Asking good questions to elicit tappable issues
Part 1: Where to Start
I trust my intuition. So when something pops in to my mind that seems odd or out of place or even outrageous, or if the client says something interesting, surprising, or unexpected, I will probably choose to make a question out of it to see what happens. It will become clear pretty quickly whether the direction will be useful or not.
“Shelley” came in, saying she just “needed a change.” Her shoulders were all hunched up around her ears and tension was evident in her face. She talked rather vaguely about what brought her to see me, so I asked her the first question I almost always ask, no matter what the person says they came for.
“What do you want?” Her face went blank, and her whole body slumped. “Want?” she said, confused. “I don’t know WHAT I want. No one has ever asked me that before. They always say, ‘What’s wrong?’”
Those two questions, “What is wrong?” and “What do you want?” will lead in vastly different directions.
“What’s wrong?” will elicit a long litany of what has never worked in a person’s life. This is a mental list that they have memorized, and that they add to each day. I am reminded of the adage: “If you always do what you have always done, you will always get what you have always gotten.” People always feel worse when they answer the “What’s wrong?” question.
When a person takes in the question “What do you want?” they have to go inside and begin to think of alternative futures, different choices, what is important to them. They have to begin a sorting and weighing process to find which possibilities feel like something they might want.
“What do you want?” engages a whole different area of one’s brain and being than “What’s wrong?” What do you want points in the direction of imagination, choice, being in charge, a sense of personal sovereignty. It is the first step of manifestation, and it leads in the direction of becoming more of who we are inside. It leads in the direction of healing.
Shelley and I began tapping:
Even though I don’t know what I want, I deeply and completely accept myself .
Shelley dutifully repeated the words, but her eyes were filling with tears. “I can’t say that,” she whispered.
I asked, “What can you say there? What would feel comfortable to you to say?” We settled on “Inside, I know I am OK ”
Even though I don’t know what I want, inside I know I am OK.
Even though I can’t accept that I don’t even know what I want…
Even though no one ever asked me what I want…
Even though I didn’t even know I could want something just for me…
(Here I sent her a questioning look to ask, is that right? She nodded and we went on)
Even though I want a change in my life but I don’t know what it is, I know I am OK inside and I am doing the best I can…
We aren’t taught much about how to know what we want. We have very few people in our lives who model for us that it is up to us to decide what we want. Mostly we pick up on what we think we SHOULD want from the people around us, parents, teachers, media. The problem is that they got their should’s, that they gave to us, from their own version of the same places.
I want to help clients to learn, through EFT inspired by good questions, how to be their own wise guides. I teach them to use their own bodies and their intuition as resources.
The first step is to find the answer to this really important question: “ How will you knowwhen you are getting what you want?” In other words, what will you be looking for, sensing for, that will let you know that you are on the right track?
One of the first things I teach a client is how to ask themselves what they want and what is right for them, and how to read their own physical signals as a barometer for knowing the answer. In order to do this a person has to know what “yes,” and “no” feel like inside, so that they can find out from themselves if a certain action or choice or decision is the right one for them. No one taught me that when I was growing up!
So I asked Shelley to close her eyes and feel the feeling of “NO” in her body. After a moment, I told her to open her eyes, and asked what her experience was. She said it became harder to breathe, her chest felt tight, and her shoulders hurt. I took note of these body responses.
Then I told her to move around in her chair to change her position (when you change your body your mind changes, and vice versa). I asked her to feel into the quality of “YES.” When she opened her eyes Shelley said she felt lighter, there was an opening in her chest, like energy was moving up and out, deeper breathing, and her shoulders felt relaxed.
We did the exercise again, this time with two slightly different questions. I asked Shelley these questions one at a time, adding the position shift in between to change her state of being.
“What happens in your body when you feel these statement ‘The world is an unsafe and unfriendly place?’
And then, “What happens when you feel into ‘The world is a safe and friendly place?’”
I encouraged Shelley to notice whatever happened inside, the images, thoughts, feelings sensations that came up for each question. Her responses to these questions were similar to the Yes and No responses, with more information there for her.
Have you noticed that everything in life comes down to Yum or Yuck?
I explained to Shelley that now she had a very powerful and accurate measure of how she truly felt about something. I suggested that next time she had a decision or a choice to make, she take each possibility, hold it in her mind, and notice what happens in her body. We tried it out on some things in her life, and she was amazed to find that she had the answers right there, in her body’s response.
Before, she hadn’t known how to know what she wanted, except that she wanted change in her life. She hadn’t known how to proceed beyond that.
Now that she had a way of knowing what she wanted, a feeling of rightness that came from inside her, we were ready to go deeper with her concerns.
Rue Hass, EFT Master
Part 2: Getting More Specific Means Getting Better Results
The next question I would ask a client might be “What stops you from getting what you want?” Many people’s first response to this question is something like “my boss,” “my spouse,” “my job,” “that situation.” I always remind them that there is nothing that we can change about the other person or situation, but we can change the client's own inner response to it. When they change on the inside, their response to the situation will change. Sometimes even the other people change!
When I asked this question of Shelley, suddenly she said “Nothing works for me!” Her eyes filled with tears again. “I always feel like I have done, or am about to do, something wrong!”
Now, sometimes I might start tapping with the person on a general statement like this one, “Nothing works for me!,” and see where it goes. This would be an approach to use with a client who likes to speak in speaks in generalities (“I am so depressed,” or “I am just anxious all the time”) and everything they say reminds them of something else again that may or may not be related. Their minds jump all around.
