Frequently Asked Questions

Simple: 

#1. Your daily tapping habits.  

When you do that (even if it’s just a few minutes a day), you’re doing enough. Building the habit is important and helpful for you.  

In case you haven’t already, review the ‘How To Create A Daily Tapping Habit’ presentation here. 

And, even if you only do the tap-along once a week, you’ll make progress. The other things however, significantly speed up your progress. 

#2. Any bonus exercises you’ve gotten on Wednesday.  

The Social Confidence Club continues for the foreseeable future. It becomes my main focus, which means that I aim to improve this more and more as time goes on. It's pretty great and I see it improving manyfold. Exciting times. 

So, unless something out of the ordinary happens, the Club will be alive and kicking for many years to come.  

We will receive a fresh new group of members after the 30 Day Challenge. They will be arriving beginning of February 2021. 

It will definitely be similar, as it's based on core concepts (acceptance, resistance, re-living the past) that have a proven track-record. But there will be improvements in clarity, depth, and ease of implementation. 

A better to follow organization where everything is easy to find, a consistent schedule, new and exciting guests, etc.  

Depending on how well things go with the launch in Feb, I may add some therapist to the team.  

Most of next year's content you will have heard before. But just because you have heard them before, or even have done them before, doesn't mean you've mastered them.  

Many people make the mistake thinking that once they've learned something, they own it and will use it. That's not the reality... 

Having the knowledge and 'living it' is a world of difference.  

Next year the information builds on the foundation you've created this year. Which means that things become easier.  

And you get better results. 

Ever taken a class again? You now become the expert in the class, and you learn things on a much deeper level. 

The challenge that most of you struggle with is knowing what to tap on. Feeling overwhelmed or alone. And not doing enough tapping (on the right targets) consistently. 

The Club continues to offer simple bite-sized tapping steps to continue making progress on #TheJourneyToSocialConfidence.

As well as warm support, accountability, powerful insight, breakthroughs, fun, and of course, some good old hand-holding along the journey!  

End of plug.  

To be clear: As long as you're gaining value from the Club, we're happy to have you and hope you stick around and continue the journey with us :-)

That other video was from the old SC Community, not our Club now. 

Since we are not following the same format of the old community, and because that is just a reference article (not something you must study), no need for you to go over that other video. 

That said, I created a simpler and better version: The Simple Tapping Mini Course. You can get that here. 

Get great at that first, then the rest all comes in a lot easier. Start with a solid foundation! 

As you hopefully know from my teachings, acceptance of yourself while you’re still anxious, and acceptance of your social anxiety symptoms is key to lasting change.

So you’ve probably worked your way towards this by focusing on non-acceptance. But you’re still struggling.
What is the answer?

Persistence.

Persistence is your friend.

Acceptance is a pre-condition for change. But it likely happens more gradually, and you need to return to it over and over again until you’re living in this state of acceptance.

For some people, it is easier to achieve this than it is for others. For most people, this is a big challenge. Gaining full acceptance of your social anxiety may be a work in progress for you.

Meaning it is something you come back to over and over again. Whenever you notice yourself in non-acceptance, you tap.

Slowly but surely, you will start gaining more acceptance of your anxiety as the meaning of it will start to change for you.

You will of course never like it, but you will no longer judge yourself for it, or judge yourself for it less and less.

And as you start to realize that getting upset about it is not benefiting you and that it is merely a challenge you are in the process of overcoming, your acceptance will grow and expand.

Also, keep in mind that acceptance is and what it is not.

What Acceptance Is Not:

• Acceptance does not mean you’re approving of your social anxiety
• Acceptance does not mean you’re agreeing with your social anxiety
• Acceptance does not mean you’re giving up on solving your social anxiety
• Acceptance does not mean you’re choosing that social anxiety is good or bad
• Acceptance does not mean you’re denying or avoiding your social anxiety

So what is acceptance?

In a nutshell, acceptance is rising above the struggle and hurt by letting go of negative beliefs about your social anxiety and/or yourself—not allowing social anxiety to define you or your behavior.

Well, not from acceptance itself.

Acceptance is very calming, soothing, and relaxing. That is because you are no longer fighting with what is. 

However, the thought that you must accept everything all the time? That can feel overwhelming. That is a great tapping target. 

Acceptance is not a remedy. It is not a fix.

Your acceptance is not a technique to get rid of your negative emotions.

Getting rid of the emotion is non-acceptance. That does not work. 

Your intention should be to accept, to allow, and to give permission to the emotion to be there.

Usually you feel relief during, and after a tapping session. However, it is possible to (temporarily) feel worse.

If that happens, it’s nothing to be worried about. 

It can feel really uncomfortable, but it’s temporary discomfort. It passes.

And, as you work through it, there is a huge reward at the end of it.

It actually doesn’t happen often that you feel worse. 

There are 6 rare reasons that can make you temporary feel worse.

1. Tapping has dissolved dissociation
2. Sadness and regret about time and opportunities wasted
3. Resistance, resistance, resistance!
4. Not getting to the core issue
5. Too much complexity/overwhelm
6. You’re focusing on several issues at a time

In this presentation called 'The 6 Rare Reasons For Feeling Worse' (which you can find inside the Club), I explained what the likely causes are, and what effective strategies are for in handling the situation gently and effectively. 

So when this happens, remember that it's:

A. Relatively rare

B. Nothing to worry about

C. Provides an opportunity to sharpen your tapping skills

D. Presents a healing opportunity

So, it’s all good. 

When it happens, I suggest starting out by doing the grounding exercises. You find these under core content inside the Club here.

Further, I’m always available on the forum for support when you need it. 

When you are no longer capable of getting upset about it. Not even when you try to get upset about it. Instead, it feels neutral. Not relevant.

You remember it, but you no longer feel the emotional pain anymore.

Straight after releasing it, there is often a sense of relief. Sometimes a feeling of calm. Or peace. Or like a weight has been lifted off your shoulders.

Sometimes there are more layers. You might clear it, and a year later, do the same exercise and find out there’s a charge on it. It’s rare, but it can happen. If so, consider it another layer, and clear it.

No need to dig into the why of things unless you intuitively feel it’s important.

Generally, however, you only have to do this exercise once. That’s how it is for the vast majority of people.

So my suggestion is to get it to 0 once and then leave it for a longer period of time – I’m talking about months at least – before returning to it if you even decide to return to it.

I say this because some people have this perfectionistic obsession with making 1 million percent sure everything is done correctly.

If that’s you, I just want you to know that…

…I can relate.

Oh boy, can I relate!

And yet, it’s not helpful.

At all.

Having a laid back attitude is much more helpful here.

The risk with this perfectionistic approach is they you feel bad one day, and from these negative emotions, you begin looking at the garbage that you’ve already cleared, and then you begin to falsely decide that “OMG, it’s not done yet.”

Which then leads to all sorts of crappy thinking about it.

“Oh no, it’s back.”

“See, I knew I couldn’t clear it completely.”

I’ll never be free of this”

Blab la bla. The bullshit continues.

What’s more likely happening here is that your ‘shit – colored glasses’ are coloring your perception. So everything you look at is shit, including that old stuff.

Most likely, when you’re in a normal mood the next day, it’s neutral like it was before.

Make sense?

Good 😊

Get it to 0 out of 10, test it (By trying to get upset about it as best as you can – and if you can, you’re not a 0 yet, and there’s more relief to be had), and then move on.

When it’s a 0 out of 10, and you cannot get upset about it anymore.

Not really, in my understanding. Forgiveness may come in naturally once all the emotional pain is released.

After all, if it doesn’t bother you anymore at all, you’re totally neutral about, why you need to go and forgive?

From my perspective, forgiveness is an act you do for yourself in order to release the pain.

You may say a few statements like

“I refuse to forgive myself.”
“I refuse to forgive the people involved (and you can name them)”
“What happened is unforgivable, and I’ll never let go of my baggage.”
“If I forgive, I’m letting them off the hook, I’m approving of it, it’s wrong to forgive.”
“I refuse to forgive because…”
“I release all my resistances and aversions to forgiving myself and everyone involved.”

And afterward, return to your CB if it’s not a 0 yet.

This can happen when you’re making progress, but you get stuck at a certain point.

Or, if you “shave off the top” and you’re now more tuned in to the crap underneath (which was there all along, making your life harder consistently).

It’s uncomfortable and can be really difficult.

I suggest checking out the topic in our forum called ‘Glossary’ and look for ‘feeling worse.’ You’ll find more detailed explanations of what might be going on.

If you work on it yourself and it gets too much, take a break.

Tap indirectly (no focus on anything). Distract yourself. Read a book. Go for a walk. Listen to music. Take a hot bath. Do proper self-care. Whatever.

As time passes, it will get less. It will settle.

So be gentle with yourself, do proper self-care, indirect tap, and let time heal the wounds.

And as always, you might need someone to help you through it when it gets too tough. Someone on the outside can see what you’re blind to yourself and help you move past it.

There are always options to get help.

How do I get it, right?

Simply follow the exact exercise I have given you. You don’t need to write down your whole life story and write a novel about it—just a few phrases and messages I’ve suggested in the accompanying exercise.

That’s all.

Your subconscious knows.

If you really feel it’s super important that you write everything down, then that’s OK too.

Write it all out. Name it. Rate it.

Done.

Now start to clear it.

This sadness can be many things. I’ve often had clients who felt sorry for themselves that they had to go through that difficult time. I’ve also had clients who felt letting go of their childhood baggage felt like letting go of a part of themselves. And releasing it felt like losing an old friend.

If the sadness isn’t releasing, it is highly likely resistance to letting go of it.

Ask yourself:
• Why do I want to stay sad?
• How is the sadness serving me? (does it give me sympathy?)
• What will I lose when I release this sadness completely?
• What will I lose when I let go of my childhood baggage completely

Complete this sentence:

I want to stay sad because…

And then tap continuously while you verbalize all your answers, and challenge the beliefs that come up for you as you tap. Once you can say “I’m ready willing and able to let go of this sadness now” your resistance is gone and the sadness will likely dissolve as you tap and focus on it.

It could also be the case that the sadness is connected to a specific memory. So you can focus on the feeling of sadness and follow it down to a memory.

Appreciate the concern. But no they're not draining. They're energizing, and enjoyable. It happens in a state of flow. That said, they take 90min of total focus, so they do take energy.  
 
At one point I did 3 a day, but that's too much. I then went back to two a day, which worked really well.  
 
I cut back to one a day last year, and now I'm not taking on new clients and only do old clients, as I want to focus more on group sessions. But it's a good time, a session :-)

For one, I do not know exactly.  
 
For two, what I think is that some kids just have a bit of shyness, and are a bit shyer by nature, perhaps. And there's nothing wrong with that.  
 
When you accept, allow, nourish and come to terms with that, then that will likely become less and less of a dominant part of your personality when you grow up, and social anxiety - well, we all know what that is. 

In practical terms, I'd say: whatever is easiest. 

But I don't think practicality is the issue here.  

Whenever I hear "unproductive," I think "aha, resistance!".  

Therefore, "I can't find social opportunities" I see as an "excuse".  

So, rather than an outside-in solution (where to do, who to call, etc), I'd look for an inside-out solution (how can I get myself into a resourceful state so finding them is easy because my subconscious, the incredible supercomputer, is onboard with socializing).  

So, ask yourself:  

"Why might a part of me not want to change?" 

"What's the upside to everything staying the same?" 

Etc.   

The 7 Day Challenge may also help with this. You can find that here. 

You are where you are at. You are dealing with whatever it is that you’re dealing with.  

If you haven’t released the association with being an anxious person yet, then you’ll: 

A.   Want to accept that. So, you don’t blame yourself, judge yourself, and feel bad about it 

B.    Want to work on releasing that completely, which may take time.  

Start with rating “I am an anxious person.  

Then say, “I release my emotional attachments to I am an anxious person.”  

That’s a good start. 

Not being okay with yourself - that’s what causes self-consciousness.   

When you are self-conscious, you are constantly observing yourself, adjusting your every move, and trying to get approval (or avoid disapproval).  

