Trauma in our lives, and I’m talking about the big “T” traumas, like physical abuse, war memories, rape, sexual abuse, etc. are huge. Anyone carrying them around knows exactly what I am talking about. These issues shape every facet and minute of our lives. They override and overwhelm every thought process we have. They cloud our thinking about who we are in Christ.
Often the memories shape our personality. It’s the physiology God put into us that makes this all so. He didn’t mean it as destructive, but as a protective mechanism.
The problem with the subconscious, if it is really a “problem” is that its main function is survival. Anything it perceives as a life threat, it will bury, hide, disguise or do anything it needs to do to protect us. And I’m talking “us” here, because I have firsthand experience on this subject. Sadly, for me, I know it intimately, and the deep burial of the memories nearly killed me. God using EFT saved my life.
So, let me continue, explaining why traumas get buried so deeply into the subconscious, where no one or nothing, including the conscious mind, can access them. Traumas are overwhelming, trapping us in the freeze part of the limbic system’s “fight, flight or freeze” mechanism. During the trauma, the person feels helpless, hopeless, without any resources. If it happens to a child, it is even worse, because up to the age of about 7 (Remember, all you Catholics, and probably other denominations, how the Church used age 7 as the “age of reason” when the sacraments of Penance and Holy Communion were permitted?), children function purely in delta, theta, and alpha brain waves, sucking up information, with absolutely no processing ability whatsoever. They are building a lifetime of neural pathways. Repetition is what builds those. That is why 2 or 3 year olds repetitively ask the same question over and over and over again. They don’t do it to irritate the adults in their lives; they do it because that is precisely the way their brains work. Kids have no cognitive neural pathways when they are born. They are a clean slate. Every event, good or bad, that happens to them begins that neural learning, all cognitive, creating a lifetime of neural connections & memories. In order to make those learned neural bundle stick, kids must ask the same question time and again to make the bundle thick and heavy duty. Our thoughts will ascend a thickened neural pathway much quicker than a lesser used one.
It is the same process that is involved in habit changing. We always hear that it takes 3 weeks to change a habit. That’s about right based on the neurology involved. You decide you want to stop eating toast for breakfast and eat fruit instead. You’ve eaten toast your entire life, so what does your taste buds want when your feet hit the floor in the morning? Yes, toast, because it is a comfortable, known habit. You’ve done it forever, it seems. In order to change that habit, you need to become mindful that you want the toast habit changed, and keep it in your mind for a couple of days. The subconscious will want you to revert back to the old toast habit, and you might even slip up a day or so and have your toast half eaten by the time you remember you had chosen to switch to fruit. Don’t fret, get up the following morning & eat your fruit. After about 3 weeks of fruit eating, you will, in the future, probably reach for fruit without thinking. Why? Because you simply, by choice, changed that particular, mundane as it might seem, neural pathway to another idea. After about 3 weeks, the body, which never wastes a single component part in the brain, disassembles the toast pathway and puts those component parts elsewhere where repair is needed.
Young children are the same way. In order to remember that the color blue is the color blue, the concept must be repeated a 100 times, or what feels like to an adult a million times. We, as adults, tell kids to quit asking so many questions. Don’t bother telling them that – they will just continue to ask the same thing over and over. Kids have to – it’s the way God programmed them to learn and to build up the neural bundles they need to function in life.
But, back to traumas, the concept here is similar. At the time of the trauma, the event is fixed in our memories; much of the details in our subconscious, where we cannot access it, the things we tell ourselves around that memory are what begins the problems. We aren’t good enough, it was all our fault, men are scary, Mom doesn’t care, red cars crash, public speaking is uncomfortable, etc.
EFT goes in & dismantles all those encoded details that are getting into our way, causing us anxiety or fear, stalling us out in life. Once 2 or 3 or 4 aspects (details) around an event are disabled, the event becomes a non-issue, allowing us once again to move forward in life, to that abundant life that God has called us to live.
It’s all in the God created physiology. God made us this way, so why not use what He gave us to improve our relationship with Him & others.
Are you stalled, or are some emotions getting in your way of your abundant life in Christ? If so, email me. I believe EFT can help!
To schedule a free EFT coaching session, email me at eftforchristians@gmail.com
Always remember to take complete responsibility for your own health and well-being.
Always remember to take complete responsibility for your own health and well-being.
