Worry & EFT

Worry!  It pervades our modern life. It is what we do as humans. We worry about relationships. We worry about finances. In certain instances, we worry about our safety and we worry if we will have sufficient food to feed our children the next day. We just worry. And often, if there is nothing to worry about, we worry about that! I’ve actually had clients come to me to tap on just that specific idea. If they have nothing to worry about, they will create something worrisome. Worry is what they do.

Philippians 4:6-7 reads, “Do not be anxious about anything, but in every situation, by prayer and petition, with thanksgiving, present your requests to God.  And the peace of God, which transcends all understanding, will guard your hearts and your minds in Christ Jesus.” All our fears, anxieties, and worry are to be placed into His loving arms. They are His to carry.

I believe Apostle Paul is referring to an attitude. An attitude of knowing who our Savior is and what He has done for us. That knowing keeps us surrendered to Him all day long, through the thick & thin of life’s travails, desiring to do His will every minute of our lives. J. Vernon McGee wrote in one of his Thru the Bible entries entitled “The Attitude of Prayer, “Prayer is an attitude of the life. It is more an attitude of life than an action of the lips.”

Dr. McGee ended the short study with this, “There was a famous preacher, years ago in the state of Georgia, who had many very unusual expressions. One of them was this, ‘When a man prays for a corn crop, God expects him to say Amen with a hoe.’ You can’t just stay on your knees all the time and pray for a corn crop. That’s pious nonsense. But to pray for the corn crop and then go to work is the thing our Lord is talking about in days when men’s hearts are failing them. “Men ought always to pray, and not to faint.” (Luke 18:1).

Prayer is an attitude of awareness that God is with us, and unlike the New Ager’s non-personal god, He is interested and involved in our every thought and action. We whisper prayers of thanksgiving throughout the day, or ones asking for help, if something difficult arises. We just know He is right there with us, a prayer or thought away.  He waits for us to talk to Him. He desires that communication. If at Baptism the Holy Spirit indwelt us, how can we do anything differently? 

Now, that all said & done, we know nothing is that easy!  After all, we are human, and our thoughts turn to worry, fear, discouragement, and anger.  It is life, and it appears to be the way we are programmed. Or is it?

As we go through the day, prayer should be our first response to everything that makes us fearful, anxious, or angry, etc.  A lack of prayer will cause us to be dependent on our own abilities and thoughts instead of depending on God's grace and mercy and help. Unceasing prayer is the humbling of ourselves through continual dependence upon and communication with the Father.

But what happens when the fear, worry, or anxiety continues to rear its ugly head?  What happens when we cannot seem to follow that Biblical admonition to stop worrying? Do we not trust God? Is God not answering our prayers?  I don’t believe that to be the case at all. God created us with a specific physiology. He knows what He created and how we function within our bodies. God allows certain situations to occur in our lives, sometimes for decades, to keep us growing closer to Him, or to teach us something important, lessons required for us to do a job God has appointed us to do for Him.

God’s physiology goes something like this:  We learn worry early in our lifetime. Oh, it might be something that today we would find inconsequential, like being afraid of the history report we must give before the class tomorrow, or not understanding the science in an upcoming big test. Worry and anxiety set in. The cognitive learning process instilled in our mind has just begun.  We brew up unconsciously a mix of neurochemicals. Each mix is different, but specific to us, for each emotion we feel. Our bodies memorize those chemical mixtures.

Time and time we feel the exact feelings when we experience similar circumstances because those special chemical mixtures are brewed and dumped into our blood streams.

We become accustomed to the feelings. Sometimes, we even like them because they are familiar to us, or, as the body is prone to do, we like the kick of endorphins it releases immediately after the neurochemical mix is released. Endorphins relax us, and the body is programmed to do that to ameliorate the original stimulating chemicals it released in emotions of fear, worry, or anxiety.