You do everything right, and avoid doing things wrong,  

Where that come from? It’s different for different people.  

But usually, it’s the result of either: 

A.   Critical parents where you are constantly being compared, or not accepted, or disapproved of a lot, or  

B.    Having a house where parents are always fighting and trying to be perfect 

A lot of stress in the house could result in a variety of things. 

EFT works for everyone as far as I know. 

It’s not necessarily behavior. But can your cells be addicted to chemical anxiety? – Yes.   

But is that the case for you? I don’t think so.  

And is there more stuff to clear? Yes. 

What I do know is that anxiety makes you tired.   

If you feel stressed and anxious, then that tends to lead to tiredness and fatigue.   

When your brain perceives a threat, it energizes your system. You are using your extra energy to speak so that takes things out. That’s a possible cause.   

Fatigue could also be other things, i.e. in your diet, etc.

Resistance: See Day #10 of the 10 Day Mini-Challenge.   

But in short, it is your subconscious mind being a NO to you making a change. A NO to you being free of your SA. A NO to you having social ease. Because it believes this isn't safe or beneficial.  

Therefore it resists you making this change because it will be more dangerous (that's its false perception) to stop being anxious.  

Signs of resistance can be feeling lazy, having a million excuses to do your inner work, not tapping, working on the wrong things, going in circles, etc. 

Oh, and also... 

Overwhelm! 

Non-acceptance: All the thoughts and feelings you have about your social anxiety. 

"How do I feel about my SA?" 

Ashamed 

Embarrassed 

Angry towards myself 

Frustrated 

Etc. 

"How do I judge myself for having it?" 

I'm weak 

I'm a loser 

Etc 

These thoughts and feelings make up the non-acceptance. As you tap and reduce/neutralize these over time (it takes work and persistence for most) you're moving into acceptance.  

You can also experience overwhelm here when you think about how much work all of this is! But when you break it all down into smaller chunks, and you simply do a little every day, you keep moving towards greater and greater ease.  

Overwhelm: See Day #5 of the 10 Day Mini-Challenge. 

But in short, you know what it feels like. Reread the email there for what to do with overwhelm, now that you've got my explanation above.  

Hope this helps.   

And also, take it easy.  

When you feel overwhelmed, shift back to doing the bare minimum:  

Daily indirect tapping (tapping when you watch Netflix, read a book, walk your dog, etc, the work out for your emotional/energetic system) and the weekly webinar. And if you feel like it again, begin doing more.  

One step backward to take two forward soon. Rushing isn't your friend. It’s not effective (in fact, it slows you down). 

Definitely not. Unless you’re in such a bad place that socializing is impossible (in which case I recommend you contact your mental health care provider to discuss therapy) I recommend you keep living life while you add doing your inner work.

Don't lock yourself in the house as that only builds up anticipatory fears.

Use the resources you’re learning, tap and tap and tap. You’ll be equipped with some powerful tools, mindsets and strategies from the get-go. These will help you manage the anxiety.

Do your tapping, keep living your life, and persist until you're where you want to be. And get help if needed.

Absolutely not. There are many ways that lead to Rome. What I’m offering you is very powerful stuff that has taken me a long time to be able to put together.

And it’s been tested with hundreds of people. And only that which works over and over is what you’ll end up learning.

But there are many more ways that lead to Rome.

There are many brilliant therapists out there, and various powerful techniques that can benefit you. Things like breath work, Logosynthesis, Emotion/body code, PSYCH-K, TAT and many more.

My programs are one very powerful way to get to social ease, and I think it’s the most powerful DIY way available by far. But there are always other options.

You are most likely dealing with resistance. General resistance can easily be cleared up.

Since this can happen so fast, first assume it’s more general resistance, and tap along with the video “Tap along to clear resistance to letting go of social anxiety”.

See how you feel after this. Do you still feel like putting it off? Or do you feel more motivated? If you still feel resistant to doing the inner work, ask:
What is the downside to being free of my social anxiety? What its the downside of me being at ease socially?
What might be difficult or challenging about it?

And/or:

What is the upside to staying socially anxious?
What is beneficial about keeping this problem in my life?

These questions help to uncover unique resistance. This unique resistance takes the form of fears and beliefs. These you can then tap on to neutralize or change. Doing so clears the unique resistance.

Without resistance there is no/minimal procrastination.

From this place you can optimize your will power. Here are some strategies I used or still use:

A. Committing to a specific time every day. Set your alarm clock. Stop everything you’re doing once the alarm goes off. Lock your door. Turn off your TV. Phone off. And now do your tapping, whether you feel like it or not (and when you don't feel like it, tap while focused on this resistance first!)

B. Set a specific duration and time it. Set an alarm for 30min, for example. Between these 30min you only focus on the exercises, nothing else.

C. Set the same time every day. Say it’s 8PM. Now 8PM becomes your “inner work time”.

D. Write down all the benefits you will get from taking the action you feel resistant to.

Your brain moves away from pain and towards pleasure. With the resistance tapping we focus on releasing the association of pain linked to taking action and the outcome we perceive the action will lead to.

By writing down as many reasons why taking action will benefit you, and the positive emotions (pleasure) you will get from taking that action, can diminish the resistance.

E. Make the task at hand super small. So instead of sitting down to do 30 min of inner work, you simply commit to doing 5 minutes. Or, if even that seems to heavy, commit to 2 minutes. Time it with a clock.

Next day you can move forward to 3. Then to 4. Etc. Be patient with yourself. What you might find is that as you start with 2 minutes, you will want to continue. Setting the standard of 2 min so low makes the resistance to starting very low. When you feel like stopping at 2 min, simply do and congratulate yourself for the 2 min you have put in.

In most cases, nothing is wrong. It typically takes a lot of tapping to free yourself of anxiety. Remember:
Whenever your mind perceives you to be unsafe socially it will fire off the FFF response which leads to you feeling anxiety.

If you don’t feel safe yet, there is more inner work to be done.

And if you do not accept your anxiety and your situation, your non-acceptance keeps you in a cycle of anxiety.

Coming to a place of acceptance, and getting to a place where you feel safe to be YOU takes time. BUT, the results you do achieve will last you a lifetime.
It’s worth it.

That said, if you have followed along for months and done a lot of tapping and you have really given it your all and you still feel just as anxious in social situations, it is likely you’re dealing with compounding issues.

There might be other things are going on than just social anxiety. If you actually have other compounding problems, you need to think about having therapy and doing this online course separately, ideally when you’re stronger after therapy cause you get the maximum benefit.

It’s best to consult with your mental health care provider when you suspect this may be the case.

He or she can give you a proper assessment of what is going on, and help you find a solution that works for you. Therapy makes you sufficiently emotionally stronger and you need to be strong enough to use this system and get lasting benefits.

This can really concern you when this happens!

It’s like the tapping is making the problem bigger, instead of smaller…

… but that’s not what’s going on.

Likely this is a good sign.

Things are shifting and changing.

And your problem is probably getting smaller, but it feels like it’s getting bigger because you’re tuned in to a particularly upsetting aspect of the problem.

When it gets worse there are reasons for it.

One of the common reasons of feeling more anxious is resistance. You’re making progress and this is threatening your sense of safety.

Your subconscious believes your anxiety is protecting you from threats. It likely sees downsides to change, or being socially at ease. Or benefits to staying with the status quo.

For example…

• You might on some level be afraid to change more.
• You might fear the responsibility that comes after you change.
• You might not know how to live with responsibility, and/or don’t want to do it You might fear the pressure to be successful without your anxiety
• You might have to give up sympathy and attention, and part of you balks at that You might fear leaving your comfort zone and live a life where you risk rejection You might fear you still won’t be liked.
• You might be afraid to lose your identity. Who will you be now?
• You might not want to stop blaming others for your issues as that would mean you have to live a life of accountability
• You might fear having to deal with things you’ve postponed for a long time.
• You might fear you’ll have to do these things you promised yourself you would do. You might fear the reaction of this important person in your life to you being assertive, etc.

And as you start making changes, it’s like the subconscious increases its resistance. In the perception of the subconscious you’re getting closer and closer to the threat so it’s sounding the alarm louder.

So one of the is to work through the resistance. Tap on any fears or beliefs about change, leaving your SA behind, and becoming at ease socially. And uncover why there might be a downside to change, or being socially at ease. Or change the perceived upside to staying where you’re at.

Here are some quick tips…

To uncover the reasons for resistance you can ask yourself:
• What am I afraid of will happen once I am free of my anxiety? What will be problematic once I’m anxiety-free?
• What I fear facing once I’m done with this problem in my life?
• What is the downside to letting go of my anxiety? What is the upside of staying anxious?
• What will I lose when I let go of my anxiety? How is my anxiety protecting me?
• Why is it important my anxiety sticks around?
• What will happen when I no longer have the anxiety protecting me?

Tap on all the fears and beliefs you uncover.

Another reason for feeling worse is the tapping has “shaven off the top” and now the deeper issues that lay underneath are showing. Your tapping has reconnected with your disowned and suppressed emotions and memories. The surface stuff has been addressed, and now these deeper issues have now come to the surface.

More tapping on these deeper issues (intense memories and childhood memories, usually) will be your next move here.

I also recommend you check out this excellent article from Lindsay Kenny, whom I’ve received quite some mentoring from in the early stages of my “tapping career”.

I would go and see a doctor and get a proper diagnosis on what's going on.

If that is social anxiety, then the advice that I give to other people applies to you too.

Good luck!

Excellent question. And it can be very complicated to answer.

If you Google it, and you Google the difference between feelings and emotions, neuroscience.

However, to keep it very simple -- feelings are what you feel viscerally in your body. So, tightness in the chest or a lump in the throat.

Emotions are the way we label these particular sensations in our bodies. For example, shame is more associated with heat in the face; insecurity is more associated with jitteriness; anger is more associated with energy in the jaw and arms and legs, etc.

Hope this helps.

Continue working on with this anxiety here (in this safe space of our community).  

As you do so, you improve your mental and emotional wellbeing.  

This then can translate into social situations in the "real world".

When that happens, that’s okay. It is likely going to happen, but it’s fine.  

When it happens, there are no worries. We’ll just roll with it. 

I’d say most of the people that volunteered had that concern. You are not alone. 

These thoughts and feelings are common especially when you're dealing with SA. 

With the set-up that we have in this community, it's a lot easier to deal with these because we all know what's going on.  

In a real social situation, it's harder to deal with these because other people simply don’t understand what’s going on for you.  

When a volunteer has frozen up during a live webinar, there’s nothing wrong with it. 

When this happens, we're applying the tapping which makes it very beneficial. 

That is your own judgment relating to your ability to speak in English.  

The self-judgment is not particular to speaking in English, but it related to other areas such as: 

“I can’t make mistakes.” 
“I have to do everything right.” 
“I have to be perfect” 

 …and so on. 

All of these we can work on together. 

You don’t have to join the live webinars (at least not for now).  

You can do the replay, and you can work your way up to doing the live webinars at some point.  

“I’m not prepared for it, and it might trigger a bigger emotional reaction that overwhelms me.” –That’s okay. This goes back to: 

“I’m afraid to feel feelings.”  
“I’m afraid to feel strong emotions.”  

Also, it could also relate to having the need to stay in control.  

If you do at one point bring it to the webinar, great! We’ll deal with that. It will likely be a good time for some parts of it. Other parts might be a bit uncomfortable, but it will be alright because that’s what we want. 

That's the elephant in the room. So, tap and express these feelings first.

Excellent, lots of tapping targets.  

Your beliefs - the primary thing you want to tap on.  
 
But what shows up is your anger and frustration about them (non-acceptance, secondary problem) 
 
And your resistance to letting go of them.  
 
I'd say start with the resistance to letting go of them. Then tap on your upset (non-acceptance) of them.  
 
Then, finally, if you have some breath left, you can work on some beliefs themselves, bit by bit, step by step :-) 
 
Rome wasn't built in a day. Social ease wasn't realized in a day either ;-)

Excellent approach. An excellent example for others. When you type it out (or write it out), there’s on paper for you to see.  

