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Motivation The
best laid plans of mice and men... The plan was, now that summer has
drawn to a close, to begin to focus my articles once again on teaching
the application of EFT. However, in perusing the vast list of queries
(emails and phone calls) regarding the subject of EFT, I noticed how
many were looking for... surprise... motivation.
OK, let's supply
some and once that's done, the next Reflections article will
continue with how to develop your use of EFT.
Dr. James Pennebaker
(University of Texas) and two colleagues assisting him (University of
Auckland) decided to conduct a study. They wanted to find out what,
if anything, occurs physically, when humans suppress emotional issues.
The study revealed,
firstly, the immune system's (lymphocytes and T-helper cells) "soldier"
count went down dramatically when emotions were suppressed. By contrast,
a second group, using various techniques designed to resolve emotional
issues, experienced a boost to the immune system's efficiency.
Summary:
Suppressing emotions compromises the immune system, the body's first
line of defence in dealing with infection, illness and disease.
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At the same time, resolving/releasing the emotional baggage boosts the immune system.
But, let's not stop there. Let's take a look at a summary of several studies investigating the effects of stress. Excess adrenaline released into the system compromise sugar and fat reserves in the body. Other stress released hormones curbed growth, negatively affected reproduction and cell repair. Heart attacks were significantly higher in the stress group. So was diabetes, hypertension, depression and various developmental abnormalities. Now, let's take a look at the end result of some other studies, whose purpose was to uncover the main cause, or causes, of stress. Are you ready? Much of the stress was directly related to the individual's interpretation of various events, situations, and circumstances. Further investigations revealed the genesis of the "bias" in interpretation was unresolved emotions. Now, before I'm flooded with emails requesting free copies of all this research, allow me to cite an example from my files. "Henry" was being investigated for child abuse. His 11 year old son clearly had some mean looking bruises, and the school teacher had understandably notified the authorities. "He was being disrespectful," was Dad's excuse. "I just lost my head." As we explored further, I found out Henry's firm had acquired a new district manager some weeks earlier, and according to Henry, he was just like his father. "He's
critical, disrespectful, and seems to get his kicks out of invalidating
people. My son is just the same." After several sessions, we had succeeded
in emotionally neutralizing quite a bit of Henry's stored resentment,
and he concluded one session with the following.
"Our new boss has really gone through some changes, now I see him as firm but fair. I think he'll be good for the company's growth." As far Henry's "disrespectful" son is concerned, it turns out he was late getting home after school; the basketball game had gone into overtime. "Typical 11 year old," Dad said smiling, "He just got lost in the moment, and needs reminders, like any kid." Synopsis: Left unresolved, these "caches" of unresolved negative emotions will seek ways to express themselves. These expressions can bias perceptions leading to stress, which can not only affect relationships, but physical health as well. In the next Reflections
we will return to how to apply EFT, and help you to improve and enhance
the efficiency of your application even more. Especially now that you
are even more motivated than before :-) Stay tuned. Don't Let Emotions Guide Your Email We are in the business of helping people with emotional issues. As regular readers of our newsletter you all are aware, EFT is a great tool for dealing with negative emotions. So, the title of a recent article in the newspaper caught our attention, and we thought it would be helpful to share it with our readers. Here are some of the Do's and Don'ts regarding email etiquette. Excerpt
from the Vancouver Sun Ignore or reply: You should always reply, even if a brief acknowledgement is all that is necessary. You don't have to reply to the multitudinous jokes and cartoons flying around in cyberspace. But if someone has taken the time to write you, and especially if they are requesting information, ignoring the email message is discourteous and confusing to the sender. Replies should be prompt. Generally speaking, try to reply within a couple of days if possible. Think about tone: The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines tone as "accent or inflection expressive of a mood or emotion." Hitting the right tone is important in email. You should come across as respectful, friendly and approachable, not curt or demanding. Avoid using irony or sarcasm - they are easily misunderstood. Never write in anger, in the heat of the moment: Take a walk, think about it, write it, then think about it again. Emails lack the facial clues and body language you would normally use in a personal encounter to adjust your response. Angry words almost always come across as more harsh in black and white. Avoid typing in capitals: This is considered the vulgar equivalent of shouting and the sender of such emails always come across as rude and uneducated. Same applies to the excessive use of exclamation marks. Do you really want to be that forceful? Isn't the statement you are making strong enough????????? Be clear in your subject line: The word or words used should be as meaningful as possible, not vague or misleading. The idea is to use the words to focus the topic of the message. Top of the list of seven deadly email sins: Top of the list is "ignoring" (not replying) and "long-windedness." Keep your signature short: The signature is the small block of text at the end of your message that contains your contact information. Keep them short and to the point with only essential information. Don't forget your P's and Q's: It may sound dated, but people still like you to say please and thank you. Interestingly, people who are normally polite in every-day life often forget their manners in their emails. Do you reply or send a new message? Some believe when you reply, you should include the original email as reference. Others say you should remove the previous message (since it has already been sent) and reply or send a new email altogether. However, the argument against sending a completely new message is that it creates a "threadless email" - one that the receiver could have difficulty understanding if it were left unread for a time.