Over the following decades, other problems arise that reinforce all that worry and fear and anxiety. Each time, it seems we worry more and more, or the worry is more deep set. Finally, by middle age, we find ourselves literally worrying about nearly every single thing in our lives. We can tell ourselves a million times that we have nothing to worry about – God has it all under control, but, for some reason, that never really reassures us, and we continue to worry (Matt. 6:25-26, Luke 12:22-31).  Eventually, the guilt about worrying begins to set in, too, adding to the angst. We know in our heart it is wrong and sinful, as it places us in control of our life, not God, and we pray diligently to be delivered from it.

We all know God can do whatever He finds necessary. Sometimes, He simply rescues us from our deep-seated worry, setting us free. Other times, it continues, like St. Paul’s thorn, leaving us overburdened and sick. God, at other times, brings alongside us something else to assist us, and answering our prayers in other ways.

If you have prayed for God to help you stop worrying about everything, perhaps it is now time to consider using Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT).

Hindsight is a wonderful thing!  Now, after praying for more than 40 years for God to “fix” my life, one that I felt was pathetic, filled with constant negativity, self-doubts, self-hatred, and persistent worry, He lead me to a permanent solution – EFT!

Would I right here, right now, be doing what I now do – tapping with hurting people, teaching other wonderful Christians to become Christian EFT practitioners, and writing this article, if God had promptly and immediately, when I first asked 40 years ago, relieved me of that early emotional turmoil. Absolutely not!

God used all that horrible negative stuff to mold me (Isaiah 64:8) and make me as He wished me to be and desired me to do for Him.  

Romans 9:20 as written in the Message says it best: “Who in the world do you think you are to second-guess God? Do you for one moment suppose any of us knows enough to call God into question? Clay doesn’t talk back to the fingers that mold it, saying, “Why did you shape me like this?” Isn’t it obvious that a potter has a perfect right to shape one lump of clay into a vase for holding flowers and another into a pot for cooking beans? If God needs one style of pottery especially designed to show his angry displeasure and another style carefully crafted to show his glorious goodness, isn’t that all right? Either or both happens to Jews, but it also happens to the other people. Hosea put it well: I’ll call nobodies and make them somebodies; I’ll call the unloved and make them beloved. In the place where they yelled out, “You’re nobody!” they’re calling you “God’s living children.” Isaiah maintained this same emphasis: If each grain of sand on the seashore were numbered and the sum labeled “chosen of God,” They’d be numbers still, not names; salvation comes by personal selection. God doesn’t count us; he calls us by name. Arithmetic is not his focus. Isaiah had looked ahead and spoken the truth: If our powerful God had not provided us a legacy of living children, We would have ended up like ghost towns, like Sodom and Gomorrah. How can we sum this up? All those people who didn’t seem interested in what God was doing actually embraced what God was doing as he straightened out their lives. And Israel, who seemed so interested in reading and talking about what God was doing, missed it. How could they miss it? Because instead of trusting God, they took over. They were absorbed in what they themselves were doing. They were so absorbed in their “God projects” that they didn’t notice God right in front of them, like a huge rock in the middle of the road. And so they stumbled into him and went sprawling. Isaiah (again!) gives us the metaphor for pulling this together: Careful! I’ve put a huge stone on the road to Mount Zion, a stone you can’t get around. But the stone is me! If you’re looking for me, you’ll find me on the way, not in the way.

Emotional Freedom Techniques is another of those answers to prayer. While He allows worry, fear, and anxiety to be part of our human experience, one started in response to original sin our first parents committed in the Garden of Eden, He also instilled in us a mechanism to relieve just those emotions.

EFT, or tapping, is a physiology process where by these fore mentioned emotions can be permanently dismantled. How? By allowing the subconscious to bring to the surface those early memories where the worry first began, and tapping away the emotions attached to those events. As we can read in the next paragraph, we must break the negative worry patterns in our lives in order to maintain our health. Even our grandmothers understood that worry could kill us. Now, science understands why.  The old computer adage, “Garbage in, garbage out” works within our own bodies. Every piece of negativity we think or speak is picked up by the antennae on our cellular receptors, and all 50-200 billion cells in our bodies have 50,000 to 100,000 cellular receptors on each. That is an awful lot of communication tools to pick up negative vibes.

