An Unexpected Block to Success – A Case Study

“Jane” was an inspired human potential trainer and well loved by her students - what few she had.  She had a real problem filling up her seminars and none of the marketing advice from all of the marketing gurus ever seemed to work for her.  She knew there had to be some kind of inner block to being successful.

We began with simple tapping, focusing on her feelings of frustration, failure, disappointment and anxiety around income.  And as we tapped, as so often happens, a familiar but seemingly unrelated memory surfaced.  Jane had no idea why it was coming to mind now, for this issue.

In 7th grade, Jane had a science teacher she really liked. One day he announced an important class assignment.  Each student must make an insect collection – the kind where the bugs are stuck on pins with a little label beneath.  This would be the major basis for their grades and they had six weeks to complete it.

The kids were given instructions on how to ‘collect’ their insects - putting them in a glass jar with cotton balls soaked with nail polish remover.  The fumes would kill the insects without damaging them.

Jane’s first (and only) bug was a common house fly.  She’d killed lots of flies over the years, clapping them with her hands or whacking them with a fly swatter.  This was totally different.  Instead of a quick death, the fly in the jar took about 20 minutes to die and seemed to be suffering horribly.

And that was that.  No way would she’d ever do that again.  The fly was bad enough, but the thought of putting a beautiful butterfly in the jar? Out of the question.

But Jane had no explanation for this.  It felt wrong, but it never occurred to her that her feelings might be valid, or defensible. She simply stopped working on the project and didn’t tell anyone.

Back at school her teacher kept encouraging his students to do a great job.  They mustn’t procrastinate.  The goal was to collect at least 25 insects and he emphasized again and again that this project would determine their grade for the class.

Jane had always been a good student.  Now she was feeling more and more anxious, desperate and hopeless as the weeks went by.  The pressure became unbearable.  She really liked and admired her science teacher and imagined his disappointment in her.  She felt absolutely doomed.

Amazingly, just a few weeks before the project was due, Jane’s parents announced that the family was moving to another state.  Her dad had been transferred and they’d be leaving immediately, before the end of the school term.  She was off the hook.

Although this gave Jane vast relief, it also meant that the issue never came to light and was never resolved.  Jane went out of her way to avoid another situation like this, and somehow managed to graduate from high school and university without ever taking a biology class.

That was the memory that showed up, but now, forty years later, what did any of that have to do with Jane’s workshop attendance?

Using Matrix Reimprinting I had Jane step into the scene and connect with her 12 year old younger self, who was watching the death throes of the fly. We tapped on this girl’s feelings of intense disgust, horror, and guilt, along with her fear of failing the science class and disappointing her teacher and parents.

As the tapping calmed the young girl,  Jane validated her feelings, giving her new information that there are a lot of good people who feel the same way - there’s even a group called ‘anti-vivisectionists’ who believe that science should respect life.  This was news to her younger self.  She’d felt like such a freak.

With Matrix we always ask the younger self what they learned or decided during whatever traumatic scene we find them in.  Our 12 year old surprised us with a very clear decision: “If you have principles then you are doomed to failure.” 

This revelation was a shock to Jane, like something long hidden, yet instantly familiar.  Was this belief the real block to her success?  Why did the 12 year old make that decision? Now an even earlier memory began surfacing.

When Jane was seven her father was the accountant for a local business.  The owner of the company fired her dad when he refused to “cook the books.”  Their family was ultimately forced to move away from their beautiful home and small town community.  As a child Jane experienced this as a devastating loss for her family. 

Again, the message was clear: “Having principles dooms you to failure.”

After a little more tapping, Jane’s 12 year old self was feeling much better.  We asked her how she’d like the picture to change – immediately the scene shifted and the girl was telling her mother about her ethical dilemma.

Her mother’s response was wonderfully supportive.  She was actually very proud of her daughter and the 12 year old’s sudden rush of relief and happiness flooded into Jane and put a brilliant smile on her face.  She said “I’m actually feeling my younger self’s feelings!  She’s so happy!”

With her mother’s help, Jane’s 12 year old was able to type up a note to her teacher, explaining her opposition to harming the insects.  She created an alternative project with carefully drawn insects and labels.  In our new picture she’d won first place, blue ribbon and all.  And she’d won because of her ethical stance.  She was absolutely beaming with pride and success.

Reimprinting this scene brought Jane wonderful feelings, but also a new awareness of how she’d been sabotaging herself.  “Having principles dooms you to failure” implies that successful people must have sacrificed their principles and integrity.

