hard to speak up about this, as that is another common challenge for people with a history of sexual trauma. So you have to become good at reading the cues of your clients.
As a practitioner you need to go slow when working with trauma, listening to the body, maintaining eye contact, observing facial expressions. This can be frustrating for them and possibly you, as you may not feel like you are really achieving anything, but the opposite is actually true. Feeling safe to talk about sensitive matters and feeling okay about being vulnerable with someone is a massive achievement for someone with sexual trauma history.
EFT Tip on setting goals and safety:
With all clients you should be aiming to make any goals small, realistic, measurable and very achievable within a specific time frame. But be even more mindful when working with traumatised individuals, as they are likely to have a very strong feeling of “I am not good enough” and may have experienced a lot of “failure” in the context of therapy, relationships and life in general.
They don’t need any more practice at that with you.
So if the goal cannot be easily achieved, in a short space of time, and you cannot measure it, you are setting your clients up for failure. And yourself.
Your goal setting skills may need work if you want to consider yourself to be “trauma informed”.
Presenting problem:
Gabrielle reported she has had money in the bank for years to do renovations on her run down old house, but she feels stuck and unable to move forward with this goal.
“I’m paralysed” she said. We came up with the following statement;
I can’t move forward with my renovations. Before EFT; VOC 100%
Validity of Cognition - is a way of measuring the perceived strength of a limiting belief, like how true does this feel for you now? It is usually measured as a percentage.
Goal for session: to reduce VOC from 100% to 80%
Gabrielle stated she has the perfect vision in her mind of what she wants the kitchen to look like, and I asked her what would be the first little baby step towards taking action on this. She said she has tried twice before, a few years ago, to get someone to come around and look at the work to be done, to give her a quote. And that was as far as she got because it just brought up so much stuff for her, and she felt scared.
I asked her when she thinks about getting someone to come and look at her kitchen/bathroom to give a quote now, what is it about that specifically that feels difficult. “They’ll come and see how run down the place is and think that I don’t really care about my house, and then they won’t do a good job”. She feared judgement, felt she would feel vulnerable as a single woman trusting a man to come and look at her house, and reported having been ripped off a couple of times by tradesmen.
She said she could make the appointment with no trouble, but just thinking about the practicalities also made her feel overwhelmed, like all the stuff in her cupboards, and then she was remembering the earlier attempts to progress this goal and how difficult she found this simple task back then.
GOAL for session:
In the next week, to make an appointment to get someone to come and look at the renovation work to be done and give a quote.
I asked her how she feels now thinking about taking that step:
OVERWHELMED: 7/10, feeling tight in the throat.
Session Goal: to reduce overwhelm by 50% to a 3-4/10
Aim to under-promise but over-deliver in setting specific goals, always going for a 0-2/10 obviously.
Before starting the tapping, I ask a few key questions to get a good baseline of where she is at and what might be underlying this, so at the end of the session I can come back and see what progress has been made, and where there is still more work to do. I learned these questions from EFT Practitioner /Trainer Joan Kaylor, and I adapt the questions sometimes depending on the client.
How confident do you feel about doing this? pre-EFT answer 40%
How motivated are you to do this? pre-EFT answer 85%
How safe do you feel about doing this? pre-EFT answer 20%
How worthy/deserving do you feel of achieving this goal? pre-EFT answer 5%
These questions can help you and the client to see where the unconscious blocks are, but proceed with caution. My client became quite teary when she realised she did not feel like she was deserving of a nice kitchen and bathroom. She had not been consciously aware of this, and was upset by this realisation that after all the work she has done on herself, she still does not feel worthy of nice things.
I have my clients tapping from the beginning of the session just at the side of the hand point, so they can stay as regulated as possible whilst tuning in to what’s coming up. We did a round or two of silent tapping on the points, just to help her to re-regulate, and she was able to talk again. This reduced the intensity of the overwhelm slightly.
Based on a bit of further discussion, the set-up statement using her exact words was:
“Even though I feel overwhelmed (now) 6/10, just thinking about getting a man to come and look at the renovations to be done in my kitchen and bathroom, because that feels like it will be intrusive, I might feel vulnerable having a man coming in and poking around in my cupboards, I’ve created a safe space for the kids and I there and it would feel disturbing to me, and I am feeling this tightness in my throat, but I accept myself and how I feel.” (The balancing statement she prefers).
Traumatic memory number #1
We repeated this first set-up and the rounds of tapping a couple of times, and then I noticed Gabrielle was teary. She said her mind was thinking of the first man who came to look at her house to give a quote for renovations a number of years ago. The tradesman had been the friend of an older man Gabrielle was involved with back then. She began thinking about how abusive this older man used to be, often criticising her and telling her how she needs to improve her house. She said she felt very sad now remembering how traumatised she was back then. Still an alcoholic, she had no boundaries whatsoever, and allowed herself to be “used and thrown around”, as she felt “very small, like a nothing”. It was a very low time in her life. Her throat felt tighter just talking about this.