Dr. Allison Adams writes in an article, “According to Dr Lipton, all living things and all cells can only be in one of two modes. The first of these modes is 'survival' whereby they are in a protective or bracing mode and the second is that they are reproducing. For any cell in the body, to remain for too long in the 'protective mode' eventually undermines the body's defenses as normal replacement and maintenance cannot take place and the adrenal system shuts off the immune system which can ultimately result in various diseases. 

Dr Lipton determined that all cells have antennae that are tuned into the signals broadcast by the mind and that fearful signals cause the cells to remain in their 'protective' mode indefinitely. Individual humans, he maintains all have unique frequencies associated with all their cell membrane receptors. Further, that many of the beliefs that we broadcast to our cells are unconscious and were acquired in a semi-hypnotic state before the age of 7 years of age.

This means that in order to get a different physical outcome, we must change the broadcast and this can be done either by becoming very mindful of our internal chatter, undergoing hypnotherapy (to access the same mind state as the program) or by using one of the energy psychology techniques such as Emotional Freedom Technique, body talk, Avatar, holographic re-patterning or Psyche-K.” (http://www.thenaturalrecoveryplan.com/articles/cell-membrane-the-cells-brain.html).

It’s how God created us when He breathed breath into Adam’s nostrils on the sixth day of creation.

EFT will break all that negative self-talk, those voices in your head, that cause you to worry, or feel God doesn’t love you, or you are worthless to humanity, etc.

Free yourself of those emotions of anxiety, fear, and worry through EFT, opening you up to an awakened spiritual experience through God’s mighty grace.  Somehow once EFT knocks back those unwanted feelings, a whole new world of God’s grace opens up to us. It’s been there the entire time, but we have been wallowing in base emotions, allowing them to drown out our Savior’s voice. Instead of allowing worry or fear to persist, overwhelming those cellular receptors, tap instead, allowing them to flood you with God’s mercy and grace and love.

Allow God to instill into you the peace of God that passes all understanding by using this EFT mechanism God implanted in you at birth.

God bless your walk with Him! 

EFT is not a substitute for a physician's care. Call your doctor if you determine to need to do so. Please take responsibility for all of your physical needs. 

Sherrie Rice Smith, R.N. (Retired)

Certified EFT Practitioner

Author EFT for Christians (2015)

EFT Makes Me Laugh

EFT makes me laugh inside. The effectiveness on the little things in life is astounding. EFT just plainly makes life so much improved.

Monday, my husband announces to me, after I asked him several times what was bugging him (I always notice something is wrong with him long before he does for himself), that he is overwhelmed. I inquire about what. He tells me the details. I ask, “Have you tapped?” Sadly, as usual, the answer was, “no”.

We were eating lunch out when he decided to tell me how overwhelmed he was.  I never care where we are or what we are doing, I tell him to just begin tapping – fingertips under the table, and let’s go.

I start him off with “overwhelmed”, and then I add “discombobulated & frustrated” to the tapping mix, after he explained his feelings.  At that point, I just leave him alone, as he knows quite well how to handle it; he’s just not to the point where he recognizes the problem.  I guess we make a good team. I notice the problem & he taps for himself, fixing his own issues.

Now, the part that makes me laugh is this:  It took him all of 90 seconds to discharge the frustration, “discombobulation”, & overwhelm completely.  Here, he has been fighting the feelings for 5 or 6 hours, doing some disorganized stunts, getting nothing accomplished, by his own admission, and 90 seconds of tapping eliminated the entire issue. “I can’t believe how calm I am,” were his words as he stopped tapping. His SUDS dropped from an 8 to 0 in 90 seconds flat!

I told him that he would go home and in less than an hour accomplish everything he hadn’t fixed in the previous 5 to 6 hours. He agreed. He knows well how the science works – put the blood back in the neo-cortex and suddenly thinking makes sense!