Jane was embarrassed to realize she’d been unfairly judging her more successful peers and colleagues. Any kind of marketing approach had conjured up the specter of a sleazy used car salesman for her.  Her subconscious mind had been working overtime to keep students away, protecting her from real success with its perceived loss of integrity.

The wait was over
With wonderful clarity she realized the Universe had been waiting patiently for her to jettison her resistance to success, and now the wait was over.

Copyright 2019 Rob Nelson

Interested in working with Rob?  Click here for details

Tapping into the Roots of Clutter & Procrastination

“Jane” had just about run out of excuses. A year after moving, a jumble of unsorted boxes filled every room in her house. She was embarrassed to let anyone come over and was feeling paralyzed and hopeless. She’d even hired a professional organizer to help, to no avail. Her home had become a place of despair and her only relief was in staying away.

Jane’s story helped put the situation into perspective. Her husband Jim was in long decline from Parkinson’s disease. After 50 years of marriage, they’d sold their beloved family home to move into a much smaller place in an assisted living community. This was a painful move for Jane and with all the boxes to be sorted her distress was ongoing.

She was sick of living in clutter and chaos, but Jane just couldn’t focus and would become confused and distracted every time she tried to start unpacking. She was quite worried about having developed ADD.

We began tapping with: “Even though I feel so overwhelmed with all these boxes, I deeply love and completely accept myself”…“Even though I feel confused and get distracted…” As we continued, quite a few issues surfaced and we simply “daisy chained” into each new aspect of the situation.

Next up was “Even though I should be able to handle this…” Here we tapped away Jane’s anger and frustration with herself, along with guilt and fear of judgment from others. This lead to a strong feeling of constriction in her chest and throat: “Even though I have this constriction…” As we tapped on the physical sensations, emotions of sadness and grief came up, and we tapped on those in turn.

Her sadness lead deeper into feelings of loneliness: “Even though I’m alone in this, Jim can’t help me and if I don’t do it nothing happens…” “Even though it’s all up to me…”

Tapping for loneliness naturally lead us into the reality of Jim’s Parkinson’s: “Even though he’ll never use those tools again…” (this was a big one!). Tapping on this grief and sadness was very effective and brought Jane’s overall intensity down to around a zero.

At this point Jane was feeling terrific relief and it was tempting to end the session right there and call it a success. But because we were doing a phone session, and Jane was at home and still surrounded by stacks of unsorted boxes, I wanted to really test our results, so I had her open up the nearest box and look through the contents.

Coming face to face with Jim’s letters home from the war, and all of his books that she’d have to decide whether to let go, her “zero” intensity quickly rose to about a 6 or 7! We tapped again on some of the earlier themes: “It’s up to me, I have to make these decisions alone, he’ll never be able to use that again, so many decisions, it’s overwhelming”.

Then we came upon a new theme: “If I let go of this stuff, I’ll be letting go of my past, of my history with Jim…and maybe I’ll forget…maybe I’ll lose my memories…” This was a deep-seated fear, but it cleared very quickly and Jane actually began laughing. As we tapped, her terror of forgetting their life together began to seem ludicrous.

At this time I threw in some reframes as we tapped around the points: “What if I could actually enjoy this process? What if it gave me pleasure going through these things? What if I could collect all of the happy memories held by these objects as they pass through my hands, just like a bee collecting pollen to make honey?”

We also tapped on “Even though I’ve had so much dread about dealing with the past, I’m also excited about what I can do with this room once it’s cleared out, and I’ve got a beautiful future ahead of me”. For the first time, Jane began picturing the room as it might be, and this gave her surprising pleasure!

By the end of our session Jane was laughing and felt eager to tackle the boxes. That she might actually enjoy the process seemed incredible, and would have seemed impossible even 20 minutes earlier. Her fears of having ADD had vanished.

I suggested she do a few quick rounds of tapping before opening each box, just to sustain the good feeling: “Even if I do get stuck or overwhelmed dealing with this stuff, I choose to collect and enjoy all of the wonderful memories held by these objects, and release the objects themselves without fear, for others to use and enjoy”.

This session showed me how important it can be, whenever we’re stuck and procrastinating, to deal with our feelings using EFT. Even the best organizational strategies are pretty much useless when we’re swamped with emotions. I’m so grateful for this amazing healing tool.

Copyright Rob Nelson 2019

“I Wish You’d Never Been Born” – EFT for War Trauma

EFT for War Trauma

“Jane” had a very unhappy memory. She’d been through talk therapy and EMDR, which took the edge off, but within minutes of describing what had happened she was crying.  

