From time to time I see clients that come with a heavy heart from childhood experiences that have long lasting effects way into adulthood.

I remember some time ago a client called me as he had received many many bouts of punishment as a child that left him feeling worthless.

This had a long lasting effect on his life, in fact he presented as a guy in his very early 30’s who was now looking after a child from a failed marriage.  He was trying to be the best father he could (and from all counts was doing a great job), but was plagued with his feelings of not being good enough and didn’t want that to effect his daughter.

Being Punished

As he was growing up there were certain expectations placed on him and his other siblings by his parents. Whilst these didn’t seem to unexpected, the punishment dealt out for overstepping the mark seemed excessive from all accounts.

Stepping out of line was meet with leather strapping about the legs and rear.  The punishment as was described to me in his word “It just went on and on, I could never understand why I got such a sever belting for such a small thing”.  He said he could never understand what a 7 year old could do so bad that warranted that sort of beating.

This led him to feelings of not being good enough, not worthy, not worthy of love outside of being punished, feelings of being inadequate.

Marriage Breakup

This is the problem with emotional disturbances they can remain with us for a lifetime; and when received at such a young age can lead to a life of unwarranted pain and hurt.

His marriage had  been plagued by his feelings of being inadequate.  Whilst he loved his wife he never felt like he every truly measured up, thus this caused tremendous strain on the relationship.

I see this type of thing over and over with clients, this person has not been the first and worst of all wont be the last.  He’s not alone; there are 100’s if not 1000’s of similar stories out there.

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Tapping on His Emotions

In this instance we started his session with some quick rounds on feeling inadequate.  Whilst that really wasn’t the core of the problem I knew that from our discussion he also had feelings of what if.. what if EFT didnt help  (to me it was all the same stream of thought).

So after a few rounds of tapping addressing the fact that EFT wouldn’t help, just like his physiologist visits never helped in the past, and his feeling of not being enough, we were ready to get started.

In this instance he was a very visual person, he seemed to be able to describe the events second by second.  So we started to tap on what I call the major event (in most cases many clients always have one event that always comes up first), the tears started to flow, he was embarrassed about that, so we reverted to those feelings and kept on going.

I continued going over the event with him, tapping at every instance, and asking all my usual questions to elicit a response.  By the end of about 10 minutes we were able to go over this event without to much discomfort, there was some there but it was related to his feelings of not being good enough.

It was then that we focused on these thoughts and feelings and how they not only effected him every day, but how they destroyed his marriage and his fears for his child.

By the end of the session I could visually see a big difference in him, he was no longer slouching in his chair, he had a more positive outlook and told me he has never felt this good ever.  He sat there for a minute and then said, “I was just thinking about those events from my childhood and I don’t feel any discomfort any more”

Childhood Traumas

It doesn’t matter what the trauma is, any type of childhood trauma or abuse can have long lasting devastating effects on our futures.

In this case we had a man who had been plagued all his life with feelings of not being good enough because he was constantly being severally punished as a child.  He felt like he never measured up and this was part of the reason he received these excessive bouts of punishment.

As children our view on the world is usually limited due to the experience we have had in the world, which at this point is obviously little due to our time frame thus far. Because of this limited frame of reference out 5 or 7,  9 or 12 year old minds come up with what we seem is logical at that time, and then we carry this with us.