About 2 hours later, he phoned to inform me, all was accomplished in about the hour I said + he had an added bonus. For the past 3 weeks, he thought he had 2 huge weekend long events happening on the exact same weekend. He wanted to attend both events as much of as possible, and he was getting flak from other participants because they wanted him to give up the “other” event for theirs. That was part of his frustration. He said he didn’t care, but obviously he did, or he wouldn’t have felt the overwhelm. Anyway, one of the organizers informed him that the 2 events weren’t the same weekend at all, but on successive weekends. He was discombobulated for no good reason, but it wasn’t until he settled down with tapping, & made the appropriate phone call, that he realized he had his weekends all messed up.

Did EFT fix Brad’s calendar? Well, probably not, but it did clear him enough so he could ask the appropriate questions, completely clarifying all the issues around his overwhelm.

For more information, go to  www.eftforchristians.com

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.  Contact a medical professional, if necessary.

EFT & Trauma

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!

For more information, go to  www.eftforchristians.com

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.

EFT is SO Effective

Hi all,

I wanted to share a little story with all you readers, as I'm hoping to show you that persistence with tapping does indeed pay off.

I have been tapping regularly and aggressively for a couple of years now, trying to clear all of my childhood emotional and verbal abuse issues. They are heavy, deep, and, until recently, pretty distressing, running my life from the subconscious level. I had no idea how much these childhood issues were driving my adult issues. It was huge!

Within the past couple of days, small events happened. I will relate one of them for you. For many of you, I suspect, you will wonder why I'm bothering to bring this up. What I need you to understand is this: small things would trigger me big time. I'd have some huge emotional blow-up over pretty much nothing.

Yesterday, accidentally, I dumped a 1/2 cup of coffee all over the floor. 4 years ago, I would have gone ballistic, calling myself all kinds of names, angry at the incident, and yelling at everyone around me. Immature behavior? You bet! Over the edge for a spill?  You bet! Now, I understand where that behavior came from - that is how my Dad reacted when one of us kids spilled a glass of milk at dinner. I thought this was how everyone reacted to incidents. He went crazy about the mess!  I learned the lesson so well. He called us all kinds of names, like klutz, idiot, etc. I simply took up, calling myself the same names, where he left off.

Well, low & behold, after I cleaned up the big puddle of coffee, I realized my only reaction was, "poop"! No swearing. No yelling. No calling myself names. I just cleaned it up with an "oh, well, stuff happens" attitude, like "normal" people do! Success!  Those old, negative, neural pathways have been severed and new, less reactive ones, built up. Praise God!  The cognitive learning has been undone! Indeed, tapping has changed my physiology!

I like this new me better. I'm more in control. Spilled coffee is not worth raising my cortisol level for 2 days!  Elevated cortisol levels and blood pressure do not serve my physical needs.

God can through EFT change behaviors that I have tried all my life to change! EFT gave me the boost to accomplish what my conscious mind could not do alone!  I'm so grateful to God for this precious gift, literally of life.

P.S. The friend who witnessed this incident added this comment later, "Not only did you only say "poop" or "darn"...something totally tame.  The next thing you said was, 'Well, at least I got to drink the first half cup of coffee!'

A beautiful example!  Great job!" Sarah

For more information, go to  www.eftforchristians.com

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.  Contact a medical professional, if necessary.

From Woe and Misery to Healing with Christian EFT

July is here with all its impending nostalgic glory, or pain, depending on one’s point of view. Glory because I’ve been healed of my emotional pain; Pain because I had to lose 2 of my “babies” to get here.

Tonight, as I took a walk in the cool of a beautiful Wisconsin evening, I once again slipped back into the part of me where I once lived. Oh, not entirely back, just a short distance back into that pain, or guilt, that I often identify as almost survivor’s guilt.

This has to smack a bit of what our military personnel feel like when one of them loses an entire platoon, leaving the one left behind devastated emotionally, pondering the question of “why not me?”