Look at the beliefs (emotionalized thoughts) you can tap on: 
 
“I'm always nervous.” 

“If I joke I'll go bright red and feel embarrassed so it's better for me not to say anything.” 
 
“I'll probably say something wrong.” 

“If someone good looking, or funny, or someone in authority talks to me, I feel embarrassed probably because I have to be perfect.” 
 
“They will think I'm a loser.” 
 
“I'm not a people person.” 
 
“I'm boring.” 
 
“I need a drink.” 
 
“Other people probably think I'm an idiot and that I'm anxious.” 
 
“I'm not confident.” 

“It's easier not to say anything. In case it is stupid, I probably look like shit.” 
 
Each of these is a tappable target. They're all aspects causing or contributing to your anxiety in social situations. They all prevent you from feeling safe socially, 
 
Tap on each individually, or tap while you verbalize the whole thing, and you can make massive progress.

You could go that route but that wouldn't be my first approach. Because often enough, you can simply neutralize these beliefs by tapping while you verbalize them.

Have you tapped on these memories? 
 
These memories alive means the feelings alive, which means you can relive them.  
 
Process the feelings and you process the memories. So then, you can't relive them.

In psychology, there is this common concept called 'learned helplessness".  
 
Basically, learned helplessness is where you've repeatedly experienced situations where you experienced pain and you couldn't do anything about it (like getting triggered socially over and over).  
 
During those situations, you find that there was no solution for it, or the solutions you tried didn't work.  
 
This causes you to arrive at a psychological state called "learned helplessness".  
 
This isn't permanent. Being aware of its existence helps. 
 
A large part of the 30-Day Challenge is focused on helping people to believe that they 'can and will change'. To overcome this state, or at the very least to begin making cracks in it.  
 
For some, it'll take more time to do this. All good. It is what it is.  
 
There were fascinating studies done with this which led them to come up with the concept.  
 
In personal development literature, the common story that illustrated it is as follows: 
 
A baby elephant is born and becomes part of a circus. To keep him in one place, he gets one end of a rope tied to his leg, and the other end of the rope is tied to a stake. The stake gets hammered into the ground.  
 
The baby elephant isn't strong enough to pull out the stake and so he's limited in how far he can move. When he tries to go further than the rope attached to the stake allows him to, he'll find that he cannot.  
 
He learns what his limits are.  
 
The elephant grows up. Now he's a big fucking elephant, and can easily pull that stake out of the ground and run wherever the hell he wants.  
 
BUT his childhood conditioning causes him to NOT EVEN TRY. Because he "knows" he cannot change his circumstances.... 
 
This is learned helplessness.  
 
Here's a great article on learned helplessness. Make sure you take the time to read it. 

When you're tapping on the belief, your aim should be on releasing the contributing memories to that belief, rather than tap on the belief.  
 
Also, you should be free of the resistance to letting go of the belief. 

Don’t try to push it. Chip away from it over little bits of time. Have your focus be on accepting the fact that there's a part of you trying to protect you from stronger emotions. And for the rest, just follow along with the exercises and see what happens over time.  

Feeling overwhelmed and afraid of your future... 
 
...it’s time to sit down and do some inner work on this.  
 
Use the Mini Tapping Course, and go to work on it.  

Play around. Don't do it all at once. You've got lots of tapping targets: 
 
“I am feeling kinda overwhelmed.” 

“I am afraid of the future.” 

“I still feel like I can’t make those changes.” 
 
Great starting points. Put in the work, and you'll reap the rewards. 

You're comparing yourself with others probably because you've learned that somewhere.  
 
Where have you learned it? Probably society, maybe your parents. Maybe your parents compared you with your brothers, something, somewhere. Wherever? I don't know.

Comparing yourself is a pattern. So, if you're doing that, there's positive intent behind that pattern. Like there's positive intent behind each pattern. So, first, you'd come to terms with patterns, you accept it, then you look for what the motivation is, and you make it safe to stop comparing yourself. There's possibly more that you need to do, but it goes beyond what I can answer here. 
 
Here are some videos that you might find helpful. 

Part 1: How To Stop Comparing Yourself With Others-Identify Yourself

Part 2: How To Stop Comparing Yourself With Others - Follow Along Tapping

You either feel superior to everyone else and you're okay with that, or you stop feeling inferior to everyone. ;) The real outcome is realizing that we're all equal.  
 
How to do that? Start by tapping on your ‘feelings of inferiority’ and see what comes up.

There's nothing wrong with that. It's a normal, natural mint.  
 
This is not something you want to get rid of. This is something you want to come to terms with.  
 
So, aim your tapping effort towards accepting that you have this desire to be special.  

You can ask yourself what you want to happen instead of that negative expectation.  So for example, that people be kind of accepting.  
 
Then, clear your resistance to that.  
 
Then, see what happens when you tap on the negative expectation. You can start to bring doubt to the validity of that negative expectation. You do that by challenging the thoughts. 

Yes, that’s a common resistance.  
 
You may have addressed those. However, the other bigger problem that you are dealing with isn’t necessarily resistance.  
 
It is what you believe is the reason why you won’t achieve social ease.   

Your biggest problem is that: ‘You don’t feel valuable enough.’ That’s the main problem. That is what needs to shift. 
 
In other words, you need to feel valued and worthy, despite all the crap that has happened in your past.  
 
Whatever may have happened in your past has led to you feeling crap about yourself on a deep level. 

This then led to you developing these “deeply-held-beliefs” (i.e., I’m worthless, I’m not okay, I’m a piece of crap, etc.,)  
 
You’re still perceiving the world through that filter, and you have been for a long time.  
 
So, your work is to shift that feeling (I don’t feel valuable) and belief (I’m not valuable) because those are still stuck. 
 
Remember, you are valuable. It is the repetitive negative experiences and the programming that led you to carry that feeling/belief. With tapping, you can get rid of those. 

You can neutralize that stuff that happened. When that is no longer in your system, then you will feel your natural value.  
 
When you feel your natural value, you don’t have to feel above people or below people anymore.  
 
From that place, you are safe to be yourself. Then, you don’t have to pretend to be a great actress or actor. That’s where you can just be naturally at ease.

You want to get to a point where you’re not taking your thoughts so damn seriously.  
 
Negative thinking is not the problem. It’s emotionalized negative thinking that is the problem. 
 
By accepting and allowing those thoughts to be there (rather than fighting them off, pushing them away, and repressing them), you’re freeing yourself up. Your daily tapping habit is going to help you with that.  
 
Do an hour of daily tapping for a month. You can do indirect tapping (without focusing on anything in particular). Just get an hour of stimulation of these acupressure points in your body and it’s likely going to reduce.  
 
Also, it is sometimes necessary to challenge your thinking and to shift your thinking pattern around.  
 
You can ask yourself: 
 
“What if this is true?” 
“Is this absolutely true?’ 
“What am I thinking right now that is 100% certainty?”  
“Is it true all the time? Is it true for everyone?” 
 
Challenging it is not easy. It requires work that is difficult to do in your mind. But it could be helpful.  
 
So, I suggest doing this by writing those crappy thoughts on a piece of paper. 
 
Now that they’re out of your mind, you can start challenging them. 

“How I would approach these” is quite a big question.  
 
But, I can tell you this: What’s likely going on is a common issue.  
 
Trying to please others is a protection mechanism. It is a particular pattern that we took on when we were little. 
 
For example, if we do nice things that our parents want us to do, then they approve of us and they won’t get upset with us.  

Your brain now tells you, “Let’s do more of that because it works.” 
 
It then becomes a habitual pattern. You are now dealing with that as an adult. 
 
You said, “I’m constantly worried that others are upset with me.” 
 
Well, that’s one of the things that you’re trying to avoid.  
 
When someone else is upset with you, it gives you a strong emotional response. A disproportionate emotional response. Meaning, it’s obvious that it’s out of proportion. It’s excessively strong.  

If you put someone else who doesn’t have this issue in a scenario where you get really triggered by someone being upset with you, likely that person hardly even notice that the other person is upset.  

But YOU have such a strong emotional response.  
 
Why? 
 
It is because you are re-living old and archaic feelings.  
 
Old emotions are being triggered by you observing someone being upset with you.  
 
Sometimes, they’re not even upset with you. It’s just your imagination. But that’s not the point.  
 
The point is, you are reacting in a strong way.   

So, you’ve got these strong negative emotions – some are coded or lodged in your body. There’s an incomplete emotional cycle that is stuck in some memory (or memories) from when you were younger.  
 
The most common way to address this without going into much detail is to tune into someone being upset with you.  
 
It can be on a specific time that it stands out, and to just tune into how that makes you feel in your body.  
 
What sensation do you have in your body?  

Does it give you a tight stomach?  

Does it make you cringe?  

Do you have a lump in your throat?  

Does it make you blush?  

Does your body heat up?  

Does it tense your body?  

Does it make you feel weak?  
 
What happens in your body? What emotions do you feel? 
 
How do you feel? Shame? Fear? Anxiety? Insecurity?  
 
And then, rate it from 0 – 10  
 
How strong is it?  
 
Now, when you’ve been tuning into those feelings, you ask yourself: 
 
“What does this remind me of?” 
“Where can I remember feeling this way?” 
 
Then, you might find a memory of the time when you were age 7 and your Dad got really angry with you. Or, it could be something else. 
 
What you then treat is - how your brain is using that memory as a resource for how to react when you are in current a situation when people are upset with you.  
 
That memory when you were at age 7 (as an example) and those feelings associated with that memory are stuck in your body.  
 
Now that you are age 30, and someone at work is seemingly upset with you, you get to feel like that 7-year-old all over again, because the feelings from that memory get activated.  
 
So, you are now re-living them, and you have an excessively strong emotional response.  
 
When you neutralize the emotions from that memory, your brain won’t use that emotional reference point anymore. 

That’s not resistance. It is a cure that came from somewhere.   

Ask yourself: 
 
“What am I afraid of?” 

“What might happen when I do share?" 

An answer might be “they would disapprove of what I’ve shared, and it would make me feel ashamed.”   

You can then work with that shame by imagining that you did share, and they disapprove of it.

The opposite of doubt is trust.  
 
What you want to have in this situation is the opposite of what you’re experiencing.   

So, you want to experience trusting yourself.  
 
You might ask yourself: 
 
“What’s the downside of trusting myself?” 

“What might happen if I do?” 

“What’s the consequence of it?
Why is it risky to just trust myself?” 
 
You might get an answer to that. And then, you can figure out where that comes from.

Well, it sucks to feel insignificant and worthless.  
 
I can tell you, I have spent many birthdays that were quite depressing. They were quite embarrassing with very little friends and I felt like quite a loser.  
 
I often fly home to the Netherlands to spend it in my motherly house. I don't want to make a bigger thing of it just because I was afraid to be giving a party and not many people wanting to come.   

In hindsight, I’m actually quite popular, but it didn't feel that way.  

One big thing for me was I thought, “People didn't like me. Spending time with me is not a fun time.”  

Feeling insignificant and worthless - also not a very fun time.  
 
What you're dealing with is an old feeling. It’s an old belief system and it's exacerbated on your birthday. 
 
That said, it needs to be addressed just like any other old feelings and identity beliefs. 

Inferior, superior – that is something cultural. Something societal. Some brainwashing bullshit (to say generally) that’s causing the whole comparison game. It's rampant; it’s not just for people with SA.  

To some degree, this is mostly in western society   

What you can do is, ask yourself: 
 
“What makes someone superior?” 

“What makes someone inferior?”   

Then, you might come up with rules such as:  

“I should be confident because then I could be superior.” 

“I shouldn't be weak because then I’m an inferior”   

Then, you tap on those rules, so they don’t have so much of a hold on you anymore.

This is what I’m talking about when I’m saying you have to work on a deeper underlying issue that is causing or contributing to your anxiety.   

You’re not comfortable with yourself. You’re not okay being you. Your outcome should be “to be okay with yourself”.  

Accepting yourself doesn’t mean just accepting the good things.   

It means accepting the other parts of you - the dumbass you, the lame joke from you, the stupid you, etc. 

