Rebecca has battled for many years with depression and major challenges with her weight and binge eating. She has searched for answers in many directions and for a long time feared that nothing would really shift things enough to be able to lead the joyful life she so desperately wanted but had trouble envisaging due to her challenges. In this article Rebecca shares with the Self Healing Portal readers a method that she has discovered that has helped her move towards peace and truly learning how to love herself. Many thanks to Rebecca for sharing this inspiring article.

Dear Friends,

As I begin to write this letter to you, I am surprised that though I’ve been thinking about writing this for more than a month, I still do not know where to begin. I normally try to tell my story chronologically and in context, but I feel now I want to start simply by trying to describe today.

Today is sunny, warm, and early autumn in my neck of the woods. Today is deep breaths and expansiveness in my chest. Today is joy and confidence and simple ok-ness that I haven’t always known. And really, today is not so very different from a lot of days I’ve been living recently.

I have not always described today this way. I have not always felt the electricity that flows through all of life or marvelled at what my body can do. I have not always differentiated between my mind, my body, and “me” – that is, the “I” that in English claims possession of that mind and body. I have not always known my own power. I have not always felt frequent bursts of uncontrollable gratitude. And I have not always been free to take good care of myself. But today, I am.

My journey to today has felt long at times, though today, it looks so short. My journey to today has been full of tears and pain and fun and games and fear and gnashing of teeth. My journey to today has encompassed more self-help stress and boom-bust (hope-depression) cycles than I care to remember. My journey to today has been ugly and beautiful and strange, and I am crazy grateful it has brought me to today.

I don’t quite know if it would be responsible of me to encourage you all to run right out and start learning Focusing tomorrow on the promise of wild freedom, though I think that’s a pretty accurate description of my Focusing Partnership experience. I want to acknowledge the power Focusing has given me to consciously create the life I want. I also want to acknowledge that my Focusing does not stand in isolation; I cannot separate it from all my life experiences or from the myriad other healing tools I’ve utilized (and dabbled in) along my way to today.

While I can’t know to what degree my today has been created by Focusing as opposed to any other means of bringing about the good, I do know I have watched myself change exponentially since beginning Focusing Partnership. It is exciting to see such positive growth build on itself so rapidly after years of feeling the steps were slow and hard-won.

I also know how I feel when I Focus.  Suzanne Noel (Focusing Teacher) likened Focusing to a dream in which one can move around while awake. This is the best description I’ve heard of my experience of Focusing. In short, Focusing is fun. Like a dream, it opens up images and sensations I’ve never allowed myself in my “real world” life. And like a dream, it’s temporary; even stressful nightmares fade in the light of day. Similarly, the most painful, tear-stained of Focusing sessions ends (intentionally) with a softening or lightening of some kind and an awareness that the experience was distinct from (even if related to) the external reality of my day-to-day life. It is wonderfully freeing to find this kind of distinction. It allows each reality (internal/Focusing and external/regular life) a safe space in which to fulfill its function without getting mired up in the “stuff” of the other world. This quality has made Focusing the safest emotional tool I’ve ever used.

Focusing seems to provide me access – a window – to the often confused and juxtaposed multi-emotional busy-ness that overwhelmed me so often in my past. I essentially had 31 years of disowned, ignored, subconscious, or unacknowledged emotional-spiritual messages whirling around inside me with no outlet. No wonder I was overwhelmed, and no wonder I didn’t exactly want to ever deal with all those emotional messengers!

Interestingly, I learned I don’t have to “deal” with them.

Amazingly, Focusing allows me to properly hear the messages as what they are – messages, not “me.”

Happily, as I no longer spend my energy trying to avoid the messages, I now have energy to create myself anew.

And that brings me to today. I am someone new today. I am a dancer (though I never have been before). I am a joyous, positive person (and no number of bouts with depression in my past can confuse me about that). I am someone who loves and marvels and feels gratitude toward her body (huge for me! I wish you could know just how unbelievable that is for me to feel). I am someone who finally can agree with the compliments given to her (I always said thank you, but now, I actually can nod my head in simple, comfortable, non-arrogant agreement when someone tells me I am a ray of light).

And I am changing the world – my world – your world – today because I am changing.

Rebecca Baldwin

Gill Wightman’s journey through fibromyalgia, depression and grief led to her training to be an EFT practitioner so that she can support others on their healing journey.  In this article Gill kindly shares how having support from EFT practitioners made an enormous difference in her own healing journey.  Gill is a great example that no matter how skilled we are with a healing tool like EFT, sometimes the connection and support that comes from working with someone else is invaluable as we heal.  If you would like to contact Gill, you can do so via her website: www.eastneuktherapies.co.uk

A short while ago I was asked to write my experience with dementia in my family and I feel this is a good place to start when I try to write about how EFT has helped me to heal from Fibromyalgia syndrome, anxiety and depression.