That question once again reared its ugly head and a few tears slid down my cheeks, as I just gently, one more time, tapped away the heart pain I feel when I again realize that I had to lose two of my younger siblings in order to find myself right here, right now, in a place I never imagined I would be, if I dreamed a 1000 years.

Never could I have thought this world I now find myself in would ever have emerged out of that muck & mire. Karen died of biliary atresia at seventeen months of age; Bill was two months old when she passed; I was age 8. My entire life up until 3 years ago was run purely on the leftovers and buried emotions around Karen’s death. One day she was alive when I left for school and by evening I was being told by family friends she was gone. Gone? Oh, I was told shortly after she was born that she was going to die, but what did that mean to a 7 year old? Absolutely nothing.

I loved that baby as my own. I bathed her, I fed her, I changed her diapers, and I even stayed up for a few hours at night with her when I saw, as a 7 year old, the complete exhaustion in my Mom’s eyes. I would send Mom back to bed and deal with fussy, sick Karen on my own. No one could put her to sleep as quickly as I could. It was my 7 year old claim to fame, one of the few things Mom ever gave me kudos for.

My total memory of Karen’s funeral consists of my aunt hauling me out of church because I was wailing so hard about “my baby being in that white box”. My aunt words to me were, “You’re making a scene”. There is a short snippet of the trip to the cemetery, a comment I made about a classmate living across the street from that cemetery. That is where the memories stop; that is the sum total of Karen’s death memories.

There are no more. Karen was never spoken of again in our household that I remember. She disappeared forever. My baby simply vanished in that small white cement box.

I slipped into depression, my first, 9 years later, in nursing school when I got to my pediatric rotation. I finally was able to ascertain exactly what Karen died from. No one at home knew. And, if they did, they certainly weren’t sharing it with me. I always felt I was in the dark. No one told me anything. No one told me Karen was close to death.

I blamed myself for not figuring that out at age 8. For pete’s sake, her crib had been moved into the living room and my Grandma Rice was there with us as much as possible. I assume she & Mom traded off sitting with Karen 24/7 for those last days, but why didn’t I figure that out & ask to stay home that morning?

Isn’t guilt an interesting emotion? I have another memory, I think, that came out during Matrix Reimprinting around Karen’s death. Perhaps that is a story for another time. I must have buried a million memories. I lived unknowingly in some numb, unloved, isolated limbo of sorts for most of my life. My heart was hardened.

I was always crabby and defensive about everything. I had literally no friends. I functioned in some manner. I grew up in church, so getting into trouble or doing anything that would disappoint my parents or the priests and nuns was completely out of the question. I instinctively knew that would simply make my emotional issues worse by increasing the isolation. The family always withdrew itself from any member that remotely stepped “out of line”.

And so life went on. I guess if you could call it living. I finished nursing school, found an interesting job or two, left PA for Kentucky, and then eventually moved to Wisconsin. Looking back now, as my adult self, it is amazing that I never delved into alcohol or drugs to salve all that pain, or a series of sexual encounters with a possible subsequent chain of unwanted babies.

 Somehow, God protected me from doing any of that self-destructive behavior. The self-destruction was contained solely in my own mind of my own making. I entertained myself by playing those same old recordings over and over again until those neural pathways were thick and heavy. I knew well that song of feeling unloved, unwanted, rejected, guilty, and a litany of every emotion under the sun.

Finally, I found a man who in my Dad’s words “would put up with” me. We married, his second, my first, later in my life, but that was going downhill because Brad’s issues from childhood were as bad as or worse than mine. We fought nearly constantly. Brad ended up in an early forced retirement, meaning we were together 24/7/365. It wasn’t pretty!

The impact of Karen’s death defined everything - the rest of my childhood and it shaped my adult beliefs, about me and all those around me, and still I never learned the lessons I needed to heal. Oh, I went to counseling several times, the latest was during my second depression a couple of years before Brad & I married.

