A client recently expressed her frustration at the amount of time it seemed to be taking for her ‘issues’ to be truly cleared working with EFT, Matrix Reimprinting, and other energy techniques. In a moment of honesty, she shared with me that, sometimes, she’s not even sure it’s working at all.

“Why is it taking so long?”

“Isn’t this supposed to be fast and effective? What happened to the fast part??!”

“I’ve read so many amazing stories, watched so many demos of people clearing their issues in powerful, incredible sessions– and the testimonials are almost unbelievable! Where is MY testimonial?!”

These types of statements are the statements I hear from clients, friends, and family all the time– their frustration resonates with me because I once asked the very same questions. And really, if I’m honest, I didn’t ask that nicely– I tended to demand when I was in the thick of dealing with my own major issues with tapping. My practitioner at the time, Karin Davidson, is a saint. I know that now because, in retrospect, I was the worst client on the face of the planet.

People who meet me now– whether because they’re working with me to tap through their own issues or emotions, because I happen to be at Karin’s office while they’re there, or it is one of the opportunities I have to speak to some of Karin’s workshop attendees– never ever believe that this could be true. “Oh, no,” they say, “I’m sure you weren’t the WORST client. You’re so sweet!”

I assure them, I was.

When I met Karin, it was because I was interning for her media and video company. I was young, a student at a major Philadelphia art school, angry, secretly depressed, and smoked A LOT. There are endless stories that could be told about how terrible of an intern I was, but my terribleness really came through when I was in the role of ‘client’.

My tapping journey began after having a little breakdown in the office– and by that, I mean, I was sitting at my desk, crying, and desperately trying to hide it from everyone else who was there at the time, including Karin. I would later learn that hiding things like severe emotional breakdowns from Karin was absolutely useless, as it also happened to be at that moment. When she realized I was crying, she offered to help me feel better with this “cool new thing” she had learned (EFT tapping). I consented, and after work, she led me in several rounds of tapping on the source of my breakdown.

To my surprise, it worked! Most people would have been elated– not me. In my art-school-nicotine-induced-permanent-state-of-anger, I was actually irritated that it had worked so well. Mind you, I wasn’t upset about the incident any more, nor about the memory we had ended up working on in that first session, but I had been so sure that tapping on my face couldn’t possibly make a difference, that it made me more angry to have been wrong. I decided, at that moment, to see how much this tapping thing could really do.

From that point, it wasn’t difficult to continue seeing Karin– I worked for her at the time, so I was constantly in the office, and she was knee-deep in learning the ins-and-outs of this tapping thing. She both wanted to help me, and I was always there, in my perpetual anger, to be helped. I did not tell Karin that I had been diagnosed with clinical depression and borderline personality disorder, that I was currently seeing a counselor to help me ‘learn to cope’, and that I was on my sixth antidepressant in a mere span of 3-4 years, managed by a psychiatrist that I also saw on a regular basis. I didn’t tell her that I had tried (unsuccessfully) to commit suicide when I was younger, nor that even on antidepressants, there were often days, and sometimes weeks, that I couldn’t bring myself to even get out of bed. Secretly, I wanted tapping to be the answer to the seemingly unsolvable puzzle of mental health disorders I felt I had been unfairly saddled with, but was also afraid to get my hopes up, and even more afraid she would refuse to work with me. I kept all of these thing to myself.

Despite my eagerness for my issues to go away, I was an incredible skeptic. I believed nothing that Karin  told me, and I refused to try new things when she suggested them.  Having been raised in an incredibly conservative, religious home, I was also convinced that I was going to hell, and that all the “weird stuff” she wanted me to do (like tapping, breathing, and eventually matrix reimprinting) was somehow of the devil. I didn’t have a lot of motivation or energy at the time (one of the many downsides of depression, if there is even an upside to speak of), and doing any sort of tapping or homework on my own felt impossible, draining, and exhausting. I was content to let Karin do the work for me, so to speak, while fighting her every step of the way.

To further complicate my journey, my depression meant that I didn’t always get out of bed, have the motivation or energy to leave my house, or feel like showing up– so while the one thing I DID do right was keep seeing Karin, no matter what, sometimes weeks would pass between appointments. When I did make it to appointments, sometimes I would leave furious. Other times, the sessions themselves seemed to trigger some sort of weird relapse, and the days after a hard session would be more difficult than the ones before.

Still, I kept going back.

Little by little, despite being the worst-client-ever, I did begin to see little, teeny, tiny differences. The time between major episodes was just a touch longer. I experienced days where I felt really good– not just “level”, which is sometimes as good as it seems to get when you’re on antidepressants. I started to have a little more energy. Weeks would pass and I would get up every morning (this sounds like it isn’t a big deal- when you have depression, trust me, it is.) The hopelessness that seemed to never end would break, even if just for a little bit.

