My client, Susan, a psychotherapist, has been on a healing and personal development journey for forty years, actively using EFT for the past seven. She has tapped and tapped, using GOLD standard EFT, on specific upsetting memories of her early years, being raised by an emotionally and physically abusive father as well as many adult traumas and painful experiences. Her life has improved enormously since integrating EFT and yet, despite all of her attention to raising her consciousness, she still experiences intermittent bouts of ‘hopelessness’.
She says, “Sometimes, it all just seems too much, too exhausting and I just don’t know if I can begin again.” Susan is frustrated by this ongoing cycle of periods of happiness followed by devastating periods where she is ready to ‘give up’.
This week we started our session by tapping on all the emotional, cognitive, behavioural and sensory aspects of her ‘hopeless’ experience. And then I asked, “Who else in your family experiences hopelessness?” Susan started to cry and spoke about her adult son who is in the throes of a ravaging addiction. I said, ‘I wonder if this pattern of hopelessness has been handed down to him? And I wonder if it was handed down to you?’
Immediately Susan said, ‘OMG, my grandfather, my mother’s father. I’ve done so much work around my father, but I’ve never seen the pattern of hopelessness from my mother’s side.” She went on to tell me the story of her grandfather’s trauma and his resulting hopelessness.
“Whatever does not emerge as Consciousness returns as Destiny.” Carl Jung
Jung and his contemporaries knew that whatever is too difficult for an individual to process in the moment does not dissolve over time, but instead is stored unresolved in our subconscious memory where it continues to impact our present experience of life. Gold standard EFT is brilliant at uncovering and resolving those events.
Today, recent developments in epigenetics and neurobiology have expanded this understanding from the individual to the collective. That is to say, traumatic experiences that are too difficult for one generation to face are unconsciously passed to future generations.
What if Susan and her son are carrying the emotional and physical symptoms of traumas they did not directly experience? How can we work with that? What if the energetic residue of generational trauma is a substantive part of chronic patterns that resist change despite our best healing efforts?
In today’s episode of EFT Unplugged, the “Leaders Share Their Truth”, coach, shaman and healer Michael Reddy, shares how he uses EFT to resolve inherited ancestral trauma by integrating it with Family Constellation work.
Michael Reddy, Ph.D, CPC, is a former academic cognitive scientist who evolved slowly into a coach, shaman, and healer in a long quest to recover from childhood abuse.
Watch Part One of the interview here and stay tuned for Part Two, where Michael describes a specific client case where he uses Family Energetics.
Connect with Michael at www.Reddyworks.com