I even wrote my parents a long letter at the behest of the counselor about everything in my life, hoping that would heal parts of me. That didn’t go well either. God allowed a perfect storm of sorts to simply brew. I had never recovered emotionally from Karen’s death’s, my marriage was failing miserably, I was horribly overweight, I hated myself and my life, and all of it was beginning to take a physical toll on me.

It was taking a toll on my younger brother, Joe, too, the next in line to me who was an extremely brittle diabetic who already had colon cancer 5 or so years previously. We had no tools to help us heal. The toolbox was totally empty. We hadn’t learned a thing about coping emotionally in life. August 9, 2008 struck. I sensed it had the potential to be the worst day of my pathetic life. Now, the pain really began; however, unbeknownst to me, this time this pain would lead to real healing and real tangible change in my life. How I longed for that!

The story is too long to tell here, so I will shorten it. I see how it all played out like it was yesterday in my mind’s eye. I was sitting at my computer, much like I’m doing right now, when the phone rang. I answered it, excited, as it was Bill, my youngest of the 2 brothers, an attorney, who rarely calls because he works 14-16 hours a day, and when home, spends the time with his wife and 4 young daughters. He lives 1200 miles east of me in northeastern PA, an hour or so from Manhattan.

We exchanged pleasantries, and then he got right to the point. “What did Grandma die from”, Bill asked. I’m a R.N. I knew something was terribly wrong. “Why”, I replied, “is your blood work screwed up?” I knew I had just heard some horrible news because that intuitive part of me said so and at times it seemed to be the only thing alive inside of me. The answer near killed me on the spot.

“Yes”, he replied. My heart fell out of my chest, drove itself through the computer room floor, and splatted into a million pieces on the basement concrete. My poor broken heart, dead over the death of a sister I never recovered from, dead over the parental relationships I never had, dead because nothing I could do helped me lose weight no matter how hard I tried or what I did to accomplish it, dead because my only chance, or so I thought of happiness with Brad, was dying, too, that heart, was simply now splintered.

My heart of hearts knew he wouldn’t live through what came to be a diagnosis of ALL (acute lymphoblastic leukemia) , the childhood leukemia that is curable about 97% in kids, but has only about a 35% cure rate in adults with all modalities of treatment, including a stem cell transplant. I found out later only 1000 cases of adult ALL are diagnosed yearly in the US. Yes, Bill snagged himself a bad one – it completely destroyed his DNA, the core of wellness in his body. His coping skills, too, didn’t help him at all either.

Were all 6 of us siblings doomed? I began to assume so. A tortured 2 years and 2 weeks began its course right then and there. That day I began a journal for Bill’s girls, knowing that if their Dad didn’t survive, they would “forget” him. The oldest was 18, scheduled to start college within weeks, and Bill’s baby was just 8 years old, the same age as I was when Karen died.

Bill had the craziest sense of humor on the planet and everyone loved him. He was the heart & soul of our dysfunctional family. He simply was a genuinely nice guy. I wanted to capture that for the girls, plus chronicle the disease process as something cathartic for me.

To this day, 400 pages later, I have yet to reopen that journal to once again read it. I have no idea when that will happen. It’s part of the journey, too. I spent about 6-7 weeks total of his illness with him in New York City/Hackensack, N.J./Lakeville, PA areas, nursing him, caring for him, and just generally repeating what I did as an 8 year old for baby sister Karen.

History was repeating itself in a horrendous way. Bill’s family lived 3 hours away from the medical center, so his wife couldn’t be with him and still care for 4 children. My Mom was well into her 7th decade of life and I didn’t think it fair for her to have to care for another probably dying child. Once through was enough for anyone.

As the R.N. in the family, this was my job to do. And so I did it. Those are the memories I cherish. Bill & I spent much time alone, reacquainting, reminiscing, Bill remembering childhood memories I had long forgotten, or buried, laughing and goofing off our way through days on end at the hospital, and me just holding him, literally, as procedures such as PICC lines were inserted, the procedures that brought home to both of us the inevitability and reality that all of this was really happening to him.

