Sometimes, we must grieve and heal alone.
After the death of a beloved pet, I found myself mute and self-isolating for a good part of this past summer. Because of my daily journal and Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) practices, I moved through my grief with slow and steady progress. I ached, I wept, and I mourned, but I didn’t slip into despair or form a codependent relationship with any number of well-meaning people who were uncomfortable with my grief and wanted me to ‘get over’ it. After years of healing with EFT, a set of body-inclusive healing tools, I knew I could trust myself to navigate this highly significant loss without the support of others.
My relationship with EFT now seems inevitable, the final leg of a journey that began when I was two. Although I had no cognitive awareness of my body’s healing wisdom, as a toddler I knew through pleasurable physical sensations that being outdoors made me feel good. Indoors, tensions among adults triggered feelings of fear and isolation. Outdoors, I was at peace with the scents, sounds, textures, and surprise four-legged visits I experienced in my grandmother’s garden. This first non-verbal, physical, emotional, and spiritual healing experience has shaped my adult understanding of the body’s vital contributions to healing early trauma.
Thanks to the evolutionary nature of psychiatry and psychology, we are discovering more about trauma, physical reactivity, and the primary role of non-verbal healing. The limits of talk therapy in the treatment of trauma have created space for the invaluable contributions of body-inclusive therapies such as Dr. Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing, Dr. Qing Li’s Forest Bathing Therapy, Traditional Eastern Medicine’s Acupuncture, Acupressure, Ayurveda, and Yoga, Dr. Roger Callahan’s Thought Field Therapy (TFT), Dr. Francine Shapiro’s Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR), and, Gary Craig’s Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) and its myriad “tapping” spinoffs.
Most significant for my personal healing and growth, along with time outdoors, is EFT / tapping. The modality’s combined physical, intellectual, emotional, and spiritual approach to challenges empowers as others do not. Most modalities require adherence to and dependence on a belief system reinforced by trained authority figures. In contrast, while there are many situations in which a trained EFT practitioner’s knowledge and expertise are helpful, the techniques are accessible enough to be learned from a video and practiced with immediate calming results.
My first in-person EFT practitioner accomplished the miracle of transmission in an hour and a half, with absolutely no preparation or knowledge of the techniques on my part. The process was simple; she tapped on me while I explored a tiny piece of my trauma story. Because of tapping’s immediate soothing effects on my nervous system, I added the modality to my daily emotional hygiene routine.
After that initial experience, I learned as much as I could from internet articles, videos, and books. Four years of daily use convinced me to formally train to teach the techniques to college students struggling with a lack of confidence in their ability to learn. Those who practiced the techniques during borrowing benefits sessions of fifteen minutes to an hour offered anecdotal reports of EFT’s effects on their organizational / time-management skills and ability to focus. With a bare minimum of coaching, these students felt empowered to address challenges in the present and had more confidence in themselves to meet whatever the future might hold.
Why is EFT’s ability to empower important, especially to those who have suffered early trauma?
When left unhealed, childhood trauma interrupts our normal brain development, activating both hypervigilant fight or flight reactivity and dissociation. Hypervigilance is fairly easy to spot because of visible signs of agitation, but dissociation, a protective numbing of body and mind, often looks like compliance in the classroom and daydreaming in other situations. Unhealed trauma is often labeled Attention-Deficit Disorder (ADD) because teachers and parents see only the surface inattentiveness and not the early causes of “checking out,” a state that results in serious school and relationship challenges, including harsh experiences with authority figures.
Developmental trauma results when adult authority figures fail to keep traumatized children safe from abuse or are themselves abusers. To the traumatized child’s brain, nervous-system, and automatic comfort seeking behaviours, this failure translates as abandonment during the years when we most need comfort and protection. All children lack the physical, intellectual, and emotional maturity to navigate life. When early protracted trauma destroys children’s healthy dependence on others, children themselves must take over the roles of parent and protector long before they have developed the resources to do so.
No wonder so many unhealed traumatized children grow up to be rebellious and resistant to authority. Parents, teachers, social workers, and mental health workers – no matter how well meaning – are conflated with the people who did not meet our needs when we were helpless, dependent, and powerless to understand or protect ourselves from harm. Threats of abandonment and abuse are always present when an unhealed early trauma is activated, regardless of the traumatized person’s current age and the benign intentions of authorities.
As unlikely as it seems, there is an upside to traumatizing authority betrayals when we are young.
Creative solutions to anxiety and isolation, such as my early garden experiences at two, teach us to trust ourselves even when we cannot trust others. Feeling the difference between peace and anxiety is something we experience as infants. Seeking comfort in the garden, or the rocking chair, or, later, at the craft table, or with the special blanket or stuffed animal – what we now call self soothing – especially when we need to quell anxiety, is a baby step toward the “I’ve got this,” feeling of confidence we long for as adolescents and adults.
