The Banana Bread Analogy
The importance of pre-framing to keep your clients safe using EFT/tapping.
These blog posts are designed to help you understand how to do EFT more safely and effectively, whether practicing on yourself or with clients. They are based on the considerable experience and training I have had in EFT for trauma. I am just sharing what has been helpful to me.
Trigger Warning:
I write about the topic of sexual abuse in many of my blogs, as it is my niche and I wish to educate practitioners and people in general about what issues are commonly faced when working with people who’ve experienced this very common form of trauma. In my opinion, it should be spoken about more openly.
I never go into any graphic detail, approaching it more as a general theme. But if you think this might be triggering for you, perhaps just proceed with caution, and think about having some personal EFT sessions for yourself. If you are an EFT practitioner or therapist, you will come across this topic with a client some day, and it’s important to have worked on your own feelings about this if it’s part of your personal history. Also a good idea to speak with your mentor about how your work with clients might be impacting you personally.
If you do not generally work with trauma, you may still find this analogy useful in helping your clients to be specific when focusing on events.
“What could banana bread possibly have to do with EFT?” you may be wondering.
Put it on your EFT tabletop! And think of it like a table leg; it’s just another way of saying “tell me a recent time when you felt that sadness”. It’s all about keeping your client safe and keeping your sessions specific, and therefore more effective.
But why do we need another way of asking this? Maybe you don’t? But I know I did. Especially working as mental health professional who practices EFT, and specialising in sexual trauma. I found that most people were coming to me with lots of very BIG emotions, which they had been experiencing for a LONG time, and they had MANY examples of how this was showing up for them. Just finding a place to start could be overwhelming for my client and for me!
Let me tell you a little about my early days in the local Sexual Assault Service, where I first learned EFT.
All of my clients had a known Big T Trauma history, and often also a long history of talk therapy (which usually had not helped them much with their trauma). Clients often assumed that my session with them was going to be like talk therapy. They would just start telling me all the worst things that had ever happened to them, (think sexually abused by brother at 10, then uncle at 14, then date rape at 21, and now their 10 year old daughter has just disclosed that she has been touched inappropriately by a friend’s child. That was a pretty normal presentation).
Before I had time to say anything much, my client would be awash with tears and flooded with sadness about how awful their life is now, and what a hopeless mother they are for not protecting their child. I had not even had a chance to explain what EFT was at this point, let alone what a table top was. And to be honest, I found this analogy of table tops and legs didn’t land so well. My clients would feel like they had department stores full of tables on tables. And they did. Maybe I just wasn’t explaining it well, but I needed to find something that worked better for me and for my clients in this work.
I like food analogies. And I love banana bread. And yes I have tapped on that, and it is now a “sometimes food”! :)
I was probably thinking about banana bread when this analogy came to me in a session. I used to eat a lot of banana bread back then, it was a stressful job! Anyway, I have found that this analogy works really well in helping my client understand some important EFT concepts in the first tapping session. I also refer back to it in future sessions if it has landed with that client. I find that most of my clients like it, they get it, and they will often refer back to it themselves.
Forewarned is forearmed and I believe that our clients ought to have as much information as possible about how EFT works and why it works. This helps them to trust the process more fully, to trust you as the practitioner (as you sound like you know what you’re talking about). It allows them to relax into the process, accepting the weirder aspects of EFT so they can be open to experiencing the power, speed and effectiveness of it.
These days I start my work with a client by explaining that an EFT session is very different to a talk therapy session. I am usually doing this in an initial consultation. I let them know there is no need for them to tell me their whole life story and all the bad things that have ever happened to them. In fact I don’t want them to do that. Lots of people are relieved by this, as many dread having to talk about what happened to them, especially if their trauma involves sexual abuse.
**However I have found that it is important and useful to have a first session that is about assessment, screening, telling me what they want me to know, what they’ve tried already, building rapport and goal setting. That’s generally my whole first session, as well as teaching them how to do EFT for themselves, but I’m not doing any real tapping with them, beyond a demonstration. But that’s probably another blog post.