My father had, we discovered, a vascular form of dementia caused by a genetic condition called CADASIL.  This illness caused extreme mental illness with violent and unpredictable  behaviour so life for us as children was confusing to say the least, the swings between that and his loving behaviour caused such strong conflicts within us which has needed much therapy to untangle.

Within all of this madness was my mother, quiet, unmoved, uninvolved.  She never spoke about what was happening, seemed too wrapped up in my dad that if there was an incident involving violence towards us she would go to comfort him, leaving me to pick up the pieces for my four little sisters.

To cut a very long story short, the years progressed, he became more ill, she became more distant.  He became totally paralysed and unable to walk or talk and to the end move.  She became his full time carer and then literally the descent into hell began.

During this time I suffered extreme depression.  My sisters were all depressed and one became seriously mentally ill.  The next few years included so many painful events and circumstances that it would take pages to detail them.  I went through hell in the lead up to when my father died and my mother’s terrifying and inexplicable behaviour throughout the whole time and following his death was very traumatic for all of us.   In November 2004, 6 months after death of my dad, I had to have my sister sectioned and found out Mum had mid to late stage FTD (a particular type of dementia).  By March, when my sister committed suicide it was decided that my mother needed 24 hour care.  3 days after the funeral of my sister I had to take my mother to a nursing home and leave her.  I thought I might die of a broken heart.

She died only 1 year ago and watching her disappear from us completely until she could not communicate at all and had no idea we were even there was so painful.  Towards the end her brain stopped instructing her to eat or drink and she died after 6 months of only managing tiny amounts.  The details of this time are too many to write about.   

I lost both my parents when they were 60 years old.  This for me was one of the worst parts about it.  There is not such a sense of tragedy thinking about my grandfather dying at age 86, which he is now, as there is in watching relatively young people disintegrate.  In fact many of the nurses were mums ages and all their friends are still around which is sad - gatherings, events, everywhere I go, their space is there and made more poignant with the presence of their peers. 

I have been and am in ongoing therapy for this and the only thing that has allowed me to survive this experience intact has been this fact.  I have trained as an EFT therapist and it is now my life’s work to help people heal from childhood trauma, the experience of suicide and the grief of living death.  My healing continues through this work.

For me EFT has literally felt like a lifesaver at times.  One of things that appealed to me the most about it when I first discovered it was that I could use it myself and that I always had the means to soothe myself or calm myself down and on the whole that has been the case.  There have been times however where I have been so frightened, so intensely distressed and in so much pain it has felt almost like being an animal.  The first instance of this was about a year after I discovered EFT I developed the most intense trigeminal neuralgia.  This was after dad died and my mum had just been diagnosed and my sister was insane and threatening to kill me, and accusing me of having abused her as a child.  My mum believed her but even worse so had my sister, which felt unforgiveable.  I contacted many practitioners via email in the middle of the night as I was literally tearing my hair out with pain and I can honestly say if someone had come in with a gun I would have said “Shoot me!”  In the morning Philip Davis, an EFT practitioner I know Jo thinks highly of, contacted me.  He patiently listened to my long rambling story and that evening guided me through the maze of ‘stuff’ going on to what was really the issue in my jaw.  Within 2 days the pain had gone. 

Asking for help has always been a challenge for me, as a survivor my belief was “I am alone, I have to do this alone”.  At first needing therapy felt to me like failing.  But time and again I would find myself stuck in bad places and no amount of tapping would help.  It was a challenge at first to find people I could trust, I was very demanding of my therapists, and in truth pretty hard work, as I was struggling with issues of such deep guilt, shame, anger and grief and sometimes I would get angry with the people taking me near my issues.  It took a long time for me to learn that it’s safe to do so. Left to my own devices I do think I would rather suffer than go there, and I see that evidenced in the life and health of the rest of my family who have made that choice.  Money was a struggle at times but whenever I have been stuck in those places an hour with someone has been what’s needed for them to get behind my defenses and critical inner self and get me going again.  Crucial in this has been finding EFT therapists I can trust and am drawn to, not all therapists have the same interests and abilities, and for me the emofree forums have been a great place to connect with the kind of people who can help me.

I feel that sometimes just the presence of someone else with me helps me feel less alone. This lonely feeling can be all pervading at times and when I feel so alone I feel vulnerable and powerless.  I suspect my healing could have been much easier if I had been only dealing with the past but it’s been tricky working through the normal childhood trauma that we regularly deal with in EFT as well as coping with the ongoing drama of a very intense period of time in the present day.

I do the bulk of my work as self help, tapping is a daily thing for me and as time goes on I am getting more able to work with the darker places myself. 

For now, I still do have issues I have to work through, but I am free from fibromyalgia, depression and I am not afraid of my grief although it still catches me out from time to time, but I am confident I have the tools to handle it.  My own experience has given me the insight into how hard it can be for people to ask for help and how ashamed they can be of this.  I call my own services ‘Compassionate EFT, for that reason!