Part 2 - EFT Tapping: Gain Self-Compassion and Inner Emotional Safety

Hi, everyone.  This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar channel and in today's video, I'll continue my series on EFT Tapping.  I think it's a brilliant way to gain Self-Compassion and what I call Internal Emotional Safety.  This is the second in a two part series.

In the first video, I gave you an overview of EFT tapping and talked about the verbal, emotional, and physical components to it.  In this video I'll cover why I think it works and how it evokes self-compassion or internal emotional safety.  First of all,

Why Does it Work?

Honestly, we don't really know.   Again, I'm not convinced by the initial claims around releasing stuck energy.  But, here is my theory.  I think the tapping activates our soothing and nurturance system.  Engaging this system was how we calmed down as babies.  Parents use a gentle voice and touch to calm and sooth unhappy babies.  This releases all of these feel-good neuro-chemicals like oxytocin and endorphins to calm our nervous systems and make us feel safe.  I think the touch used in tapping activates that mammalian nurturance system and helps us to immediately feel safe and protected. 

The other thing is that most of the 8 tapping points used are on the path of the ventral side of the vagus nerve.  I'm not going to weigh in on Polyvagal theory here which has some controversial tenets, but one thing that is widely accepted is that the vagus nerve, which runs from our brains down to our digestive tracts, is instrumental in engaging the parasympathetic nervous system to calm us down.  It helps to put the brake on our fight/flight response and allows us to rest and digest.  Because the vagus nerve is responsible for facial expressions and vocalizations, I think tapping on your face and neck stimulate the vagus nerve which then serves to down regulate our emotions.  So Tapping requires that you bring up all of these uncomfortable emotions and while you do that, it activates our soothing system to calm our emotions.  Doing that over and over again serves to take the emotional punch out of the thought or memory and allows us to experience it without all of the heavy emotions attached to it.  This seems to ME like a much more palatable explanation than clearing and releasing stuck energy, but in the end, it doesn't matter that much WHY it works, it just matters that it works. 

5 Elements of Self Compassion

I think Tapping is a practice that will increase your self-compassion and inner emotional safety.   And I believe emotional safety is the key to lasting and real personal growth.  I have another video where I go into detail on what I believe are the five elements of self compassion: awareness, understanding, kindness, soothing, and acceptance.  But Tapping skillfully engages all 5 elements at once.  Let's go through them:

• Awareness - You can't heal what you can't feel.  You need to be aware of what you are feeling.  Tapping makes this a requirement by forcing you to decide on a negative thought, emotion, or memory.  It also makes you rate the intensity of your emotion around it.  Both of these require you to be aware of what and how much you are feeling.  And not only this, as you continue to tap and process emotions, you can bring up other things that lie underneath those initial emotions, and things that lie underneath that -- until you get to the root of what you are feeling.  Tapping requires an initial awareness and then assists in becoming more aware of deeper, more hidden issues.
• Acceptance - In the end, this is where we want to be -- acceptance.  It's the end of the Grief cycle, it's the holy grail for Buddhist meditation, it's the point of the Serenity Prayer.  The problem is how to get there!  How do you get to a place where you can accept the feelings that you have, the things that happened to you, the negative thoughts that haunt you?  These things can be too painful to even approach, let alone accept, so we avoid or run away.  I think Tapping is a process that helps you to accept.  You repeat a negatively charged phrase, over and over again until you come to accept it.  Do you have to believe it?  For example, do you have to believe that you are too overweight to exercise?  No -- but you do have to accept that you are having that thought.   By the end of your tapping session -- you fully accept your emotions and your thoughts, and you are able to approach and engage with them without the charge of negative emotion that makes you want to run for the hills.  But how does Tapping succeed in taking the emotionality out of it?  I think it does this through three means: one is cognitive, one is emotions, and one is body-based.  First,
• Understanding - The negative and postive phrases that you come up with start out as cognitive.  These may be thoughts that bubble up or your understanding of your emotional state.  But on top of this, tapping layers
• Kindness - Your postive phrase is accepting and loving.  It might be uncomfortable to say at first, but it is unremittingly kind.  And you have say it in a way that isn't sarcastic or angry, but that is kind and loving.  "I deeply and completely accept myself." That is objectively a kind and wonderful thing to say and you say it to yourself in a gentle and loving way.  This practice teaches you to bathe yourself in love and acceptance regardless of how negative your thoughts, your emotions, and your memories are.  Tapping requires you to treat yourself the way you would treat a friend who was suffering.  And finally, Tapping helps to zap the emotionality from negative phrases through
• Soothing - Physically tapping on each of the nine points activates our soothing and nurturance system that used to calm us when we were babies.  It floods our bodies with feel-good neuro-chemicals and stimulates the parasympathetic nervous system to calm us down.  Just as we are activating our threat systems by saying something with a negative emotional charge, like "I don't have any friends", we can sooth and calm ourselves by tapping on points that stimulate the vagus nerve to down regulate our emotions.  So, by the end of our tapping session, we can say that phrase, look it straight in the face, and it doesn't have the emotional gut punch that it did before. 

Once we find the ability to be compassionate and loving to ourselves, we give ourselves the gift of inner emotional safety.  We allow ourselves to experience a range of emotions from joy to deep suffering and know that we can accept it, suffer through it, and are strong enough to weather it.  It makes us understand that we are worthy of support and love and compassion from ourselves.  That we don't have to run because we have the ability to comfort and sooth ourselves.  And from this place of safety, we can make changes -- even small ones -- knowing that mistakes are okay, rejection is okay, failure is part of growth.  Safety allows us to get out of our bunker and see all of the possibilities so that we can make better choices for ourselves and ultimately see what is best for us.  In my opinion, it is the only real way to make lasting and real change and to experience personal growth.  And Tapping gives us a simple, codified practice to build a springboard of self compassion from which to jump.

Let me know what you think.  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching!

Vagus Nerve as Modulator of the Brain–Gut Axis in Psychiatric and Inflammatory Disorders -   https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5859128/