I explain to my client that most people come to me with a whole big fat banana bread loaf (or loaves) of big emotions, like Sadness for example. And our job in this first tapping session might be initially to tap on that sadness in a general way, just to take the edge off the intensity. But then, in order to be most effective, we need to cut a slice from that loaf, and then to cut that slice into about 9 little pieces of sadness. And to begin with we are just going to focus on one little piece, which represents a recent time when the person experienced this sadness. I tell them that the reason we do this is so that I am able to ensure that they find the session comfortable and so they don’t become overwhelmed with big emotions.
In my experience, the reality is that EFT has the potential to have people coming undone pretty quickly, especially if they have a trauma background, so I am honest about that. People appreciate this, as many have had experiences in therapy of feeling re-traumatised, and they’re happy to skip that in their EFT session if at all possible.
I use the banana bread analogy to explain the generalisation effect; how if we do a good job on this one little piece of loaf, that there will be a positive flow on effect to the other little pieces of that slice. And if they keep tapping, either with me and/or at home, eventually the whole loaf of sadness will be impacted and they will feel less sad in general. And there is no need to tap on all the little pieces or all the slices to achieve this.
I explain how different layers of emotion and different aspects might show up while we are focusing on this one piece; one minute they could be feeling really sad about the message we are tapping on, and two minutes later they might be really angry about it. I let them know that this can be a normal part of the process EFT, and we just process as much emotion as we can in one session.
I discuss how the mind might also take the person to other little pieces of that slice of sadness, like other times when they felt this way either recently or earlier in their life. I explain how we will decide what to do about that, if it happens, with the priority always being to keep the client feeling emotionally safe and physiologically comfortable. I explain that we don’t normally work on childhood memories in the first few sessions. This is my policy, and I believe it’s about being “trauma informed”.
The banana bread analogy is particularly helpful in explaining the need to “be specific” - just focusing on one little piece, and all the important pieces of information contained in that - the message, the words, the perceived tone, what meaning was made of the message. As opposed to “going global” in our session - which means going back to the whole loaf, all of the sadness about all of the things.
**As long as the intensity is not too high obviously- you don’t want to get more specific if the person is so teary that they are having trouble speaking, and their throat is closing over. That is the time to back off from specifics and try some gentle techniques instead.
It’s really important for people who have experienced a lot of trauma to feel in control, as much as possible, and they may have a greater need to know what to expect. You don’t want this session to be frightening for them in any way, and it totally is frightening to be trying to talk about something and feeling your throat starting to close over! Or to feel like you’re going to vomit as you are all of a sudden remembering your cousin asking you to touch their private parts when you were 8. That kind of memory popping in can be most unsettling, especially if the client had forgotten all about that event until now! But it can happen with EFT.
We have to remember that many of our clients have never done EFT before and it’s a pretty different way of processing emotions and trauma, and having this sort of memory come up is not what most people are expecting. They may not be thanking you.
I explain in this first session how the mind and body work together when doing EFT. We talk about the Amygdala (the stress response centre) and the Hippocampus (the memory centre) and how we might be tapping on the recent sad event, and the Hippocampus may decide to drop a memory about an earlier time when the person felt that sadness. Or perhaps a memory that doesn’t seem relevant at all, but I still want them to tell me about it.
It’s good to discuss early on how we safely deal with memories and big emotions that may come up, so the client feels prepared. They have the visual in their mind of a loaf of banana bread and the slices and then the little pieces. It helps them to understand what’s happening and what their job is in giving me feedback, letting know what their mind is focusing on during the session. So I know where to go and what to do.
I let them know I am very interruptible, and it’s their job to stop me and tell me if something new is happening or an emotion or sensation is getting vey intense. If you don’t expressly give this permission, some people will feel like it’s rude to interrupt you and not tell you about something important they are thinking or feeling.
