Our Relationship with Ourself
The most important relationship you have is the one you have with yourself.
But what is your self talk saying?
Do you constantly put your self down?
Would you let other people talk to you in the same way that you talk to yourself?
What do you honestly believe you are like as a person?
How many of us can truly say we feel comfortable about ourselves?
The source of so many of the negative beliefs we hold about ourselves can be traced back to things that happened to us during our childhood. EFT is a wonderful tool for getting to the root cause of why we feel the way we do about ourselves. By tapping and focusing we can transform the way we think about ourselves, raising our confidence and self esteem.
Our Primary Love Relationships
Never underestimate the power of love. I know that sounds a corny cliché but its true. The extreme emotions, upset and trauma suffered by people abused or rejected in love can have lasting repercussions on all areas of a person’s life.
If you feel loved by your spouse or partner, you are more able to cope with whatever life throws at you. Love positively feeds our needs for security, significance and self-worth. These needs are the emotional force behind much of our behaviour. If you feel loved you must be worth loving and this feeds our self-esteem, our self-worth. You are significant to that other person and you can feel secure knowing they will do you no harm.
It is also vitally important that we make our partner feel loved. I have been greatly influenced by Gary Chapman’s book, The Five Love Languages printed by Northfield Publishing. Just by choosing to make small changes to the way we communicate and show our love to our partner, we can change the whole dynamics of a relationship.
Our Relationship with Others
The people in life who give us the greatest difficulties are often our greatest teachers. The people who press our buttons the most are often triggering something deep down in our subconscious mind or are showing us a part of ourselves that we don’t like.
Ask yourself, what is it about them that’s triggering me? By tapping and focusing on the person and the difficulties, deep down, buried negative beliefs often come to light. If you can acknowledge and change those negatives using EFT, you can change the way you feel about that person. This subsequently changes your response to them and then change in the relationship as a whole starts to occur. You will find they won’t press your buttons in the same way. The dynamics of the relationship will change. Sometimes it only takes a small change on our part to create a big change in a relationship.
You have to be honest with yourself, is this relationship doing you more harm than good? Does this person leave you an emotional wreck for hours, days, weeks after you have had dealings with them? Does this person confuse, undermine, ignore, abuse you? Is this a relationship you want to save or to end? If the relationship is with a close family member, it may not be possible to end it. If the relationship is with a work colleague or boss, how important is your job to you? By clearing negative memories and beliefs, EFT can bring clarity and help with these difficult decisions.
People move in and out of our lives quite naturally. There is that old saying;
Friends for a reason
Friends for a season
Friends for life.
If you want to change the nature of a particular relationship, you have to change the energy of the interaction.
Within the context of a marriage or partnership, if we do not feel loved our differences seem magnified. We have to fight our corner for our needs to be met and life becomes less harmonious and more like a battlefield. We also begin to lose our security, significance and self-worth.
Coping with difficulties in a love relationship can be exhausting, demoralising and heartbreaking. Living in an unhappy, abusive environment and experiencing recurrent negative emotions over and over again takes its toll on our energy system and physical symptoms can often result. Children, previous relationships, financial and housing problems can all add to the difficulties.
EFT is a very effective tool for taking the ‘charge’ or hurt out of many of the destructive, damaging things that happen in a relationship that’s experiencing difficulties. Often when people are in the middle of so much angst and upset, it’s difficult to see the wood from the trees. By tapping and focusing in on specific problems and the emotions that arise from them, EFT can bring clarity to a situation to enable more rational decisions to be made.
Using EFT to help with Relationships
It is estimated that we have on average around 70,000 thoughts a day. If we can change just 5% of our negative thoughts using EFT, the change in our outlook and subsequent change in our life and relationships can be profound.
