Accepting Ourselves, Accepting What Is: How EFT Tapping Can Open the Door to Healing

Do you deeply and completely love and accept yourself?

In my work with clients over the years, I have seen many people who found it difficult to say yes to this question. They can accept parts of themselves, but other parts they just don’t like or they are ashamed of or they outright reject.

Pause for a moment here and say this out loud: “I completely love and accept myself.” How true does it feel to you?

Why should we care whether we love and accept ourselves or not? What difference does it make? I believe it makes ALL the difference between our ability to heal versus staying stuck in dis-ease and pain.

“The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.” Carl Rogers

Self-acceptance is an important, if not essential, factor in releasing negative emotions and physical discomforts through Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT). EFT is an evidence-based* technique that is simple and easy to learn and apply, and it is often effective on difficult issues such as phobias, PTSD, anxiety and pain. It involves tapping on specific acupuncture points while focusing on the target problem with verbal statements and affirmations.

The initial statement used in EFT is, “Even though [fill in the blank with the problem], I deeply and completely love and accept myself.” Before anything else, we use this setup phrase to clear resistance and set the stage for processing the issue at hand.

Let me use a simple example to show you how the tapping process works. A client came in to my office one day complaining that she was feeling angry toward a friend after a conversation that morning and couldn’t seem to let it go.

We started by tapping on the side of the hand (Karate Chop point) and I had her repeat after me, “Even though I’m so angry and frustrated with [my friend], I love and accept myself anyway.” We repeated that phrase three times while continuing to tap the Karate Chop point. (See the figures for the locations of the tapping points.)

Then, we tapped through the other eight EFT points while repeating a short reminder phrase at each point, “This anger, this frustration.” The tapping round was completed by taking a deep, cleansing breath. We checked in with how she was feeling toward her friend to assess if there had been any change. After just a couple rounds, she reported feeling a release and no longer felt attached to her anger. Just a few minutes of tapping diffused an event that had been stuck for most of the day in her mind.

I have seen an issue that had been stuck for over fifty years resolve just as quickly. A veteran who had lived with PTSD since a traumatic explosion in Vietnam experienced dramatic relief from just one session of EFT. He had judged his experience to be less traumatic than so many of his fellow soldiers and felt he had no excuse for having problems because of it. In other words, he could not accept how his body and mind were reacting to that event. As we tapped, he began to accept that he had good reason to have a strong response to the explosion. Accepting himself and accepting what happened opened the door for him to release the entire event. Later, he reported, “The result is a calmer [his name], in and out. I really hadn’t thought that it was So Big Deal in what happened that night. Obviously it WAS.”

Years ago, I had an experience using EFT with a friend that illustrated clearly to me the power of self-acceptance and the direct connection it has to our physical experience.

On a crisp winter day with a fresh layer of snow, my kids and I met my friend, Karla, and her kids at our favorite sledding hill. The kids had a new snowboard that Karla wanted to try. She always was a bit of a daredevil! She started out great, but about halfway down the hill she went down hard and injured her shoulder and thumb.

She was upset and frustrated because she had plans to go skiing the next day and didn’t want to miss it. I offered to do some energy work on her when we got home to see if it might help. As we headed into my home office, I noticed that she was expressing a lot of frustration with herself, so I decided to focus on those feelings first.

We did a few rounds of EFT focused only on her feelings of “doing something dumb” and “shouldn’t have done that.” We were both surprised when she checked her thumb and shoulder and found that they were feeling significantly better; in fact, her thumb didn’t hurt at all now. I still remember the look of shock on her face as she wiggled her thumb and couldn’t find any pain. We had focused only on her feelings around judging herself for getting hurt, not on the actual injuries.

In other words, healing had begun (or at least her experience of pain had decreased) merely by clearing her self-judgments and negative feelings about the accident.

Our thoughts and feelings about ourselves are powerful. Negative thoughts and judgments can stall the healing process. Acknowledging our faults, our mistakes, and our pain and loving ourselves anyway opens the door to releasing the feelings that keep us stuck.

“The moment that judgment stops, through acceptance of what is, you are free of the mind. You have made room for love, for joy, for peace.” Eckhart Tolle

“The first step toward change is acceptance. Once you accept yourself, you open the door to change. That’s all you have to do. Change is not something you do, it’s something you allow.” ~ Will Garcia