It also means getting rid of these ideas:  

“I have to be perfect.” 

“I should behave in a certain way.” 

“I should not behave in a certain way.” 
 
Coming to terms with all of that so you can become comfortable with yourself, is where you want to be.  

Being comfortable with yourself is the opposite of being awkward with yourself.  

How do you do that? Well, that’s a long answer.  
 
But the short answer is - you can look for the experiences where you were not accepted, and you work on that. 

“I feel like I’m a burden” – when you feel like a burden, that kind of says “deep down, I don’t really feel that I am worthy” or it could be “I don’t feel that what I’m offering or bringing to the table is worthy”.  

Other things you want to look at is when you don’t feel confident reaching out.  

“Why do you not feel comfortable?”  

Working on your worthiness – that’s a big picture thing. That’s an overtime thing.   

While growing up, you are taught to either feel worthy or not worthy.  
 
If you were treated with respect and if you were appreciated the way you are, then you feel worthy without having to do anything for it necessarily.  

If you were brought up and taught that you’re only worthy if you’re the best in your class (for example), then it becomes very conditional.   

There are other things that could be going on. That self-worth is some of that earlier work that needs to be done to clear that other stuff (i.e., your beliefs).  

Those not-so-deeply-rooted-beliefs can be addressed with just a bit of tapping and a bit of re-framing (like challenging your thoughts), So then, it becomes a lot easier.

The things that you make up in your mind has negative emotions attached to it.   

So, you simply focus on the scripts that you bring up, and you tap on the feelings and thoughts that trigger.  
 
Those are your tapping targets.

This is your own critical voice telling you all these crappy things and projecting it onto other people.  
 
So, your inner voice is telling you these things (i.e., they’re watching you, watch what you’re doing, don’t be stupid, watch how you’re walking, etc.)  
 
That’s your own internal dialogue wreaking havoc.  
 
What that might be is your Mom or Dad, or some kind of authority figure, or a brother, or someone who is close to you when you were growing up.   

It is a pattern to avoid pain.   

So, (for example, if it was your father), his criticism caused you a lot of pain – emotional pain.  
 
That pattern of taking on his critical voice was your attempt to try to be the way that “you are supposed to be”. So, it is a defense mechanism.  
 
You want to resolve that by getting rid of the core wounding so that the pain that your Dad (or whoever) caused goes away, and then the pattern itself can be interrupted and broken.   

Once the gasoline of that pattern is gone, the pattern won’t have much of a holding.   

In most cases, it automatically changes.   

In some cases, you need to do some other stuff.   

But the foundation is what you are looking at in the clearing.   

We’re in this for the first few months, very much working on reducing your suffering, and putting everything in a particular perspective. This optimally prepares you for it.   

Ultimately, the inner deeper work that you’re doing is healing the earliest emotional pain from which all the patterns were formed.   

But now, you’re having all these patterns: people-pleasing, not being able to say no, judging others, and expecting that you’re going to be judged yourself, being extremely critical of yourself – all that kind of stuff, these kinds of defense patterns. That causes pain. That causes difficulty.   

And so, we are first working on with a lot of compassion and acceptance, because that’s essential in order to go to the next level.  

But as you are evolving to the next levels, then the focus is going to be more on healing those core wounds.   

It’s not that we are not doing that at all. It’s just that we are not focusing on that so much. Because it is more important that we set the frame.   

When you’re building a house, you first want the foundation to be solid. Otherwise, you won’t have lasting results. And with a strong frame, a strong foundation, that is going to happen.

Well, you won’t get there from that place.   

You’re not going to become socially at ease of hiding in your house. Tapping on yourself, wanting everything to change in the inside first before the outside is going to change.   

You want to keep living your life and you cannot lock yourself up completely. Then, think that with tapping.  

You’re going to dissolve all of the mental blocks that you’ve built up until this point.   

What you want to do is you want to use the tapping to get out of your self – imposed limitation. And what I’m trying to say is it’s gradual. It’s not just one explosion.   

“I’ve achieved social ease and now I’m going to go out into the world and everything’s going to be fine.” – It’s not like that.   

It’s not necessarily a mental block. It’s a misperception of what is going to happen.   

So, for one, I think you need to get some assistance and the help from a therapist (If I’m understanding your message correctly)   

For two, I am where I am – Yes, you are, indeed.   

Nobody wants to communicate with me – that is something in your mind because you’re thinking that you’re this worthless, low status.  

That’s just an idea.   

And so, shifting that along with getting some real-world evidence that you’re not as bad as you think you are.   

That will start to change things for you. 

For one, you can have compassion for someone’s crappy mood, but you don’t have to take it on. 
 
So, “I am responsible for how they feel” – that might be a belief worth tapping on underneath.

The first part is understanding what you're dealing with - that there is a part of you that is trying to help you in some shape or form.  

It might not feel that way because this strategy of “criticizing you” is very painful and exhausting. But it actually has “good” intent. 
 
So, you can ask yourself: 
 
"What's the job of this part you?” 

“What is it trying to do by using this strategy?"  
 
Then, tap with the intention of coming to terms with the fact that this part of you is doing that to serve you.  
 
In other words, making friends with that part of you so that you are not at the bore with yourself.  
 
That would be the first step.  
 
From that place, at subsequent times, you can just add tapping to whenever you are doing the criticizing - whenever you're noticing the internal voice going gangbusters.  
 
You're not tapping to make it go away. You're tapping with acceptance. Noticing, observing, allowing, and just seeing what happens when you do that. That would be your strategy.

The below question is a copy paste from my Social Confidence Community forum (old product – no longer for sale). It came up after Mila went through the first few presentations of the “Top Tapping Training”.

Here’s her question:

I was tapping on frustration and it started to lose some intensity, but then another emotion (fear) came up and distracted me.

My question is, when this happens, should I refocus on the original emotion and keep tapping until it's gone?

Or should I immediately switch over to tapping on the other emotion that surfaced, even though the original one is still lurking there as well?

This is what I answered her:

Milla, when this happens (and it will, frequently, you're "shifting aspects" here - something I cover extensively in the Tapping 101 3/3 presentation) you indeed focus on the most intense emotion.

Whatever is most strongly in your awareness is what you focus on.

So in this case, you shift your focus to the fear, and you see what happens to the frustration after you've tapped the fear down.

That said, there's no perfect way to go about it.

If you keep focusing on the frustration, the fear will eventually most likely become so prominent it's hard to ignore.

But to be most effective, focus on what is most bothering you. Excellent question, thank you

Here’s another question from the Social Confidence Community forum that I thought would be valuable to put in here…

--

Hi Seb,

I also noticed that when I try to focus in on a particular emotion, the emotion evades me, or at least I can see it but cannot intensify it to what I knew it felt like originally, and these may be recent experiences.

I don't know if it's one of those blocks and subconsciously. I feel that I'm in a "safer" place in the moment so therefore, don't need to access it or what but that's what typically happens with tapping.

I think I'm self-sabotaging, but will definitely try again your suggestion from part 3/3 about tapping on the feelings about the issue when there's a split in focus.

Really enjoying your videos, thanks! Jting

---

Here’s what I replied:

---

That's fine.

You don't need to have it be as strong as it felt back then.

It's just "a way in". Usually you'll be able to tune in more as you tap on it more.

And, the feelings that got triggered in more recent events are actually feelings from much younger you's. When you tune in to a feeling, you're looking for what that feeling reminds you of (i.e. when the feeling got stuck, like for example when you were 7 and your dad got angry with you).

:-)

---

That’s OK. Take it easy on yourself.

You can’t force yourself to come up with the earliest memory.

When you ask what it reminds you of (or a similar question) simply go with the first memory that comes to mind. When more come to mind, pick the first one that came up or the one that has the most emotional intensity.

There is no perfect way of going about this. If you first address the memory that came up first, but the one with the strongest intensity was the most important to address, you’ll end up there anyway.

And if you first addressed the strongest in emotional intensity, but the first one that came up was the most important to address, you’ll end up there anyway too!

You can’t lose.

Just trust that whatever memory comes up for you is the right one to be addressing at that moment in time, whether it’s the initial experience or not.

What you might find as you start working on that memory, is that an earlier memory pops up in your mind as you release some of the intensity.

The exercises help you find the earliest experiences that your brain finds safe enough for you to find. As you get more experience you may find older and older memories until you eventually find the initial experience where the trauma is held.

Also note that you might find vague or seemingly unrelated memories. Or just images and not whole memories. That’s fine, simply start tapping on them and see what happens.

Aim and tap and notice what happens. Be a curious explorer of your inner world and notice the changes you’re making. Don’t force things, let them happen.

I can’t give you a definite answer here.

From my limited experience you can’t absolutely know, but a good indicator would be that you are no longer able to feel the negative emotion you were trying to release.

And, if after a week or so (after which most of the processing of your inner work has been done) you are still no longer able to feel any of the negative emotion.

This would be a good indication of you having found and released the initial experience.

However… In some cases it is possible to have released the earliest experience, and there is yet another, or multiple traumas you’ve endured in life which need to be addressed to release the negative emotion completely.

So you may have released the earliest trauma, but due to subsequent trauma the negative emotion you were tapping on isn’t at a 0 yet.

Hence me saying I can’t give you a definite answer.

Your best approach is to just keep tapping until your negative emotion is at a 0 out of 10.

Check out the presentation of the Top Tapping Training called “How to clear any negative emotion”.

If you still struggle after this look at the “10 Blocks To Effective Tapping” presentation.

Most likely because you have “evidence” (supporting memories) to prove this belief to be true. You will need to “destroy the evidence” in order to let go of the belief.

Or you are dealing with resistance to letting go of the belief. You need to clear the resistance. Or, the belief might actually be true!
In this case, you want to work on acceptance of the belief that you perceive as something negative or limiting. You can likely progress with this yourself by tapping on the negative emotions you have about what you believe to be true.

For example…

You might really want to believe you’re model-like attractive. The reality might be that you’re average looking.

You might see the “I’m average looking” as a negative limiting belief.

You want to tap to get rid of the belief so you can believe you’re model-like attractive. In my experience, that won’t work very well…
In this case, you make much more progress tapping on your lack of acceptance of the truth. Tap on the negative emotions about your “average looks”.
Come to a place of acceptance of your looks.

From this place, you might find that you’re able to start looking different at your average looks (you may for example come to the conclusion that you don’t need model-like looks to attract your ideal partner, or that your character makes you more stand out in an attractive way, etc.)

For specific instructions, check out the presentation of the Top Tapping Training called
“How to clear any negative limiting belief”.

There are tons of release techniques out there. I’ve simply picked some of them that are most well-known and are most popular by the most credible people that I know. 
 
PSYCH-K - installing beliefs into your subconscious 

Logosynthesis - you see me using it in webinars, the 3 intention-based sentences 

Intention-based tapping - you see me using it in webinars, where the 'I release all my emotional attachments to ____” is the main sentence. 

TAT - By Tapas Fleming, you hold a pose while you focus on a memory/fantasy 

Body Code/Emotion code - releasing trapped emotions and other stuff from your system, no talking needed 
 
These I've used a lot. There are many more to try. So, if it helps you, great, go for it! Whatever gets the job done. 🙂  

There’s a lot more than tapping, such as Trauma Release Exercises, Psych – K, Logo synthesis, working with a face to face therapist, intention tapping, and emotion code/body code.

Tapping is more like a body-based approach.   

Logosynthesis is an intention-based approach.  

Although your intention is also important when tapping. 
 
In my experience, Logosynthesis is more effective than tapping when dealing with memories.   

But in general, I think it can be a lot more versatile with tapping. And tapping is easy.   

It’s not a matter of either/or. It’s a matter of both for me.   

So, I like incorporating and using whatever works, whatever gets the job done. 
 
They’re very similar. Both addresses emotional and energetic issues on a deep level. It’s just a different way of going about things.   

The same could be said for the Intention-based Energy Process, which is quite similar to Logosynthesis. 

This is a funny question. I did magic mushrooms for the first time when I was 13 or 14 – but it was totally recreational.  
 
Then, I did it in a time period of a year, maybe six times.   

