EFT and Cancer Support
Hi,
EFT can be a powerful tool when it comes to working with both emotional and physical problems. It can be a fantastic tool to help support people who have been diagnosed with cancer and are facing difficult medical treatments, such as surgery.
Being diagnosed with cancer can be extremely devastating. The mere mention of the C word is enough to traumatise people. In fact when EFT therapists work with people who have had this experience, they treat the moment of diagnosis as a trauma. They use EFT to release that trauma. The result they look to achieve is that the person should be able to say the word “cancer” and have no emotion attached to it. One of the reasons to do this is that you need to take the person out of the “fight, flight or freeze“ response. It is more conducive to health if your body is able to repair, renew and regenerate cells. This is difficult to achieve whilst the body/ mind is operating from a survival mode.
Surgery is a common occurrence during the course of cancer treatment. Surgery also can be treated as a trauma. EFT can be used to tap out the impact of this trauma.
I would like to share with you a video taken near the end of one of my EFT Training Courses. Tony attended the course having been diagnosed with skin cancer around Christmas 2012. The treatment he received for his cancer was surgery. This had left him with a ten inch scar as well as two other smaller ones. The result of this was that he was not able to move his arm very far. In fact he couldn’t move his elbow above shoulder height. Tony thought nothing of this. Why was that? Well he had been told by his medical practitioners that it would take at least three months for the full range of movement to begin to return. He accepted this as a fact. It is quite normal to do this. We often accept what we are told without challenging it simply because it fits into our existing belief structure. This was the case with Tony. However was it fact? I asked Tony if he would like to be my volunteer to demonstrate the effectiveness of EFT with pain and physical problems. He agreed after showing me his current range of movement.
During the EFT Training, the trainee EFT Practitioners are taught to deal with trauma. One of the approaches they use is the EFT Movie technique. This is a simple technique, that can be very fast in getting results. It does not require that you talk about the trauma, so it is classed as one of the more gentle dissociative approaches used in EFT, ( Emotional Freedom Technique ). I asked the trainees to find a trauma they would like to clear and partner with one of their colleagues. Then use the movie technique to clear that trauma. Tony chose to work on the moment of the diagnosis of his cancer. This had been a devastating moment for him more so because he had a child on the way. This was tapped out rapidly, without tears or emotion. Because they tapped it out so fast I suggested that they did another trauma. Tony chose the moment his doctors had explained what would happen to him. What he should expect during the course of his cancer treatment.
It is not unusual to hear people laughing away in an EFT Training Course, in fact it is a common occurrence. I think the laughter comes because things do not seem as bad when you have the power to deal with them. In fact, you can have great fun tapping out the “bad” stuff. Tony and his training partner were laughing their heads off having a great time. I was drawn to their laughter, why not, join the fun:-) I asked what was happening during the conversation and it became evident that Tony’s problem with his arm had greatly improved. He showed me the new range of movement he had. Impressive considering where it had been a few moments before. However, he did still have some tightness that was restricting him. He again thought this was perfectly normal, after all he did have a ten inch scar and had only had surgery about a month before and the scar was still red. Interesting, this reaction shows his belief system. We decided to challenge it and see whether it was treatable and whether we could get an even better result!
Tony agreed to let me do a demo on him in front of the trainee EFT Practitioners. I did say that I would need another volunteer since I did not expect it to take very long and I wanted to fully demonstrate working with a physical problem. Tony’s problem was no longer bad enough to really demonstrate the full power of EFT. It took minutes to clear the tightness completely. This resulted in Tony gaining full range of movement in his arm and shoulder, in fact better that it had ever been in his life.
You can see the results Tony achieved during the EFT Training in the video below.
