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Positive affirmations in EFT and in itself
In my opinion the increasingly popular variations of EFT which make heavy use of positive affirmations as a standard part of the procedure (apart from the original set-up statement) are actually missing the whole point of EFTas a healing modality; and their creators, who include some very experienced practitioners and trainers, are forgetting the basics of how EFT actually works. EFT works when we tune into the problem, and the resultant disturbance of the energy system (or the nervous system if you like, or both) is then balanced out by the tapping.
For clients with really complex issues and severe trauma, nice phrases about letting go, forgiving, choosing etc may be no more than a sticking plaster,with the deeper issue left untouched, and when the client does not get the result they are longing for, there is a risk that they may feel it was their fault, that there is something wrong with them – after all the therapy was supposed to work “fast”!
There is nothing intrinsically wrong about positive affirmations, of course they have their place and can be very useful, but as practitioners we need to be aware whether what we are doing is actually EFT, or just some affirmations with tapping added. In the therapeutic process with EFT (or another technique or modality), when the intensity of negative emotion subsides to a sufficiently low level, positive phrases, choices and beliefs will arise spontaneously in clients – and I believe that this is the most appropriate time to incorporate these into the process – doing this too early in the process is likely to do more harm than good.
Andy Hunt wrote an excellent article on this topic, The Curse of Premature Reassurance, which can be found on his website www.practicalwellbeing.co.uk.
Masha Bennett
UKCP Reg Psychotherapist
AAMET Advanced Practitioner and Trainer
Masha and group,
I completely agree with you and I¹m somewhat unhappy with this trend. Positive affirmations confirm polarity and polarity will bind energy. Here¹s an article I just wrote on the issue of different types of dissociation:
http://www.logosynthesis.net/docs/article.lammers.blackhole.pdf.
It¹s gearde towards Logosynthesis but that¹s not relevant for this point. Trying to create the positive without release of frozen energy will always keep the process at the surface level.
In my terms, applying positive affirmations will try to restore second order dissociation and thus avoid the processing of deeper existential, traumatic material.
Warm regards,
Willem Lammers, DPsych, TSTA