And that last, I did it, I had a massive bad trip.  
 
So again, I was 14 years old, and it was very scary and scared as I’ve ever been in my life.  
 
Since then, I’ve been quite avoidant of anything trippy like that.  
 
Now, I’m 35, I’ve done all this work. And now, it’s becoming more interesting to me.  
 
Two years ago, a good friend of mine talked about an LSD trip that she did, and it was life-changing for her. I’ve had many friends who did Ayahuasca retreats, and so on.  
 
They rave about how it changed her life, their lives, and that kind of stuff. So, I’m curious about it now, and not scared of it anymore.  
 
And it is something that I’m considering doing.  
 
In fact, in the Netherlands, that last trip I visited the Netherlands, I was considering doing it, because you have something there that called trip sitters.

According to the experts, while magic mushrooms are often sought for a peaceful high, Shrooms have been reported to induce anxiety, frightening hallucinations, paranoia, and confusion in some.   

In fact, most hospital admissions related to the use of magic mushrooms are connected to what is known colloquially as a bad trip.   

This is what I’ve read on www.verywellmind.com 

First off, I'm not a medical doctor, so I cannot give you any advice, other than my opinion based on my limited experience.

That said, as I understand it, medication alters your brain chemistry.

And research has shown that tapping decreases the amount of cortisol production, and increases your serotonin levels. And these biochemical responses create a sense of calm. So from my limited understanding, medication alters your brain chemistry, and so does tapping...

...which is why I suggest you check in with your mental health care provider and ask this question as he or she is the expert.

The effects of tapping MIGHT not be as effective.

They could be less effective, but that's not a given at all.

I've also heard it said by EFT experts that the positive effects of your medication improve. However, this is merely speculation, and isn't advice.
It may depend on the type of medication, the frequency you take them, how you respond to them, etc.

Again, best to consult with your doctor.

When your doctor gives you the go ahead sign, my suggestion would be to just tap and see what results you are getting.

If you are getting great results, then continue forward and be sure to keep in check with your doctor regarding your prescribed medication.

It might just be that the medication needs to be adjusted as the reason for taking the medication (which I ASSUME is excess anxiety) could become less relevant, or not relevant.

When you are making changes as you do your tapping you want to keep checking in with your medical doctor.

Usually you feel relief during, and after a tapping session. However, it is possible to (temporarily) feel worse.

If that happens, it’s nothing to be worried about. 

It can feel really uncomfortable, but it’s temporary discomfort. It passes.

And, as you work through it, there is a huge reward at the end of it.

It actually doesn’t happen often that you feel worse. 

There are 6 rare reasons that can make you temporary feel worse.

1. Tapping has dissolved dissociation
2. Sadness and regret about time and opportunities wasted
3. Resistance, resistance, resistance!
4. Not getting to the core issue
5. Too much complexity/overwhelm
6. You’re focusing on several issues at a time

In this presentation called 'The 6 Rare Reasons For Feeling Worse' (which you can find inside the Club), I explained what the likely causes are, and what effective strategies are for in handling the situation gently and effectively. 

So when this happens, remember that it's:

A. Relatively rare

B. Nothing to worry about

C. Provides an opportunity to sharpen your tapping skills

D. Presents a healing opportunity

So, it’s all good. 

When it happens, I suggest starting out by doing the grounding exercises. You find these under core content inside the Club here.

Further, I’m always available on the forum for support when you need it. 

Overwhelm is a common problem that’s reported. So common in fact, that I’ve covered it in detail.

Check out this article on 'The 9 Main Causes of Overwhelm', where you will understand what's going on when you are feeling overwhelmed.

Also, inside the SC Club, you will find simple exercises to help you reduce and neutralize these feelings of overwhelm. You can see those here:

• 'Overwhelmed Releasing Tap-along' (15mins Video/Audio)

• 'A 5-Step Super Simple Exercise' (written)

When you need some help with overwhelm because it’s a big issue, you can ask for some support on the forum here, or during our SC Club live meetings (Sun). I’ll help you out.

When you are just learning something, it can easily feel overwhelming. 
 
Especially if you're beginning to address challenging issues by yourself with all new tools and strategies. 
 
First of all, here's a good mindset: When I'm tapping on targets, something good is happening. 
 
Now, some tapping is of course more effective than other tapping. But while you surely have some skill, you're not a tapping ninja guru just yet. 
 
So keep it simple. 
 
And know that when you're tapping, you're doing something good. 
 
Don't expect to resolve your issues every time. Just be pleased with getting some tapping in your system. And be pleased with any bit of relief you get. 
 
There's a lot more to learn, and it all gets easier with repetition. 
 
Also... 
 
... there's no perfect way to tap! 
 
Steve Wells and David Lake (Aussies) actually teach what you consider to be a problem: "chase targets all over the place".  
 
They say, simply focus on what bothers you most, and tap. And then as you gain some relief, and something else bothers you more now, simply focus on that and tap. Repeat. Just follow what bothers you most. 
 
It's much easier.  
 
The Gary Craig way is to be very precise, and get everything down to 0.  
 
For this, you need to work meticulously, and this can be challenging on your own. Especially when it's new, and you're doing this all in your head.  
 
While I've taught you a few things already, keep in mind it takes time to learn this. And it gets better over time. Eventually, it becomes easy.  
 
But at first, it isn't.  
 
So, keep a beginner’s mindset.  
 
You're trying to tackle big issues with only a few tools, that you haven't mastered yet. No wonder you're struggling! 
 
If you want to go the Gary Craig way, I suggest writing everything down.  
 
Otherwise, go easy on yourself, and go Aussie style. Just focus on whatever bothers you most. 

That might be feelings that are beyond what you can deal with yourself. It might simply be too much for you to handle alone.   

It might be that you need some assistance in dealing with those emotions. That would be my first answer.   

The second answer is: When that's not an option or that’s not a possibility that you have, you can realize the fact that they are just feelings, just emotions, and they have a due date. 
 
So, they'll not be going to be there forever. It is not physiologically possible to stay in a particular emotional state all the time. So, you can let it run its course.   

You can simply tap and allow the feeling to be there.  

When you notice thoughts like …  
 
“I can’t handle this.” 

“This is too much for me.” 

“I’m so overwhelmed.”  

… then your focus should be on those because those are the stronger feelings.  
 
So, focus on that, allow those to be there, and honor the fact that you feel that way. 
 
That will start to calm down the particular way of perceiving the world as:  

“I am a victim.”  

“I can’t handle this. This is too much for me.” 

“I’m a little kid and these feelings are too strong for me.” 

“I’m not able to cope with this.”  

And so, by verbalizing that, by acknowledging that, and by sitting through it and allowing it to be there, it gets less strong.  
 
In a way, you’re then sitting with that younger self of you, sitting next to him, holding his hands, or putting his arm on your back, and you kind of saying like, “Yeah, I know what you’re going through and it’s going to be alright. It’s going to be ok.”  

And this where you might need a therapist to help you with that, especially if this is something that is reoccurring and happening a lot for you.  

Usually you feel relief during, and after a tapping session. However, it is possible to (temporarily) feel worse.

If that happens, it’s nothing to be worried about. 

It can feel really uncomfortable, but it’s temporary discomfort. It passes.

And, as you work through it, there is a huge reward at the end of it.

It actually doesn’t happen often that you feel worse. 

There are 6 rare reasons that can make you temporary feel worse.

1. Tapping has dissolved dissociation
2. Sadness and regret about time and opportunities wasted
3. Resistance, resistance, resistance!
4. Not getting to the core issue
5. Too much complexity/overwhelm
6. You’re focusing on several issues at a time

In this presentation called 'The 6 Rare Reasons For Feeling Worse' (which you can find inside the Club), I explained what the likely causes are, and what effective strategies are for in handling the situation gently and effectively. 

So when this happens, remember that it's:

A. Relatively rare

B. Nothing to worry about

C. Provides an opportunity to sharpen your tapping skills

D. Presents a healing opportunity

So, it’s all good. 

When it happens, I suggest starting out by doing the grounding exercises. You find these under core content inside the Club here.

Further, I’m always available on the forum for support when you need it. 

This is a challenging question to answer because I don’t know what you’re having resistance to.

You could have resistance to letting go of your social anxiety. Resistance to being socially confident. Or resistance to change.

You could have resistance to letting go of a negative emotion.You could have resistance to letting go of a belief. Or resistance to letting go of a memory.

And there is more things you can have resistance to (like letting go of a habit, for example). And my answer would be different depending on what you have resistance to.

1. It might be the case that you have blind spots to your resistance and you need the outside help of an experienced practitioner. Sometimes it’s too difficult to “be doctor and patient at the same time”. An outside expert point of view who can spot your subconscious resistance will be of great help to you. It can save you months, or even years trying on your own.

2. It might be the case that you’re dealing with compounding challenges, aside from social anxiety. You may be dealing with social anxiety + a/some other challenges. It’s best to consult with your mental health care provider when you suspect this may be the case.

Therapy makes you sufficiently emotionally stronger and you need to be emotionally strong enough to do these exercises and get lasting benefits.

I recommend considering getting an assessment from your doctor. When you know what you’re dealing with, or what you’re not dealing with gives you more changes of getting the appropriate help to move towards where you want to be.

These are indeed not resistance to letting go of the memory. These are general resistance to overcoming your problem with SA and achieving your outcome of social ease.  
 
Those thoughts are your subconscious trying to sabotage your conscious efforts towards overcoming your problem because it believes that overcoming your problem is less safe or riskier than staying where you're at.  
 
Tapping along with the general resistance protocol would be a good first strategy. 
 
More about this on Day 9 of the 10 Day Mini-Challenge. 

First of all, GENERAL RESISTANCE PROTOCOL works for about 85% of the time. Meaning, it works most of the time, but it doesn’t work all the time.  
 
So, it could be the case that there is a specific resistance that needs to be addressed first. And that’s pretty much always the case.   

When you’re working on a particular memory but can’t get any further (i.e., you’ve addressed all these angles, used the general resistance protocol, you’ve tapped until you’re blue in the face, still no results, still not neutralized), what you should do is to ask yourself: 
 
“Hey, is there a downside to me neutralizing this memory?”  
 
Your mind might have made the idea that: 
 
“When I get rid of this memory, I’ll get rid of my SA”. 
 
So it can start seeing things from a bigger picture.   

Often, when you’re really stuck in trying to neutralize a memory, you want to zoom out and look at the overall bigger picture of what it is that you’re trying to accomplish here.  
 
You’re trying to neutralize your SA. You’re trying to get rid of your SA. You’re trying to achieve social ease. And your subconscious is not on board with that bigger picture outcome. So, it’s sabotaging your efforts to neutralize the memory.  
 
That’s something that is commonly happening. 
 
In that case, you use the GENERAL RESISTANCE PROTOCOL for overwhelming SA.  
 
You also want to get specific,  
 
“Hey, is there any downside to me getting rid of my SA?” 

“Are there any upsides to staying where I’m at?” 

“Is there any pain associated with the journey of going from A to B?” 
 
That’s where that kind of work comes in.

Often you can physically feel the resistance. You find yourself feeling resistant to wanting to do the tapping. You simply don’t want to do it. You will find yourself feeling lazy, or overwhelmed, or not focused.

Quite possibly you’ll find yourself procrastinating, using any conceivable excuse (I have no time, I don’t feel like it now, I have to do my homework, I have to watch this program, I have to finish this task, I’ll do it later/tomorrow/next time, etc.) you can think of.

When this happens, you now know you are dealing with resistance. You will know you are sabotaging when…
… you are not taking action!

How long it exactly takes to be free of anxiety is impossible for me to predict as each person is unique and therefore each situation is different.

It depends on how long you have been anxious, the severity and frequency of your anxiety, your history, the amount of triggers you have, the amount of resistance you’re dealing with, how motivated you are to change, how much tapping you do, and what your current life circumstances are, to name a few determining factors.

That said, you’ll likely feel the tapping working the first time you try it. You’ll be able to gain relief from the very first tapping exercise.