She’d come to me to try EFT and with her intensity level so high we started right in tapping, first on fear and then for sadness.  As Jane calmed down a bit the story came out:  When Jane was about three and a half, she woke up from a nap on a beautiful spring afternoon.  Dad was sleeping on the couch and when she woke him up he flew into a rage.

He literally threw her across the room where she hit a wall.  Adding insult to injury he screamed at her “I wish you’d never been born”.

After a bit more tapping Jane was calm enough to begin Matrix Reimprinting work.  We began by freezing dad like a statue. This made it safe enough for the younger self to focus on Jane, who stepped into the scene, introduced herself and took the little girl’s hand. When asked what she was feeling, Jane’s younger self told us she was scared and confused. She also had physical pain in her back and head from being thrown up against the wall.

I had Jane take the little girl’s pain away, just by waving her hand over the problem areas.  We then asked what the little girl had learned about life from the experience and got a very literal answer - she shouldn’t wake daddy up from a nap!  Probing a bit deeper the learning seemed to be that it wasn’t safe to upset people. And since you never knew what would upset them it’s probably best to just not bother anyone and not to ask for anything.

I asked Jane if this was a belief she was still running today and the answer was yes!  Very much so.  I guided Jane through tapping on her younger self and the fear and confusion cleared rather quickly. I added reframes for the little girl that it wasn’t her fault – something was wrong with her daddy and she hadn’t done anything wrong to deserve being treated that way. Daddy didn’t really mean what he’d said.  He was just having a really hard time for some reason.

Soon the little girl was feeling much calmer so we asked how she’d like the picture to change.  Immediately she told us that when she woke up daddy he’d smile at her and they’d go outside to play.  This answer absolutely surprised Jane.  She’d been thinking that mom could come in and take care of the girl.  Jane couldn’t imagine her father doing anything nice like that at all!  She told me this was nothing she would ever have come up with.

But this was definitely what her younger self wanted.  So I had Jane go to her father (he was still frozen, with a very angry look on his face) and take his hand, then we unfroze him and asked “What are you feeling? Why did you treat your little girl that way?”

He told Jane he didn’t know why – he’d been worried about money, and worried about being sick, but he felt extreme self-hate and shame for what he’d just done. I had Jane ask him when he’d first begun hating himself.  I fully expected this question to lead us into dad’s childhood – some terrible encounter with his own dad.  This is very common.  I was surprised then to hear Jane say “It’s WWII! He’s a soldier and he’s terrified to do what he needs to do. He just watched his friend die – he couldn’t save him”.

Freezing that scene, I had Jane step in and begin tapping on her father’s younger self, who was experiencing extreme terror in the heat of combat.  He was also feeling intense shame and guilt that he hadn’t sacrificed his life to save his friend (even though it wouldn’t actually have worked).  We did quite a bit of tapping on this terror and his guilt and shame, and as he began to calm down a new layer emerged - he didn’t want to kill anyone!  

Shooting at and killing the enemy soldiers went deeply against his nature and was totally overwhelming him with horror.  He saw himself as a coward and this only deepened his self-loathing.

It really took only a few minutes to tap away most of his distress and reframe that his feelings were humanitarian and compassionate rather than cowardly.  That is was acceptable to not want to kill other human beings.  When we asked him how he’d like the picture to change I was certain he’d want to get the hell out of there and go home.   Once again I was surprised.  Instead he wanted to have a way to serve without killing anyone – a way to feel proud of his service to his country and fellow soldiers!

Very quickly the scene changed and he was a medic, helping carry wounded men off the battle field.  Bullets were flying and he was still terrified, but was mastering his fear to save lives.  There was a powerful feeling of valor in this scene and we re-imprinted this new picture for Jane’s dad.

Following the timeline forward, we came back to the scene of Jane’s three and a half year old, waking up dad on the couch.  Dad awoke smiling and pulled the little girl to him for a big hug.  He asked her if she was thirsty or wanted a snack.  She said no, she wanted to go out and play.  So he took her hand and they walked out into the beautiful spring afternoon together.  Our little girl was feeling incredibly happy. So important and grown-up. And this was the picture we reimprinted for Jane.

While sending the new picture out from her heart, I had Jane imagine a timeline flowing from that wonderful moment all the way back to her birth and then all the way up to where she was now and on into her future.  She told me she could see her father holding her as a new born – gently telling her it was okay she wasn’t a boy!  And as she brought the picture into the future Jane could hear her dad saying he loved her and would always be there for her.

Jane told me this was the first time in her life that she’d ever felt connected with father.  And that now she knew he was actually a good man.  She felt peaceful and a new sense of confidence.

Copyright Rob Nelson 2015

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