By the time I consciously noticed these things, I had already been working with Karin for a year or two. None of our sessions focused directly on the depression itself– most revolved around early childhood stuff, my parent’s early divorce, my lack of relationship with my father, and the like. She assured me that this was all work that needed to be done in order to break down the depression. I trusted her, thankfully, but in the moment, I was skeptical.

The most frustrating thing about the entire process wasn’t necessarily the amount of time it took– I had been seeing counselors for years before that, and on meds for years as well. Time was something I had already dedicated to trying to cope with my depression. I was used to the time. The truly frustrating part came in the moments when tapping seemed to suddenly not work. When I would have a couple of really great weeks (weeks with lightness and happiness I KNEW I had never experienced before tapping). only to crash into a depressive episode that would land me in bed, crying, for days. THOSE moments, when my hopes were dashed, were the most frustrating.

At the time, I was also traveling and working with Karin as she began video taping the EFT Masters, Gary Craig, Ann Adams, and other giants in the field. I was fortunate to get to watch them work, listen to them lecture, and learn from them– and opportunity that I would have never had otherwise had. But the more events I taped, sessions I watched, the more I began to wonder why I wasn’t like the people I saw on stage. Why weren’t my issues weren’t disappearing in the span of a single session, fluttering off with the sound of audience applause? I wanted MY testimonial, and had spent YEARS working with only one goal in mind– freedom from depression– and still had to take that little white pill every single day.

In those moments, I could have given up. Every time I had yet another episode, spent another day in bed, another hour crying, one more thought that I wished I were dead, I could have said to myself, “This isn’t working. It’s time to move on,” and no one could have claimed that I didn’t try.

Years passed, and I continued to work with Karin, and I continued to take my meds, and I continued to struggle with depression. But those little tiny changes, and encouragement from Karin that it was a process– and not just any process, a HUGE process, kept me coming back.

Five years after my first EFT session, five years of working with Karin and being a terrible client who refused to try new things, refused to tap on myself, I had “the” session. I had gone with Karin to film a person by the name of Richard Flook. Because we were short on demos, or because Karin knew that it was important for me to work with him, she convinced me to volunteer to be filmed for the video. By that time, I was used to having to do things for the sake of the video, and I agreed. By then, I also trusted Karin more than nearly anyone in my life, and when she told me this could help, I (sort of) believed her.

Richard, using a diagnostic tool, helped me pinpoint three remaining specific events that had triggered my depression. Because of all of the previous work I had done with Karin, all of the other events that had been cleared, all of the preparation that had been done, and all of the awfulness I had gone through, I was able to tap away those remaining events, and nearly immediately, I was a different person. I know that’s hard to believe, but I physically felt different. I LOOKED different. This was the breakthrough I had been waiting for– it wasn’t until later that I realized that the breakthrough had been happening all along. Each of the sessions I had previous to that one had prepared me, broken down barriers, cleared events and emotions that stood in the way of the magic three, so to speak, and, more importantly, prepared me for the after-shock of that special session.

The EFT we see online, many times, offers a limited view of how healing really occurs. We see participants on stage, tapping their intensity levels down to *surprising* zeros, physical issues cleared in the matter of a few rounds of tapping, and the like. We SAY that this isn’t how EFT really works. We warn people not to expect those one-minute-miracles in the fine print at the end, but secretly, I think there are little parts of all of use that hope that the magic version of EFT will work on us. Sometimes, tapping has instantaneous, incredible results. Sometimes, mothers use adrenaline to lift cars to protect their children. Sometimes, people walk away from horrific accidents, completely unscathed. Sometimes people who aren’t ‘supposed’ to live, do. Sometimes things happen that defy all conventional wisdom, and when they do, they are amazing and exciting. But, in reality, these things are the exception, not the rule.

More often than not, it takes weeks, months, and sometimes even years of committed work to address the issues that plague us, especially long-standing, rooted issues that have lived with use for years.

To those individuals who come to me, wondering why it’s “taking so long” for tapping to work, I remind them that I worked on my depression for five years before I could honestly say it was gone, and at that time, I hadn’t even begin to address the other diagnoses I had received. And, when they pale at the idea that it could possible take that many years, I remind them how terrible of a client I was, and how it very well could have gone faster had that not been the case. I even tell them they can ask Karin if they don’t believe how awful I was.

It is not hopeless– after those five years, I was no longer depressed. I have not ever had a single depressive episode since that day. I am no longer supervised by a psychiatrist, and no longer on any medication. I get out of bed every morning, and when a morning comes around that I don’t feel like getting up, I recognize it for what it is, show myself a little kindness, and hit the snooze button– because I know that it isn’t coming back.

That, my friends, is the beauty of this crazy thing we call tapping– even if it takes a little longer than anticipated to get there.

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