It is common that during each session some of your negative emotions are being released and/or your beliefs are challenged and changed and/or some of your unhelpful patterns that are sabotaging you are being interrupted.

You can expect to see subtle, (or more profound) changes within a few weeks of daily tapping.

And for some people that’s already within just a few days. And for the lucky ones amongst us that’s after a single tapping session.

Results can mean feeling calmer overall, more acceptance of yourself and your current situation, caring less about others seeing you anxious. Less anxiety, negative thinking having less of a hold on you, feeling lighter and more optimistic.


Here’s an email sent to me a few years ago from someone who bought the old program (Social Confidence System - no longer for sale):

“Hey Sebastiaan!

I just bought the SCS a few days ago and already feel a great shift. The first day I came across it and did a few of the techniques, I felt a huge weight lifting off of my chest. It was really the first time that I completely admitted and accepted that I struggle with social anxiety.

I will keep working the system diligently to overcome my challenge!”


And here’s another one, from a few years back:

Hi Sebastian,

I wanted to email you to simply say thank you. Your course has helped to change my life, and funnily enough, without my realizing it! I never truly noticed a change in me until yesterday. I went through an anxious episode (which thankfully was not triggered by anything 'social' but by something completely different) and experiencing all those physical and mental symptoms - the heart racing, the palms sweating, the stuttering, the inability to think straight, the negative thoughts, the feeling of doom etc. - made me realize how far I had come.

Constantly feeling anxious and negative was once so normal for me but now my new normal is a sense of calmness, a sense of serenity.

So, when I felt anxious yesterday I was shocked at how abnormal it all felt. I was shocked that I couldn't remember the last time I had felt like that.

Your course has worked miracles, but in such a wonderfully subtle way that I never actually realized I changed!

I still feel like me, I still act like me, so much so that it took an anxious moment for me to notice that I am actually different!

Now when I think about it, I am so much more comfortable around people. I have fun with them whereas before I was too stuck in my head to have fun.

I am more confident in myself and my abilities. I am more present :)

Your course is brilliant. Thanks so much for making it available for us to use. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who would like to be free of their anxiety once and for all. And if anyone is afraid of changing (like I was) then don't be. You will change in such a gentle and gradual way that you won't even feel it.

Best wishes, M


Now these are just two examples of unique individuals who wrote me about their changes. For you the changes might not be so subtle, for you they might be more profound.


Like this guy:

Hi Sebastiaan,

It's great to hear about your experience, because for a long time I thought it's only me with this problem. I've just recently found you and then signed up and I started using your techniques. I already feel the change, it's brilliant and liberating, I never thought I'll be able to talk to people again without going red in the face for no obvious reason. So it's been life changing and a relief that I'm a normal person after all and not a weirdo, as I'd been feeling before. I'm happy that it worked for you too and not suffering with SA anymore as where would I be without you :-))


But my advice is to not compare your results to others’ results.

Just start tapping. And compare your results to where you were before. If you make progress, keep going.

When you tap in the right way you’ll bit by bit start feeling more and more confident and at ease. And that can happen quite quickly, and it can happen more slowly.

Within a couple of weeks you may find that your overall social anxiety is reduced. Some situations where you formerly felt anxious might not bother you much anymore.

Your relationship with anxiety begins to change as well. It’s no longer your biggest enemy, your fear of becoming anxious starts to dissolve. And you won’t beat yourself up about experiencing anxiety anymore.

You’re beginning to increase your level of emotional control.

As you continue to move forward your results stack on top of each other.

As you keep moving forward it is common you start to feel more grounded, more centered. It’s also common to start feeling better about yourself and to feel more relaxed and “at ease” more often in more situations.

And be more at peace in your life in general.

As this happens you typically start to feel better about other people, and you can enjoy “being with others” more.

As you keep moving forward you can expect a progressive reduction of your social anxiety. And your remaining social anxiety will bother you less and less.

As you keep going you’re working on changing your thoughts, and your worrying could diminish to where it’s no longer an issue in your life. Connecting with others starts to become easier.

In more and more social situations you now feel safe to be yourself.

As you decide to move forward even more to live the life you want, you go through situations you formerly considered scary, using the tapping to get rid of the remaining worries, fears, and beliefs.

You experience new situations comfortably, and expand your comfort zone and gather new insights and information.

As you keep going and you persist you can get to a place where you are anxiety-free. Socializing now becomes enjoyable.

And eventually being at ease socially just starts to feel normal.

Usually you feel relief during, and after a tapping session. However, it is possible to (temporarily) feel worse.

If that happens, it’s nothing to be worried about. 

It can feel really uncomfortable, but it’s temporary discomfort. It passes.

And, as you work through it, there is a huge reward at the end of it.

It actually doesn’t happen often that you feel worse. 

There are 6 rare reasons that can make you temporary feel worse.

1. Tapping has dissolved dissociation
2. Sadness and regret about time and opportunities wasted
3. Resistance, resistance, resistance!
4. Not getting to the core issue
5. Too much complexity/overwhelm
6. You’re focusing on several issues at a time

In this presentation called 'The 6 Rare Reasons For Feeling Worse' (which you can find inside the Club), I explained what the likely causes are, and what effective strategies are for in handling the situation gently and effectively. 

So when this happens, remember that it's:

A. Relatively rare

B. Nothing to worry about

C. Provides an opportunity to sharpen your tapping skills

D. Presents a healing opportunity

So, it’s all good. 

When it happens, I suggest starting out by doing the grounding exercises. You find these under core content inside the Club here.

Further, I’m always available on the forum for support when you need it. 

Instead of using a 0-10 scale, you can just use…

• Strong
• Medium
• Light
• No intensity

…that can make it a lot easier.

Further, there are practitioners like Steve Wells who hardly or ever used the 0-10 scale.

As long as you're getting relief, you're getting somewhere.

I will be getting into greater detail about all of this down the line, not yet.

For now, what I can say is…
In the email where I talked about being specific, I gave you examples of how to get more specific.

I also added a section where I explained that with IEP, you can also be nonspecific and be super general, and yet get amazing results.

So, start there.

For example:

“I release all my emotional attachments to everything that's wrong with me.”

Super general but see how you go.

Aim the statement at the next elephant in the room and keep going. Clearing aspect after aspect after aspect.

No, too much tapping isn't bad for you, per se. On workshops I went to with my mentors, we'd tap for 6 hours a day, throughout the whole workshop. That said, after 3 days of doing this, I'd feel totally drained. Maybe not even because of the tapping volume (how much of it we did) but more so because we addressed so many issues, which were processing, which took up energy. 

I think you can overdo it. If you're tapping for hours and hours every day, you might be draining yourself. Just like exercising is good for you, 4 hours of exercise each day is likely going to drain you. 

I'd say tap for an hour a day. If it's a bit more some day, that's not a big problem. Though if you find yourself getting overwhelmed, that could be a sign you're doing too much (though it can also be part of your issue, and you can therefore tap on that overwhelm and see what happens). Experiment for yourself, and see what happens.

Yes it can be challenging sometimes indeed, as one things leads to the next and the next. But you can indeed keep a notebook, which is helpful. And, you can simply keep coming back to a particular issue over and over until it's dealt with. 

This super focused tapping is Gary Craig's approach (founder of EFT) and most follow this. I usually do this too, as it makes your results more easily measurable. 

If you switch to something else (called "switching aspects") this can simply be a good sign that the original issue isn't bothering you much anymore. And you're off to the new thing. 

Or, it may be a sign that you're dealing with resistance to resolving the thing you're working on. So check with resistance! 

Coming back to the same issue (being persistent with it) and continuing to keep an eye on resistance (which may send you off in other directions) can make you more efficient in focused tapping. 

That said, this is only one way of going about it. Steve Wells and David Lake use continual tapping, and simply tell you to "focus on the next thing that bothers you". This makes tapping much easier, doesn't have you worry about missing the key issues, and still has you make great progress (because you're getting release on your issues!). The only downside is that it's less measurable in the moment, and you can be less obsessive compulsive about measuring results. But hey, for some of us this might be a great thing ;-)

What we’re doing here is “acknowledging the dark side” and “playfully taking this side of you that does not want to change”.  
 
So, when we are saying “you are really shit”, we are exaggerating it. It becomes very funny because your brain is like acknowledging it. It’s like the truth.  
 
When you’re pointing out the elephant in the room, it's like, “All right, I’m being found out”.  

Then, all these lessons release the whole that has it on you. 

When you are tapping at the moment, it should not be with the intention of trying to get rid of the anxiety.   

Remember, the anxiety is there for a very good reason. Your brain is seeing threats. 
 
Tapping on that is not going to make the anxiety go away.  

By honoring your experience and by focusing your attention on accepting your SA symptoms (no matter how challenging it could be), that is what is more beneficial.  
 
It is also helpful to do it afterward.  
 
Ask yourself: 
 
“What was the threat that I was seeing?” 

“How could I not come across?” 
 
Those kinds of questions will lead to uncovering a belief, which then what you can focus on.

Any kind of tapping is better than no tapping.

When tapping before a social situation, you are tapping on your anticipatory fears, worries, dreads, concerns, and so on.  
 
Some questions you can ask yourself are:   

"What am I afraid of will happen?"  

"What's in the way of me feeling safe in this situation?"   

When tapping during a social situation, your focus should be on accepting and allowing as much as possible. You can go to the toilet to tap when the anxiety gets too intense. Simply focusing on your fears.   

When tapping after a social situation, you are tapping all the feelings that have come up. Then, you bring yourself back to acceptance. 

Your subconscious will bring up what you need to work on first.   

When you get triggered, you have an excessive emotional response to whatever is going on. And so you feel like a little kid. This is what happens all the time.  

Through tapping, you can bring on the traumatic experiences in the not too distant past to calm that down.  
 
You might want to ask yourself: 
 
“What does that remind me of?” 
“Is this a similar feeling?”  

“Can I connect that to how I felt that before in my life?” 

“When is the earliest time I can remember feeling that way?” 
 
If you don’t put so much pressure on yourself to find the right core event. It will just come to mind whenever you’re ready.  

Those are deep issues that no tapping script will work for. That is something that you must work through by doing deeper work, or doing one on one coaching, or going through particular exercises, or tapping along with the webinars.  
 
There is no tapping script. It’s a mistake some people make, thinking that there’s a tapping script for every problem. It doesn’t work that way. 
 
The tapping scripts are just supportive. They’re helpful to re-frame particular thinking.  
 
Sometimes, they’re helpful to get some relief. They’re helpful to suggest a particular mindset. They’re helpful for a variety of things. But they’re not the end-all-be-all thing. 
 
This is a deeper work that you’ll be working on overtime. You’ll see it appear within sessions.

I think it’s a little bit less effective. But just slightly. That’s just my opinion.  
 
In my experience (and many other tapping practitioners say), it’s just as good. 
 
My mentor, when he has sessions, he just uses finger tapping most of the time.

Equal. You can even do the intention statement without tapping. 

When you do some real deep healing work, a bit of integration period is recommended.  

When you are working with deep traumatic experiences, you want to have some time for your system to acclimatize to whatever is going on.    

This allows your system to reintegrate itself, kind of updating itself because things have been shaking around. It takes time to get used to that. It takes time for your system to reorganize itself.  
 
Usually, a bit of an emotional shit storm comes after a deep healing session.   

When that happens, be nice to yourself. It’s time for self-care. 
 
You can do your daily tapping, but I wouldn't go deeper. Keep a bit of a balance.

I don’t think it’s either overwhelm or resistance, or lack of acceptance, or at least not right now. It’s more just that. It’s old stuff that’s being triggered right now.  
 
“Not sure how to get past this” – I would simply just watch the webinar for a while. Before the webinar starts, I usually have you set a bit of an intention that you want to make some progress. So, you might tune into whatever your biggest problem is.  

Write it down or think about it, close your eyes a little bit before we start tapping.  
 
Then, tap along through the whole session. And again, you’re just focusing on whatever is happening there. 

The first thing that comes to mind is, you can write all this stuff down on a piece of paper.  
 
So, if you have 4 or 5 memories coming up, and you have a bunch of beliefs coming up – you write it down and maybe make squares for the memories, like mind mapping things.   