 The tears begin anew as I type this. Today they break quickly and easily under my tapping fingers. Then I had no defense. I just plodded on day after day, filled with worry and fear, wondering when the final phone call would come. Somewhere in here, shortly after Bill’s stem cell transplant, a break happened with my 2 sisters. I, to this day, have absolutely no idea what I did or what happened.

The relationship, what little there was, simply splintered, too, like my heart that August, 2008, morning. It has yet to recover. As in usual fashion, no one else in the family saw Bill’s deterioration, or they simply denied it is probably a better description. I talked with him often, many times late at night when his pain was at its worst. The stem cell transplant held for a few months, and then the leukemia came roaring back with all its fury.

I made 3 long trips east during this time. Brad was wonderful to me through it all. He simply allowed me to do what I had to do. The last trip with Bill alive was 3 years ago this month. He simply refused to give up. No one wants to give up when all treatment options are gone, but I couldn’t seem to make him understand the need for hospice (and I promised him if he wanted home hospice, we would do that – I would stand with him every moment).

He simply wouldn’t sign the DNR, making the doctors continue every treatment option right until the end. Perhaps, another piece of my guilt was, I couldn’t take much more. I had little help, except for Mother, in caring for him, and she had my Dad to take care of back home, 6 hours away. Everyone else had families to care for. I’d call, asking for some relief from my sisters.

Return phone calls never came – they couldn’t deal with the illness either. I just kept going, somehow by God’s grace. The last 2 weeks of Bill’s life, and, of course, I didn’t know it was the last 2 weeks; I finally just went home to Wisconsin. I needed some peace. He was bad & I knew it.

Mom came to stay with him in a motel in N.J., as he was still getting a specialized radiation for an ALL brain tumor that had popped up a couple months previously, causing him excruciating pain because it was sitting right on his trigeminal nerve, mimicking tic douloureux . I had finally within the previous week convinced him to see a pain specialist.

That doctor was wonderful. Bill’s dose of oral Dilaudid was unbelievable. I’d never seen the like of it in my 35 years of nursing practice. I was permitted to allow him to take up to 32 mg of the stuff every 1-2 hours. That dose would have killed most of us. If I needed more, I was to simply call, and that phone, believe it or not, was answered immediately by pain clinic staff. He could have whatever dose he needed.

When I picked up the prescription from the pharmacy, we realized (remember Bill was an attorney, so he knew these things!) I had something like $32,000 street value of Dilaudid in my pocket! I made him hide the bottle in the house so no one would be tempted! I gave Mom her instructions and returned to Wisconsin, telling Bill good-bye for what I now know to be the last time I saw him alive.

Within 3 days, the crisis came. Mom had to deal with him. She phoned me & I made phone calls for her to get her the help she needed to make decisions for him. Bill was re-admitted to Hackensack University Medical Center where he stayed until 36 hours before he died when he was moved to a hospice facility 3 hours west in Scranton, PA.

I was no longer there with him. No one could make any decisions, as I could well understand. I, to this day, have no idea who finally put him in hospice where he should have been all along. I had done what I could for him and maybe I should have stayed those weeks instead of Mom, but the family needed a reality check. No one understood that Bill was dying, or they were denying the fact. They had to get the point.

As always, I got the dirty work of telling people he was dying. First, I told brother Joe who promptly said good-bye and hung up the phone and the following day Mom asked what I thought. I gently told her she was going to lose another child. Her tears started, she sniffed them back, bucked it up stoically, and replied, “I thought so. How long do you think he has?” I had no idea it was only about 5 weeks. Brad & I put 2500 miles on the car to bury Bill because of wakes/funerals on both ends of PA.

His professional one with all the lawyers and judges was in eastern PA and the family one with his burial in western PA. Mom essentially threw Brad & me out of her house 3 days after Bill’s burial. She to this day has no idea what she said to me. I would never confront her on it. It hurt, but it was the grief talking, I now know. I let it alone. I haven’t been back. I’m not quite ready for that just yet. I knew I had to grieve. I always told patients’ families – you grieve now or you grieve later, and later is usually worse. I took my own advice.