If the tapping doesn’t seem to be working, as in the SUDS (Subjective Units of Distress) are not dropping, you can ask your client whether they are still focusing on that first bit of banana bread, (the message for example) or whether they are actually thinking of something else. And as they start talking, you both realise that their mind has shifted on to some other aspect, or some other event, and so you need to create a new set-up statement to reflect the new content.
Now I’m going to try and explain this analogy to you, using a hypothetical but common case presentation from my practice. Let’s call my client Susan.
The loaf of banana bread represents the presenting problem Susan comes with. The main problem she wants EFT to help her with. And let’s be real, our clients may come with a whole trolley of loaves they want to work on! Sadness, Stress, Anger, Anxiety, poor sleep, lack of energy, difficulty concentrating at work, relationship problems. And I am going to ask Susan to pick one loaf to start with, and explain that by doing a good job on this one, the other loaves are likely to be impacted in a positive way as well.
So let’s start with Susan’s loaf of sadness, as pictured above. Susan is sad about a lot of things. Her mum’s boyfriend sexually abused her when she was a child. She told her mum when she was a teenager and her mum was angry and unsupportive. She said to Susan “why didn’t you tell me when it was happening? I could have done something about it then! What do you expect me to do about it now?”.
Susan felt like her mum didn’t really believe that the abuse had even happened, like maybe she was setting mum’s boyfriend up to get kicked out because she never got along with him as a kid. (This was actually because he was sexually abusing her throughout her childhood). Susan felt she was not protected from the abuse, and she did not feel supported by her mum after it stopped.
Susan tells me that she still feels really sad about this thirty years later, and she cries about it often. Her relationship with her mum has been terrible ever since the sexual abuse was disclosed.
Susan’s mum is barely in her life now and when physically present she seems distant, cold and angry. Susan thinks her mum blames her for the relationship breakdown with that perpetrator boyfriend, and the struggles she then experienced as a single parent. Her mum never found another relationship that has worked since then, and she seems bitter about everything. She doesn’t seem able to find any joy, even in her beautiful grandchildren, and she makes very little effort with Susan or her children.
Susan tells me that she looks at her own daughter, who is in her early teens now, and is still so sweet and innocent. She wonders how on earth her mum could have been so cruel to her at that time in her life? She was terrified, and it was so hard for her to tell her mum. When she did tell her mum that secret, it literally broke the whole family apart, and Susan still feels responsible for this, even though she knows it was not really her fault. Susan reported she has little contact with anyone in her family now, and feels her own children are missing out as a result.
So you get how there can be a whole lotta sadness to deal with in a person who has this kind of history?
The banana bread analogy helps me to explain to Susan the way the mind works when we are tapping, and we all like to know what to expect when doing something new. I explain that there will be times when it’s easy just to think about the thing that happened recently that’s making you sad; the event that we decided to focus on in the beginning of the session.
In Susan’s case let’s say the recent example she chose is “I sent mum a Facebook message last Friday asking did she want to come and see the kids at Easter, and I know she has seen the message, but she hasn’t even replied. It feels like she doesn’t care about me”. Susan is feeling this Sadness 8/10, and it’s in her heart, and in her eyes, she’s very teary.
I also explain early in the session that there may be times during our tapping session when the mind might start thinking of LOTS of other times when she felt really sad and let down by her mum, or someone else. Clients will say, “well it’s not just THAT time, it’s ALL the times mum has let me down!” (Going global versus staying specific). Because I have already explained that this is a very normal thing for the mind to do, and it’s easy to become overwhelmed with sadness then, my client knows that I will help her regulate herself emotionally again at that point, and gently guide her back to the recent event.
I explain that because tapping sends a signal to the Amygdala, which is right next to the Hippocampus (the memory centre) that during our tapping session the Hippocampus might decide to drop a memory, and the mind might start focusing on that particular memory, perhaps an important time earlier in your life when this sadness started or was very present. For Susan, let’s say this was; “when I was 14, I was the lead actor in the school play, and mum didn't even come to watch me perform. She said it was because she had no babysitter, but it was really because she was angry at me for breaking up the family”. A lot of sadness here.