But this is how my brain works. This helps me get all that crap out on paper. That means it’s out of your head. That already makes it less overwhelming.  

Then, as you have it out of your head, on a piece of paper, you can just tap on your general overwhelm about having to deal with all of it.   

You don’t need to deal with all of it all at once. But it might feel that way.  
 
And so, having a bit of distance and doing a bit of tapping, without getting into the specifics, just all that crap on paper. That can be relieving.   

Then, you can kind of take it in pieces, so you don’t have to do it all in one go.   

Maybe you do 15 minutes and just say “Okay, I’m going to do 15 minutes in this particular way today. I’m not going to do more than that. Whatever my result is, it’s fine.”  

If you force yourself to get a great result, that’s a fantastic way to put pressure on yourself.  

If you’re not so attached to the outcome and you assume that whatever kind of tapping you do is a success (which is it), then you’re going to feel better and you’re going to have less pressure on yourself.   

Further, when there are so many things that come up, that might be an indication that you need some outside help.  

However, that is not necessarily the case.  
 
What you can also do is:   

1. Put it on a piece of paper and go about it in that first way I described. By putting it on paper, then tapping on your feelings about it. And small chunking it so addressing it 15 minutes here, 15 minutes there. You can then just pick one particular memory and neutralize that.   If other ones pop up, now you just write down your memories. Just focus on the other one.   
2. This might something you need – some outside help.  
3. If you’re not going about it in that step-by-step approach. Simply tap and focus on whatever comes up.  

Well, I don’t think that there’s a full release when you’re experiencing an empty feeling. So, there is a bit more going on in there.   

You might want to sit on that empty feeling. Tap and allow that to be there. Just observe what happens.  

You might slow down your breathing. You might close your eyes and just be very curious. 
 
You might want to say, “I release all my emotional attachments to this empty feeling.”   

Play around with that, but you’re not done yet.  

Well, I think this is a matter of perspective.  
 
If you have been working on yourself for a long time, you got to dig into your emotions and feel them, and really be able to live through them, and breathe through them, and allow them to pass.  

From my perspective, I think that is more of a perspective.   

You see emotions fully. You feel without resistance or short-lived.  And so, they’re just old stuck emotions.  

And just because you felt them a lot and because they’ve been with you for a long time, doesn’t mean that they need a long time in order to process.   

If they process quickly, great.  

I don’t think that that is avoidance. It might just be surprised that things are releasing so fast for you, which should be a good thing.

Beliefs and emotions are not issues.   

The better question is: Will your general excessive emotional state start to decrease while tapping? – Likely.  

David and Steve say, most people don’t get great results because they’re simply not doing enough tapping. They’re not getting enough tapping into their system.   

That’s why I suggested the Daily Tapping Habit.  
 
Getting enough tapping into your system is going to help very much.  

Does that automatically change your beliefs? No. not really. It might over time.   

When you do the Wednesday exercise and the Sunday webinar, things are going to progress and they’re going to keep progressing.  

Not definitely double the effect. But most people only tap with one.   

Lindsey Kenney, whom I learned a lot from, does everything with two.   

She says, “it is a little bit more effective.” And it might very well be.   

I think it’s more of a habit that I usually tap with just one hand, but it’s not a big effect.  

You are trying to tackle the whole elephant at once.  
 
Pick one piece and focus on that.  
 
If that does not work, select a set time (say, 5-15min) and stop focused tapping after that.  
 
After that, just keep indirect tapping (unfocused tapping, which you do when you're watching Netflix while you tap).

Tackling issues that are big takes time. Sometimes, lots of it.  
 
An effective strategy is:  
 
#1:  Doing it in bits and pieces 

#2: Doing it in short times (say, 5-15min) 

#3: Do lots of non-focused tapping 
 
This is more effective than doing it in one go. 
 
It is like, trying to get in shape for a marathon and forcing yourself to run 42k.  

On the first day, you might be able to do it. But, you'll exhaust yourself, won't be able to walk for a week, and you'll have even more struggle happening the next time you attempt to force yourself to run. 
 
So, do a little. Keep it balanced.

The below question is a copy paste from my Social Confidence Community forum (old product – no longer for sale). It came up after Sara went through the first few presentations of the “Top Tapping Training”.

---

Hi Sebastiaan,

I have a question.

When I tap, I tend to get into a flow and I tap several rounds before I stop and re-measure. It feels good and effective because I feel focused and I tune into the aspect I tap on and really experience and expose it. I also tap with my eyes closed. Focus and flow. So it feels.

Your instruction is to tap one round, then re-measure.

When I hear this I think, "Boy, that sounds really slow, I don't want to tap one round at a time, it's going to be a drag, and also an interruption of my focus...!"

So now I will ask and I will follow your expert advice!

Do you recommend I tap one round only in between re-measuring? Or should I just - tapping being the wonderfully forgiving technique that it is - go with my flow?

Thank you!
Sara

---

Here was my answer to her:

---

Hi Sara,

Great question.

I just shared the basic recipe from Standard EFT, and here it is measured after 1 round of tapping.

That is mostly done to assess what your results are so you can change course. After one round of tapping you'll have some feedback on how well it's going.

Maybe you feel better. Maybe worse. Maybe the same. Maybe different. Maybe you have complete relief.

Based upon how you feel you can then adjust your approach.

And, I shared this as an exercise so you can get some practice under your belt. There's no perfect way to do this.

In fact, I most frequently tap for multiple rounds with clients in a row also. But that's because I've fine-tuned my approach and intuition.

If nothing is changing, I might stop halfway the first round or even sooner to adjust my approach. If things are shifting nicely I might tap for 4 rounds in a row or more. It all depends on the outcome you're getting.

So sure, go with the flow and trust your intuition.

---

We of course apply tapping not only to the earliest memories. Sometimes more recent traumatic memories are just as important to address.

However, we do look for the earliest possible memory we can find. Because the original “trauma” is held in the earliest memories.

You may have 100 memories of where you got rejected. And if you start clearing them one by one you will start chipping away at the overall feeling of rejection. But you likely won’t resolve the overall feeling rejection unless you deal with the earliest memory.

The initial experience of rejection is the memory where the negative emotions are held.

The subsequent experiences where you felt rejected were in part because the negative emotions of that initial experience with rejection got triggered.

By releasing that initial experience with rejection you are “removing the splinter from your finger”. Your “rejection wound” can now heal.

Yawning is one of the common signs of energy release. It costs the body energy to hold on to stuck emotions. When your energy is balanced, or when stuck energy is released, this often results in a relaxing feeling. And sometimes this results in yawning.

Some people don’t yawn. Some people yawn every now and then. Some people are heavy yawners. The amount of yawning therefore doesn’t indicate to what degree you’re releasing stuff.

But when you do yawn, you can see this as a good sign.

And there are other signs of energy release, like feeling a relaxing sensation, energy or tingly sensations moving throughout your body, or a deep sigh.

The numbness may indicate that you have other compounding problems aside from just social anxiety, and you need to think about having therapy and doing this online course separately.

It’s best to consult with your mental health care provider when you suspect this may be the case.

Therapy makes you sufficiently emotionally stronger, and a warm empathic therapist may help you reconnect with your emotions over time.

I suggest finding someone who’s both a therapist and an EFT expert (or someone who uses other forms of energy psychology, or trauma processing other than just talk therapy) who has experience working with clients who are “numb”.

While this will take your time, dedication, and effort, it is well worth the investment. The way you get to feel is worth a hundredfold of all of any effort you’ve put in.

That might not be what you want to hear, but it is important you get the best possible help for your situation.

And this is something I dealt with in the beginning of my EFT journey as well. And I have worked with a lot of different therapists to move past this issue. And I’m forever grateful I did.

What happened for me was…

I would get triggered in real life scenarios, but when I was asked in a therapy session how I felt about XYZ I had no emotional response whatsoever. Couldn't feel anything.

A few things I’ve since learned that I am aware of that could be going on here. One is that you’re not vividly imagining what can be going on.
Some simple instructions (really vividly image being in the situation again, step into your younger self's shoes, see what you saw, notice the details, the expressions on the faces, the look in the eyes, hear the sounds, tune into what you felt) can remedy this.

But this is less commonly the case when you can't feel the feelings. Though try this first!

My guess is that it’s likely that your subconscious has switched off your ability to sense in order to keep you safe and protect you from the emotional pain.

This is what likely was the case for me.

I had experienced a lot of trauma for a long time, and my subconscious had shut off the ability to access my feelings about the past. It took a lot of work of getting my subconscious to understand that I was safe before I started feeling emotions again.

One powerful way I’ve benefited from was “Matrix Re-imprinting” which is an advanced form of EFT which combines Neuro Linguistic Programming and Inner Child work.

As you clear some of the really painful traumas that happened using these techniques, your subconscious may start feeling it’s safe for you to become more sensitive to your emotions again.

Another thing that could potentially be going on, is that it wasn't OK to feel your feelings when growing up. So there’s a lot of repressed feeling. Your relationship with feelings and emotions needs to be “healed”.

Additionally, there's another emotional healing tool called "the Emotion Code" or another one called "PSYCH-K" which can be very helpful too.

I have benefited from both tremendously (but they're possibly even more weird and whacky so I don't promote them as much).

Hope this helps you and best of luck. There is a way out of this. Persistence wins the race.

This is a common problem perfectionists deal with.

First, some perspective: You do not need to know it with mathematical accuracy to get results! You don’t need to know it’s a 6.5 out of 10 strong emotion after a round of tapping.

You simply come up with a rough guess of your 0-10 intensity rating. The solution to not being able to (trust your ability to) rate is… Guessing! Simply guess the number, and you’ll be alright.

Say: “even though I don’t know what my number is, if I really had to guess it’s X”

… and blurt out the number.

Another thing to do is make the rating more general, allowing yourself only 3 options: Does it feel really intense, average intense, or just a little intense?

This might happen when you try to force it, or when you add immense pressure on yourself to “come up with the right memory”.

You don’t need to come up with the perfect memory, your subconscious will do this for you. When you ask yourself a question, things will come up, but you need to trust that what comes up is the right thing.

People often think “ah, nothing comes to mind and I’m just making this up!” or “this isn’t the right memory” or “I have to find an earlier one than this!” or “this is just a vague image” or “this is blablabla”.

If you don’t trust it, just pretend that you trust it and go with the first thing that comes to mind. Often, all you need is some time and tapping as this relaxes you.

Here’s a strategy I find often works:

Simply keep focusing on the emotion (or belief) you’re tuned into, and while you tap (either on one point, or moving from point to point) ask yourself the following questions to tune into it even more…

• Where do I feel this emotion in my body most strongly?
• If this emotion has a color, what color is it?
• If this emotion has a shape, what shape is it?
• If this emotion has a temperature, what temperature is it?
• If this emotion has a texture, what would it feel like if I could touch it?

As you are tuned into the emotion strongly, simply ask the question again “what does this remind me of?”

You can also ask “can I think of an earlier time I felt this way?” and here you are lessening the pressure to come up with the earliest ever event.

As you work on the more recent memory you might find that an earlier one comes to mind.

Example:
• You have a feeling of shame. You ask yourself what does it remind me of. You think nothing comes to mind. You ask yourself if you can think of an earlier time you felt shame.
• You now know tons of times!
• You go with the shame that happened just last month when you were in that specific situation where you became red when you were the center of attention.
• As you start tapping on that memory, all of a sudden comes to mind an image of when you were 5 and your mom spanked you in front of everyone when you had peed your pants in school.

Patience and persistence is your friend here. The more you do this the more you start to trust the process, the easier it becomes.

Be a curious explorer of your inner world and notice what comes up when you ask yourself a question. Don’t force things to come up. Let them happen.

And of nothing comes up and you have an emotional response to that (i.e. a worry that nothing will come up and you’ll never solve your anxiety, or a frustration with the process, or an anger towards yourself for not doing this right, or whatever…

… AIM YOUR TAPPING AT THAT EMOTIONAL RESPONSE!

Get to the point where you don’t care about what comes up and you see it as “just information”.

