Tapping on Releasing a Situation
Oh Boy!, I have recently found myself in a situation where letting go is essential. What a challenge that can be. I know it can be for me. I’m not one of those people that can automatically go to the positive when my emotions are highly charged. Depending on what it is I need to let go of, I can do it quickly, if I get a grip on myself right out of the gate, or it can take me days, even weeks to truly get myself congruent with whatever it is I’m challenged with.
Letting go, when emotions are fresh, can be a messy road. We end up with a tug of war between our rational mind and our emotional state of being. When the initial experience occurred I was highly activated and as Blair Singer says, “When emotions are High Intelligence is Low.” Well, along this vein, I found myself reacting in very counter-productive ways. A twelve year old would have better judgement than I did initially.
I was tied up and twisted and coming from this place was not serving me or anyone else involved. I have found that a great question to ask yourself when you find yourself feeling activated emotionally is, “How old do I feel right now?” See what comes up for you. I suspect you’ll find that you feel quite young.
The fact that I’ve been vacillating in and out of this place creates more challenges, because I go from “All is Lost” to “It’s all going to be okay.” I believe this is what we call grief and grief has 5 stages according to Elisabeth Kübler-Ross and David Kessler and we can jump back and forth between these stages which are denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Well, I’ve touched on all of them and continue to. I’ll land on one of the stages for a bit and then jump to another one.
I tap on myself and I’ve worked with another practitioner and that provides me relief, and then an entirely new aspect of the situation can come up on my journey to the heart of the matter….the core issue of what is really transpiring for me. So I just keep tapping and feeling and tapping and feeling. With this in mind, I’ve opted to do my messy best by allowing my feelings when I can and be aware when I’m resisting when I can (and tap) and that in itself can be messy, but sometimes, life is just messy, but I know that armed with the tool of tapping I can get there.
The critical piece of all of this that keeps coming back to me is that I need to continue my quest for self-acceptance and patience with my foibles. It’s not something many of us are trained to go to. We’re more often trained to be hard on ourselves and buck up, just do it, make it happen, keep a stiff upper lip, never let them see you cry, stay strong (whatever that means) and the list goes on. We have an inner voice that can be ruthless and it will swoop in and stomp all over us, leaving us feeling like worse about ourselves.
I have been dealing with some potent emotions such as guilt, shame, failure, embarrassment to name a few and these go back a long way in my life with many experiences attached to each emotion. As I vacillate in and out of this I’m noticing that my pendulum swing isn’t nearly as severe as it was in the beginning. I’m starting to level out more and I notice that the activated little kid in me is at bay more often which allows for my adult self to step in and run the show. My activated child still likes to pop her head in and remind me that she’s around and I take note of the resistance that’s still occurring for me and tap tap tap.
I like to use the analogy of cleaning out a closet that’s packed to the gills and hasn’t been attended to for a while when talking about the process of letting go. When you might not be ready yet, when you’re railing against the tide of what is hitting you emotionally. Sometimes it’s going to look ALOT messier before it gets cleaned up and cleared out. It seems like the easiest way to clean out a closet like this, is to pull everything out and sift and sort through it, discarding the items that are no longer useful and cleaning up and organizing the items that will remain.
When you first pull everything out of the closet, it’s a mess. There’s stuff all over the place and it can feel overwhelming and like you’ll never get through it all, but with some time and patience you do. If you allow for all your emotions and give them full flower with the healing power of tapping, I believe you’ll find that your emotions do what they were intended to do and that’s move through you.
So the next time you find yourself struggling with a person, a situation or a circumstance, do your best to allow yourself to feel messy about it and use tapping to assist you in releasing the emotional charges and I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised at the cumulative results you’ll witness. I know I’m in the process of doing so with the current situation in my life and I do know I’ll come out the other side all the better for it, but right now, it’s still in the messy stage and it will be until I’m done with it. So remind yourself when you find yourself losing patience with your process that you are still experiencing some resistance and use the insights you get from the resistance to tap and move you a step closer to your own resolution and you’ll find it.
Keep Tapping.
Warm Regards, Marti