In spite of the peace I felt in our garden, I carried a great deal of unhealed early traumatic reactivity into my teen and early adult years. When my frontal lobe development finally made it possible in my teens, I did my best to escape into thinking about my challenges and crises rather than feeling the emotions that are part of such frightening experiences. Dance, a great source of emotional and physical regulation, along with outdoor experiences of peace, helped me to navigate these tumultuous years.
Like so many other traumatized children, as I matured, I intuitively deepened my commitment to my healing journey until my challenges were too great for my intuition to handle. When this happened, I knew I had to engage an expert to pull me back from despair. Rather than encouraging my dependence on her, my therapist built on the self-regulating techniques I’d already mastered intuitively, what are now called bottom-up strategies, and helpfully introduced top-down strategies to complement these, such as reading John Bowlby’s work about attachment and loss and expressing my thoughts and feelings in a journal. Throughout our two-year, weekly relationship, I explored the contexts of the harm done to me and added to the skills and abilities I had already developed to support my safety, my healthy engagement with others, and my general happiness.
Only much later did I consciously identify a constant source of deep healing: my very own body. EFT was the agent of this profound discovery.
Dancing, singing, walking, and swimming have always supported my feelings of peace and joy. Eventually I learned why: these activities reward the body with feel-good hormones in spite of all the trauma story sensations and memories stored in the flesh. The body as trauma storage facility is the reason why so many body-inclusive therapies are successful when talk therapy is not.
EFT has become the most effective of these tools for me because I can apply the techniques without an authority’s supervision of my tapping and partnering storytelling. EFT tools nurture my ability to trust myself to address whatever comes up for healing. Self-trust is vital to those of us carrying the legacy of early trauma because trust is the first and worst casualty of early trauma. Together with outdoor experiences and journal work, EFT creatively detangles relationships snarls, navigates professional difficulties creatively, and addresses the challenges of daily living, including aging. This past summer, EFT came on long walks and supported my journal work, not to “get over” the grief I felt because of my beautiful cat companion’s death, but to integrate everything I felt and thought about this loss.
The continuous choice to expand empowering body awareness supports self-regulation, no matter the severity of past traumas. Using EFT means I can address very specific unhealed experiences as they surface – any memories, beliefs, and sensations that, if ignored or denied, cause reactivity. And I can do this work without surrendering to an authority figure.
Empowerment was and is central to my personal healing journey, because, while the mature person using the word “I” in my vocabulary is a great judge of character, my guardian inner child hops from foot to foot whenever “I” am tempted to surrender responsibility for my personal state of well-being to someone else. It turns out there is good reason to feel threatened: the imbalance of power required in codependent relationships.
A codependent arrangement forms when both parties feel compelled to enter into a power-imbalance agreement. Such arrangements impact the autonomy of both parties because one person is required to remain helpless and dependent while the other is compelled to be the saviour of the other. Psychologists and psychiatrists describe the “saviour complex” as the compulsion to help others to the detriment of personal physical and emotional health.
For obvious reasons, the saviour complex must be guarded against by all of us in the helping professions, including teachers, social workers, nurses and nurses aides, and mental health associates.
Were the well-meaning folks who wanted me to “get over” my cat-loss grief suffering from the saviour complex? Perhaps, to some degree. More likely, they were folks habituated to avoid feeling their own deep grief. More than fear, more than anger, more than rage, grief pulls us into the depths of vulnerability. And yet, experiencing our grief is essential if we are to avoid falling into either helpless or saviour codependent roles.
My experience of loss in childhood was extreme. It made me prickly and suspicious even as it made me creative, resourceful, and, over time, thoroughly embodied. My early trauma also contributed to my ability to feel the difference between surrendering my authority to an “expert” and becoming a partner in learning, the latter a role I very much value as teacher and coach. Trusting myself and my own judgment about healing has become far more important than trusting others, especially those in the grips of a saviour complex.
All body-inclusive modalities, and especially EFT, are teaching traumatized folk that every one of us has what we need to integrate traumas early and late. Most important, these therapies teach that our first and best learning partnership is with the body. Once we support the empowering partnership between spirit and flesh with EFT and other gentle, body-inclusive approaches to healing, we significantly reduce the compulsion to develop the codependent thought patterns of helpless victim or messianic saviour.
To learn more about Emotional Freedom Techniques, see the EFT page on this website. To learn more about how developmental trauma differs from traumas experienced later in life, visit the Developmental Trauma page on this website. To learn more about my personal healing journey and the complexities of healing from developmental trauma, you can read about my memoir, Once Upon a Body on the Jane’s Books page. While it is available online, if it sounds like a story that will support your healing journey, I hope you’ll consider ordering it through your local library or from your local independent book seller.
Until next time,
Jane