So we might begin tapping with, “Even though nothing works for me” and find a completion phrase that offers a new direction, or suggests that in fact there are some things that the person is good at.
For instance:
Even though a part of me thinks that nothing works for me, I am curious about how many times I can remember in my life where I made a good decision, or did something that has had good consequences.
Sometimes this feels like the best way to enter the client’s concerns. But being specific is almost always better. Asking the client to come up with specific examples of their general statement always produces tappable phrases.
I like to use the metaphor of a cage, instead of a forest or a table with legs, for what holds a memory in place. The cage could be the incident, or the limiting belief. The bars are the aspects of the incident, or the incidents that hold the belief in place. To me, being specific means dissolving each of the bars of the cage, until there is a space big enough to step out of the cage into freedom.
I tell people that in some ways it doesn’t matter where we start on an issue. To use another metaphor that I often suggest, each aspect of the issue is like a corner of a net. It doesn’t matter where on the net you pick it up. When you start hauling it in from that point, the whole rest of the net comes, along with whatever is caught in it. In some way all of it is connected. So picking out one specific incident is holding up a hologram of the entire cage.
It is a good idea to choose a specific incident that illustrates the feeing or the belief that the client has. A particular incident carries all the triggers, the emotional responses, the beliefs, and the physiological and behavioral symptoms.
Healing can begin only when each of these aspects is addressed. The more specific the actual language is in pinpointing the precise experience of the symptom, feeling, location, the more likely it is that the emotions of the memory will be uncoupled from the neurology in the brain that represents it.
Some examples of being specific :
Felicia said, “My doctor has always told me I am too hard on myself.”
I asked her “What specifically do you say to yourself?” That elicited some specific beliefs, particularly around self worth.
Then I asked her for some examples, specific stories, of “a time when something happened that made you think that about yourself…”
We tapped on each of those incidents, using her exact language patterns.
Sandy came to me for weight loss, and for “always feeling guilty”. In her first comments I heard her say, “I have this pressure or anxiety on me to be the head of the household.” (Her husband died ten years ago and she has two children.)
I asked her “Where in your body do you feel that pressure?” “What does it feel like?” “Make a metaphor of that feeling.” We used all that languaging in the tapping.
It has turned out that she is a real talker, and in her long history with therapy has clearly managed to fill each session with her “stuff.” I find that if I focus her on her body in this way, on specific physical feelings, with precise language, she stops talking and goes inside. As we tap for the physical symptoms, the most brilliant revelations emerge from her. She hears herself.
Just the other day in the midst of tapping like this, she said suddenly, with huge surprise and then tears, “Omigod! I just realized that if I lost weight I’d be free of my mother and I could have my own life -- but -- then what would I DO???? Ohhh, it is better to be in a prison because then you know what to expect!!!”
Those two sentences alone contain enough information to create a whole life-transforming tapping session around!
Even though if I lost weight I would be free of my mother...
Even though if I were free of my mother I could have my own life...
Even though it scares me to death to think of having my own life...
Even though I wouldn’t know what to do...
Even though it is better to be in a prison...
Even though I don’t know what to expect if I am in charge of my life..
Even though I might even be addicted to “being in this prison” – it is keeping me safe...
Even though focusing on my weight keeps me from having to notice how I really feel...
Even though carrying on an inner fight with my (dead) mother means I don’t have to pay attention to what is running my life...
Even though food has been what nourished me...
Even though all of this distracts me from feeling guilty about even being alive...
And those are just the starters!
Remembering her first comments, I also asked Sandy, “When in your life have you felt pressure to be responsible? Give me five specific times and tell me a title for each one, as if it were a movie.”
Then we would take a particular time, and I would say, “What moment in the event was the worst? What made it the worst? Was it a tone of voice, a look, a gesture, a taste?”
She rated the intensity of her response to that incident. Then we tapped using her particular words, for“Even though ____(title)______has been in my body all these years, ...”
We also tapped for all the aspects of the worst moment of the story.
April felt sad and depressed about the holidays coming up. But, seeking the source of those feelings in her history, when I asked her about her childhood memories of holiday times she described them in glowing terms. That was such a contradiction, since I knew that she had had a lot of emotional abuse as a child, so I wanted to know more.
We did a lot of talking and tapping on her answers to the question, “What did you lose when you lost your father?” She said she had lost the opportunity to resolve the problems she had had with him.
I asked her, ”What problems, specifically?” We worked with each one.
The most interesting moment came when we had gotten “this loss sadness” reframed and down to a 2, and then April said she felt a sudden pain in her butt. It felt “like a Tasmanian devil poking me right there in the left buttock with a hot poker.” She has had chronic pain for many years, and that butt pain is a signal to her “that there is something I am uncomfortable with, actually terrified about.”
We had an interesting interchange that led her to ask herself “Am I strong enough to face the world without my pain?” The implication was, of course, that unconsciously she was using her pain to avoid facing the world on her own.
I suggested that she try saying it another way:“How will I know when I am strong enough to face the world without my pain?”
I asked her to check out the differences between the two ways of framing the question. This question utilized specificity in a different way.
April said that her first way of phrasing the question, “Am I strong enough?”, which she realized had been unconsciously there for a long time, produced a caged, overwhelmed anxiety, and a scared response in her body.
“How will I knowwhen I am strong enough to face the world without my pain?” made her mind go in a direction toward “finding specific, quantifiable ways of looking for answers.”
Instead of being terrified, April realized that she saw this question as an interesting challenge.
Rue Hass, EFT Master