Again we did a round or two of silent tapping, allowing the tears to come and go. She could then talk freely again. The initial set-up statement was deliberately a bit global, due to the 8/10 intensity - too intense for us to go into a lot of detail yet.
“Even though I feel sad 8/10, just remembering that time in my life, when I was so traumatised. I had no boundaries, it was a very low point in my life, and I feel this tightness in my throat, I accept myself and how I feel.” The reminder phase was simply “feeling sad, feeling sad in my throat”.
After one round the sadness had reduced to 5/10. We did another round adding a few more specific details;
“Even though I feel really sad 5/10, thinking about that time when I got that guy to come and look at my kitchen. I was so traumatised, I had no boundaries. I allowed myself to be used and hurt because I felt so small, like a nothing, and I feel this tightness in my throat, but I accept myself and how I feel”.
After the second round Gabrielle started to think about how much more self respect she has now, that she will never go back to drinking again, and how much debt she has paid off since that time. She thought it was funny now that she has all this money in the bank and hasn’t felt able to spend it. A little more chatting about this with continuous tapping and the sadness was now 4/10.
Traumatic memory number #2
Gabrielle then found herself thinking about her father, who was also very critical and controlling of her and her house. “He would come over and put me down and put my house down too, telling me what I need to do. He made me feel like I couldn’t do anything for myself. He created this dependency, which she then realised she had transferred on to other men she was involved with. This dependency then made it easy for the men to abuse and exploit her. We did a set-up statement to reflect this;
“Even though I feel this sadness, 4/10 just thinking about getting someone to come and look at my kitchen, I feel sad about how dependent I was on dad and that other man back then, I didn’t have any other way to be, I didn’t know any different, and I feel this in my throat a little but I accept myself and how I feel.”
Reminder phrase: “this sadness in my throat”.
After one or two rounds on this Gabrielle noticed a cognitive shift. She started to talk about the big shifts she is noticing lately in how she responds to things like being let down, or disappointed. “I can tell I am changing, growing and letting go”. She said she used to feel shame about everything back then, when she was so traumatised and drinking heavily. She had to hide a lot of things, and compartmentalise all the different parts of her life. She had to keep a lot of secrets, and she realises that the only thing she really feels shame about now is her house. (And her body - a separate issue all together for another session).
Some other sadness began to show up as Gabrielle thought about what high achiever she was as a child. Because there was no other way to get any sort of acknowledgement from her father she had to constantly strive for his approval. And yet, despite all she had achieved as an adult (a degree, a marriage, a house, children, a professional job) at that time in her life, when she first tried to arrange renovations in her house, she felt that she had no value whatsoever.
After chatting about this Gabrielle found herself thinking about her own kids, and what a simple, easy normal childhood they have. They don’t feel pressured to do or be anything spectacular in order to feel loved and approved of, and she feels proud of what she has achieved in that sense. Her children know their intrinsic value and goodness already because she has chosen to deal with her trauma, rather than passing it on to her children as her father did. The sadness was gone now, she said, it felt like a zero.
Just to test our work I asked her to think back to our original goal of having someone come look at the kitchen and bathroom to do a quote for renovations. She reported feeling a bit overwhelmed again about the state of her house, and feeling like she would have to make everything nice and acceptable before they came. There was no feeling in her throat anymore. We did another round of basic EFT on this feeling,
“Even though I have this overwhelmed feeling, 4/10, thinking about someone coming to look at the house, because I think I would have to pull everything out of the cupboards, to make it all look nice, and then it still won’t be acceptable, but I accept myself and how I feel”. The overwhelm reduced to a 2/10 and she said she felt much more confident because if she felt any judgement from the person who came, as the customer she can decide to not choose them. She said that she doesn’t feel as scared now as she has the power in that situation. We did one more round until the overwhelm felt like a zero.
We had then surpassed our goal to get Overwhelm from a 7/10 to a 3-4/10.
I then asked her to think about our initial statements.
I can’t move forward with my renovations on kitchen/bathroom: Initial VOC 100% The goal was to reduce this to 80%, and we reached 60%.
Now to check in on our other statements, which I hadn’t set goals for, as all of this work can lead to lots of long conversations, especially with someone you know well! But it’s always interesting to see what has changed, and these were great results. Doing this kind of exercise can really help the client see just how effective EFT is for reducing unwanted thoughts, feelings and beliefs and increasing more positive ones.
How confident do you feel about taking this step toward the goal? Initially 40% increased to 80%
How motivated are you to do this? Initially 85% increased to 100%
How safe do you feel about doing this? Initially 20% increased to 50%
How worthy/deserving do you feel of achieving this goal? Initially 5% Increased to 70%
Gabrielle left the session feeling confident, safe, and motivated to take that next baby step of arranging a quote for renovations to make her dream kitchen and bathroom come true. Most importantly she felt deserving of achieving this goal. We are both always amazed at the power of EFT to help the body gently bring up and release old trauma from her body, enabling her to be more present to her children, whose safety and happiness is her most important goal and priority.