Now that memory is golden! Thanks hippocampus for dropping that one! Really relevant.
But do we want to work on that important childhood memory in a first or second session? No. We don’t.
Why not? Because I barely know Susan, it’s very early in our work together, and more sessions are needed for me to establish rapport and safety with her. I seem to be doing a good job in building rapport with her now, but I don’t even know how she will react to a single session of EFT yet.
Yes EFT is likely to help, but it could also lead to nightmares and flashbacks about traumatic events, and open up a can of worms Susan isn’t prepared to handle. She already has so much stress in her life, and I don’t want to do anything that could destabilise her further, when I possibly haven’t even had a chance to teach her how to do basic tapping for herself yet.
This old memory is laden with very deep sadness from that awful time in her life, and I want to make sure we are both in a really good position to do the work on that memory. I want Susan to be really well regulated, (she’s totally not right now) and I want to feel prepared myself to know how to best proceed with that memory. And as you all know, these golden memories will often pop right at the end of a session! When you have another client due in 30 minutes!
So by pre-framing all of this to Susan in the first session, it feels ok to just acknowledge this very important memory that has come up, because I have already explained that we won’t be working on any childhood memories in our first few sessions together. We thank her very intelligent mind body system for producing that relevant memory, and respectfully pop it in a container of her choosing, placing it in somewhere like my cupboard for safe keeping until next time. Or whenever she might want to work on that memory.
**I am talking about what I would do in a first session here - obviously once safety and rapport has been developed in later sessions, you can go with the “daisy chaining” and follow the mind back to earlier events and do much deeper work.
Let’s say we continue to do a few more rounds of tapping on the sadness about the Easter message and Susan tells me the sadness is “still a 7/10” after three rounds of tapping on sadness. So seemingly not dropping much at all. I might ask her to tell me what her mind is thinking about now when she thinks about that little piece of banana bread - the facebook message. And she says “Well it’s just rude not to respond at all. If she got that message from anyone else, she would respond straight away. Everyone thinks she is so polite. But when it comes to me, she is just a total bitch sometimes. It’s like she’s still punishing me for what happened decades ago, when I was a child for heaven’s sake!”. Does that sound like sadness to you? Nope. I ask her what is that emotion she’s feeling now? “I guess I am Angry at her now”. So we create a new set-up statement to reflect the shifting aspects and tap on that Anger.
After a few rounds of tapping on the anger, I ask Susan again how she feels about the facebook message she sent on Friday asking mum did she want to come for Easter to see the kids. And she might say something like this; “Oh that’s typical of Mum. She never responds to my messages straight away. She can be a controlling bitch like that to me. But I don’t really care if she doesn’t come this Easter, she will just bring us all down with her misery. I actually feel kind of sorry for her that she is so miserable and that nothing gives her any joy. The kids have started calling her “Nanny Misery Guts”. That’s pretty sad isn’t it? I think it might be good for me to have a break from mum whilst I am doing this work with you. She only buys really cheap awful Easter eggs anyway”. Susan laughs and says she is feeling much better about the message. And you know that your work for that session is pretty much done. You can hear the cognitive shifts and her reframing is coming from within. You can do some testing to check how low her SUDS is on that message now, to make sure it’s a zero, and make a plan for the next session to do another little piece of banana bread from her loaf of sadness.
Have you cleared away all of her sadness in that one session? No, and no reasonable person would expect you or any modality to be able do that in one session. But you have hopefully achieved your goal for the first session, which ought to be to reduce the sadness about that first little piece of banana bread, and for her to have a positive and empowering EFT session. And Susan is likely to now feel excited about the potential for her next session with you.
Enjoy your banana bread tappers, and please feel free to let me know if you found this blog useful.