Let me just say, amidst that grief I learned about EFT. I downloaded the EFTU mini-manual, devoured it, tried it, got a couple one minute miracles and I was hooked! I knew it was my last chance at healing, or I was next to follow Bill to the grave. I lived with 6 months of the world’s worse chest pain, which amazingly vanished on December 18th, knowing it was an emotional issue.

No doctor was going to fix the pain. My heart was simply broken. Other people died of less issues than this. I took Dawson’s Minneapolis EFTU classes Levels 1 & 2 the following April, and the rest is history. I quickly did my EFT-INT certification, and began working on my EFT-EXP certification soon thereafter, tapping with anyone I could find, and all the while tapping furiously on my own stuff, never realizing how much there really was that needed to move.

I solicited Irene Baum, EFT-INT, in Milwaukee to help me. I have no idea how I would have done it without her! I sit here today a candidate trainer for EFTUniverse, amazed and emotionally healthy. And I mean emotionally healthy, complete, peaceful, the chatter of my previous life gone from my subconscious, free at last, our marriage mostly healed (we’re married, remember, we still have “words” some days!), thanks to Kim Eisen, EFT-INT, in Minneapolis who tapped with Brad, discharging his hate for his abusive, now dead parents.

I never really dealt with Karen’s death. It simply led from one thing to another. That early cognitive learning just compounded itself event upon event until I lived in an overwhelmed state of emotional turmoil. I have with tapping pulled out 2 early 18 month old events/memories that I know shaped everything from that moment on. They were awful memories. It was no wonder I could barely function in life.

Without sounding non-empathic, I want to encourage anyone reading this that no matter what your issues, no matter how long you have endured them, no matter how painful, no matter anything, persevere through them. I’m here to tell you that you can heal. EFT will work. Do not give up hope; just keep tapping every minute you have to spare. TAP! And find a certified EFT practitioner from the list on this website to help you, if you feel stuck or you feel you cannot go on. Call someone. Reach out. Save your life. If I can do it with childhood PTSD abuse stemming from at least 18 months of age on, so can you!

Today, I stand here, with a tiny bit of sadness remaining, knowing I’m so very alive and Bill & Karen are so very dead. But the realization dawned on me, causing some tears, that I cared for them all of their lives, at least Karen’s short 17 months of life, and Bill at the beginning, as he was 9 years younger than I, and again at the end when he needed someone to care for his every need.

I have no regrets at all of the time I gave both of them. It was my pleasure to do it. The sad pain comes knowing that in their deaths they returned the favor and cared for me. It was their deaths that was instrumental in my healing, my rebirth of sorts, by the grace of God, through EFT. My new life now begins, as I open this chapter in continuing to serve mankind, as God so deems, through the healing mechanism of Emotional Freedom Techniques.

I have to make them proud and allow them to see that their early deaths were not in vain. It all served a much higher purpose than any of us could have ever imagined. I stand amazed! God be praised. Amen. For more information, go to www.eftforchristians.com To schedule a free EFT consultation coaching session, email me at: eftforchristians@gmail.com Always remember to take complete responsibility for your own health and well-being.

Epigenetics Behind the Scenes Science Article

http://discovermagazine.com/2013/may/13-grandmas-experiences-leave-epigenetic-mark-on-your-genes?fb_action_ids=10151657962056600&fb_action_types=og.likes&fb_ref=.UbfoNfOy9q_.send&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%7B%2210151657962056600%22%3A505189692878125%7D&action_type_map=%7B%2210151657962056600%22%3A%22og.likes%22%7D&action_ref_map=%7B%2210151657962056600%22%3A%22.UbfoNfOy9q_.send%22%7D#.Ubfq8_nVBjj

For more information, go to  www.eftforchristians.com

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.