Things might not be so bad if, as Robert Palmer says, you are "Addicted to Love" - but what if the addiction is to something not so pleasant, as might be alcohol... drugs... work... sex (too much of it?)... medication... gambling... danger? I'd like to share with you some ways in which you might use EFT in situations where addiction is a problem. There might be many different reasons why someone becomes addicted to a behaviour or a substance. One might be the situation where the person is experiencing physical or emotional pain and the substance or behaviour they are addicted to brings relief, however temporary, to that pain. A simple example might be the person who often gets headaches and always uses pain killers to relieve the pain. Firstly, EFT can be used to reduce and eliminate the physical pain. More importantly EFT should then be used to address the cause of the headache. For some people, this might be anxiety, tension, stress, etc. - and again EFT can be used to manage, reduce and eliminate this part of the problem and hence the headaches and the pain killers. Similarly, the use of tranquillizers and anti-depressants can be reduced (and possibly eliminated) through the use of EFT, especially where they are prescribed to help a person stay calm or reduce nervousness and anxiety. In these situations, please ensure the person discusses reducing the medication with the doctor or professional who prescribed it. Anti-depressants, in particular, can have serious consequences if the dosage is reduced too much or stopped altogether. A more complex situation might be one where a person has low self-esteem, low confidence, no job, money problems, trouble relating to people, might be in trouble with the law, family and friends who try to help, but seem to make things worse (from the point of view of the "addict")... the list of problems and issues could be endless. On top of all of this, the person happens to use hard drugs and is in and out of rehabilitation centres. While he or she is in a centre - things seem ok, but once back out - it doesn't take long to fall back into the drug use. Whilst this is an example - it is all too real a situation for many people today. Using a similar strategy to that in the examples above, one could establish what it is the person goes through - what they feel (both physically and emotionally) leading up to the moment or the situation where they take the drug. The person might identify that it is fear, or anxiety that they feel - the thing that drives and urges them to use the drug. EFT could then be used to reduce the "need", the "urge", the anxiety or fear that causes the desire for relief. Using EFT to uncover the root cause of problems or behaviours would then assist in the person not relying on the drug to feel better. It might well surface that "not having a job" or "trying to talk to my father" might be what causes anxiety for the person, so EFT would be used to deal with these issues (or the negative emotions caused by these issues). Naturally, a person with a serious addiction should seek professional help. Even professional help might not be able to provide a person with the tools he or she needs to avoid resorting to addictive substances or behaviours - this is where EFT can help. If the person learns EFT, in it's simplest form, they have something to fall back on - something to help avoid the addictive behaviour. Not only can EFT help the person with an addiction to cope with the ups and downs of day to day life - it is also invaluable to those around that person, to help them to deal with the situation. A person could, of course, become addicted to EFT, but I guess you can just tap for that, can't you? Seriously though - you don't want to replace one addictive behaviour with another, so rather than just use EFT to alleviate the symptoms of a problem, go a step further and eliminate (or deal with) the root cause of a problem. Don't know how? How about attending a 2-day EFT course, you'll learn all about EFT and how to use it with yourself and others, including how to get to the root cause of a problem. As we always like
to say around here - try it on anything, but do be sensible - if someone
needs professional help, refer them accordingly.
I found the article on email Do's and Don't very interesting. Also, I was pleased to see that the #1 deadly sin of emails is "not replying." I HATE IT WHEN PEOPLE DON'T REPLY!!!!! Oops, I just committed a deadly email sin. I admit to being guilty to using all capitals and exclamation points for emphasis in my emails, but from now on will try to restrain myself... maybe I'll switch to using bold more often :-) Speaking of not replying to emails, we would like to apologize to anyone that sent us an email and did not receive a reply from us, during the first few weeks of October. I wrote about our internet/server/email problems last month, but had no idea the problem would get worse than it already was. I won't go into the details of the nightmare we experienced except to say our website was down, and we couldn't send or receive emails for quite a while. I'm happy to report that everything is fine now, our website is back and email is working. So, if anyone sent us an email and didn't get a reply, please send us another email, and we'll respond... within two days... we want to obey the rules of email etiquette, that's for sure. In some ways it's strange to have everything back to normal, I almost don't know what to do with myself. I was so used to dealing with the crisis everyday, I had forgotten what it's like to have a "normal" day. What a joy, especially when the sun is shining like today. "Normal" is good. We did an EFT seminar last weekend and everyone had a great time. For those of you that couldn't attend this seminar, the next one will be in early 2005 (probably February). We will also aim for an Advanced EFT in January. Please watch for details in an upcoming newsletter. We will stay close to home this Christmas as we don't want to put the doggies in a kennel, they've already had to go there twice in the last year, while we were in Spain. And, speaking of Spain, our sponsors got together last weekend on the Costa Blanca to discuss bringing Alex back to Spain to teach EFT, NLP and the Mind/Body Connection in the Spring (probably late March or early April 2005). We'll keep you posted as to their progress. There's lots to look forward to! I hope you have some holidays coming up wherever you live, and will enjoy some time off. And, please remember to REPLY to your emails, especially if they are from us!!! Sorry, I couldn't resist using all capitals and several exclamation marks... I like to break the "rules" occasionally, and I bet you do too :-) Till next month, take care.
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The
London School of Economics has come up with a whole bunch of recommendations.
And a survey of 750 European office workers produced a list of the "seven
deadly email sins," of which ignoring, long-windedness, blitzing and
tactlessness were the top four. Many books have been written on the
subject. The London School of Economics has compiled a list of basic
rules, most of which you have probably figured out for yourself already,
but may prove as a useful reminder for all of us.
Addicted
To... 
Berit's
Corner
This
is a really good time of year because we have lots of holidays to look
forward to. We celebrated Thanksgiving on Oct. 11th with a delicious
turkey dinner. Halloween is just around the corner but unfortunately,
it is a hard time for the doggies because of the very loud firecrackers,
so we'll try to keep them occupied playing ball, inside the house.
And, we'll be doing some tapping for the fear, especially for Kaylie
(the girl dog) 'cause she gets really scared. Once we've survived Halloween,
there's Remembrance Day on Nov. 11th and before we know it, Christmas
will be here again!
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(C) 2004 - Dr. Alexander R. Lees & Associates Inc.