Release the pressure (using tapping as described above - releasing your emotional reactions) and things will be a lot easier.

Not necessarily, other than that you mess up your momentum.

Starting something can for people be harder than keeping up with something that was started…

Compare it to a train. It takes there engines the most power to get this gigantic machine to start moving. It starts really slow, and then it starts to build momentum. Once it’s at full speed it’s got massive momentum and it’s hard to stop it!

So if you stop for a while, you lose that momentum you’ve built up. No worries, you can simply build it up again.
Start small, don’t try to do 2 hrs to catch up. Do 15 min if you think you can do that. If that seems a lot, just fo 5 minutes. And focus those 5 minutes tapping on not wanting to get started, and other resistance stuff. Then do 5 min again the next day. And then 10 if you can the next day.

Start building momentum slow steps at a time.

Quick tip for when life gets in the way of your deeper inner work:

Simply do finger tapping. You don’t have to focus on anything doing this, and you can do it at any time (on the toilet, while taking a shower, while watching TV, while waling somewhere, on public transport, behind the traffic light, etc) without needing to focus on something specific.

This way you maintain your habit of tapping and you get some tapping into you system each day regardless of what’s going on in your life.

When you're only having temporary results there are 3 common causes of this.

1. You're using tapping aimed at the social anxiety symptoms, and you're not addressing the underlying causes of the anxiety being there.

What we label as anxiety (racing heart, doom thinking, tightness in chest, lump in throat etc) is our body's response to the activation of the fight flight freeze (FFF) response.

This response gets activated whenever your mind perceives danger.

If you're only tapping on the social anxiety symptoms (the racing hear, the doom thinking, etc) you may get some temporary relief.

But, when you're just tapping on the symptoms of the problem, and you're not using the tapping to get rid of the perception of danger, your mind still perceives danger.

As long as there is a perception of danger, there will always be the in-built response to danger (FFF-response) to put your body in survival mode.

And you will still feel anxiety…

The animation here explains what anxiety really is quite well: 

However, when you use EFT on where you learned the perception of danger and you get rid of it, there won't be a FFF activation, and your anxiety will be gone.

2. You haven't overcome the subconscious resistance to being free of your social anxiety. - resistance

"Subconscious resistance is your subconscious mind resisting something you are trying to achieve consciously.

While you consciously want to overcome your social anxiety and feel calm and confident socially...

... your sub-conscious is resistant to your letting go of it.

It resists change because it believes it’s not safe or beneficial.

And as long as your powerful subconscious believes change isn’t safe and beneficial for you…

… it will make sure you won’t change.

To explain subconscious resistance in detail and how to get rid of it is beyond the scope of this little window here. I interview EFT- Master Lindsay Kenny on this exact topic here.

You'll have a crystal clear understanding of subconscious resistance, how without resolving it your results will always be temporary, and you'll be guided through some tapping to clear the general subconscious resistance.

Aside from that I've interviewed tapping expert and psychologist Steve Wells on the same topic here.

The title of the interview "this stops 95% of social anxiety sufferers from getting better" says it all.

Until you overcome the subconscious resistance, you'll always struggle because your subconscious doesn't believe you're safe without anxiety.

Once subconscious resistance is cleared, and all parts of believe change is safe and beneficial for you, you'll be able to permanently be anxiety-free.

3. You haven't dealt with all the aspects of your social anxiety problem. triggers

Social anxiety is in most cases a more complex problem, with lots of aspects (smaller parts) to it.

As an analogy, you can see social anxiety as a huge pie, which can be broken down into smaller parts.

There are pie slices of resistance, of symptoms, memories, parts of memories, beliefs, fears, emotions, etc.

Your social anxiety might consist of 100 pie slices (aspects). If you only address 80 of these, there are still 20 aspects active, and these can cause you to remain anxious in those situations.

Until all of the parts, or aspects, have been resolved, you may still feel anxiety in social situations.

And you might have thought like "EFT didn't work very well", “my social anxiety eventually came back”, “Tapping doesn’t work (for me)”

In reality, the parts of the problem (the slices of the pie, or aspects) you have already resolved are often still resolved, and the anxiety is caused by the aspects that remain.

Persistence is key.

You might need to work with an expert to find the remaining hidden aspects.

Once all the aspects of the social anxiety problem have been resolved, you'll be free of your anxiety.

That’s OK. Simply go with the first thing that comes to mind as you ask yourself what the emotion reminds you of, or where you have learned this belief.

Now it might just be a very vague image that comes to mind. That’s OK. Or it might be a face. Or a part of a face. Or it might be a sound. Or it might be a memory that you feel you’re just imagining on purpose, rather than it coming to mind naturally. Or it might be an image of yourself that you think you’re fabricating based on pictures you’ve seen…

… it’s all good!

It does not matter!

All of the above are valid targets to start aiming your tapping at. Focus on it and tap and see what happens.

Your subconscious brings to mind whatever needs to be brought to mind. So simply go with whatever it is. Whether you make it up, whether it is vague, or whether it is just a sound, or a smell, or a sensation, or whatever…

… just trust that it is the right thing (this will get easier with practice as you will start getting some results doing this) and go with it.

So as you have this not-clear-memory (whatever it is)…

… you simply focus on it as best you can and you start tapping.

You might have an emotional response to the image that you have, or the sound you hear. Or you might notice a bodily sensation (like your heart race increasing).
Simply focus on it and start the tapping.

Be very sensitive to whatever is going on. Keep tapping. What you likely find happening is:
Things become clearer (you might see a face appearing). More parts of a memory start to appear (whether it’s “real” or whether you think you’re making it up doesn’t matter)

Feelings and sensations start to shift (a racing heart calms down, or another sensation starts -like a tightness in your chest)

Another scene, image, sound or memory comes up

Simply keep tapping. You can make progress with these images, sounds, faces and so on.

Your aim is to neutralize the emotional response to whatever comes to mind. And then simply follow the trail. It’s like a treasure hunt. Follow what comes up. Tap on it. And repeat.

If you see or hear it in your mind and you have an emotional response to it, simply concentrate on it while you tap.

All that comes up for you is valid tapping material.

You are most likely dealing with resistance to letting go of your social anxiety. Or there is resistance to change. Or resistance to your outcome of social confidence.

That resistance can be general (in which case you watch the video “Tap along to clear resistance to letting go of social anxiety”) or it may be specific, unique resistance.

One good way to uncover specific unique resistance, is to ask:

What is the downside to being free of my social anxiety?
What its the downside of me being at ease socially?
What might be difficult or challenging about it?

And/or:
What is the upside to staying socially anxious?
What is beneficial about keeping this problem in my life?

And/or:
Why might I not want to change?
What is painful about change?

These questions help to uncover unique resistance.

This unique resistance takes the form of fears and beliefs. These you can then tap on to neutralize or change. Doing so clears the unique resistance.

You want to get to a place where letting go of your social anxiety is seen at 100% safe and beneficial. Where the outcome of social ease is seen at 100% safe and beneficial.

And where the journey from social anxiety to social confidence is safe and beneficial.

Now this is work you’ll come back to several times until all resistance is cleared. It is common that resistance comes up, clears through your tapping, and then at a later date other resistances
(that you hadn’t addressed yet) come up.

That’s OK. Deal with as much as you’re aware of in the moment, and whenever you notice yourself self-sabotaging again (feeling lazy, procrastinating, going in circles, etc) uncover and releaser resistance.

It’s a continual effort of clearing resistance to open the way to healing, doing some healing, noticing some new resistance, clearing the resistance, now doing some more healing as the door to it has been opened, encountering new resistance, clearing it and therefore opening the door to more healing, etc.

Be persistent.

When you release the emotions connected to a particular memory properly, they are gone forever.

When you release a limiting belief properly, it won’t come back anymore.

Once something from the past is released, it is released.

And you perceiving threats socially is because of emotionally painful past experiences, and the meanings (beliefs) formed there.

So deeper work (neutralizing these stuck negative emotions and beliefs) leads to permanent results.

However, your resistance(s) to being free of this past event might creep back up. And equally, feelings of non-acceptance might creep back up.

And (new) resistances to change can come up as you go through the process of change.

This is all normal and to be expected. All needs to be addressed until they no longer come up for you. And that can be done with enough persistence. Over time they bother you less and less.

So when you haven’t been tapping for a while, it’s OK to continue where you left of. You just want to keep making sure you’re in acceptance, and you’re not in resistance.

And if you notice that you are in non-acceptance, or you experience resistance, aim your tapping on this first before you continue.

There is no perfect way to tap—either works.

You can do a specific setup phrase for each aspect and work in a way that's more systematic. Or you can tap on various aspects simultaneously and have the intensity reduce on the ones you're tapping.

This is sometimes easier, and sometimes it's harder to keep track of the progress that you're making.

So, it's up to you. Experiment and see what happens.

Don't look for perfection; look for progress.

The answer is yes and no.

Yes, you can tap while you watch TV. And this is called indirect tapping.

Which is also referred to as energy toning by Dr. David Lake, and Steve Wells (Psychotherapist and Psychologist), who came up with that.

This is where you simply add enough tapping to your system while you're doing your daily activities, for example, watching TV, you don't have to focus.

That's unfocused tapping.

There's also such a thing as focused tapping, which is where you focus on a particular issue with the intent to release all of the aspects that make up that issue.

In that case, you absolutely do not want to watch TV while you say the phrases because you need to be focused.

And to overcome your social anxiety, you'll need to do a significant amount of focus tapping. And when you are struggling with that, you're going to need some help from a practitioner.

Hope this helps!

Option one is definitely better. Though, after one round of tapping on one particular aspect, you want to evaluate where you're at, and look for what is the elephant in the room for you? Which means...What am I most aware of right now? Or what am I noticing?

And that might be the same aspect that you've been tapping on. Or it might be another aspect that is now stronger.

For example, you might be tapping on an emotion of shame and do one round of tapping. And after that round of tapping, you notice that you now feel anger more strongly than shame. In which case, your next round can be focused on anger instead of shame.

After each round of tapping, look for the elephant in the room.

And that can be a memory, a negative fantasy, a limiting belief (an emotionalized thought), a bodily sensation, or a negative emotion.

What are you aware of most strongly? Focus on that, do another round of that and then repeat the same process until you run out of aspects to tap on for the particular issue that you're focused upon.

The other approach that you mentioned - tapping for 15 minutes on one particular aspect. That's not really very helpful because there are many aspects that make up a problem.

Hope this helps!

YES.

That’s a fantastic idea. Yes.  
 
First of all, about 40% of the people do not have a specific emotional experience that kicks start their SA. 
 
It can happen progressively.  
 
Some people have been anxious about their whole life. They’ve already been anxious in early childhood, and it’s just progressively gotten worse.  
 
Usually, when puberty starts, it gets worse.  
 
For other people, they don’t have anxiety in early childhood. They don’t have a particular trigger experience. But it gradually starts to happen. That can be when they move schools, go to a different places, have a difficult boss at work, whatever the case may be – it is a series of smaller things.  
 
Even if that is the case, 95% of the case all leads back to early childhood stuff (i.e., relationship with mom and dad). 
 
Starting with small things you can remember is an excellent idea. One thing leads to the other. Your subconscious will bring to mind whenever whatever needs healing next.   

Yes, SEE can be reduced indirectly.  
 
As you start reducing the memory, it might just happen that the earlier memory comes to mind, which you can then focus on.  
 
If you get to a point where it doesn’t reduce any further, ask yourself: 
 
“What does this remind me of?” 

“When is the earliest time I can remember feeling this way?”  

If you find an earlier memory, treat it.  
 
If there isn’t one that comes to mind, there might not be one. 
 
Or, it might be more of a period rather than one specific experience. Then, that whole period needs to be addressed.   

Further, the other reason why a memory might not decrease any further is of course RESISTANCE.  

It could either be resistance to letting go of the memory.  

Or, it could be general resistance to change, to letting go of the SA, or to being socially at ease.  

So, this in case, you have more resistance work to do first.   

Resistance clearing is so important that’s why a significant amount of time is dedicated to it.   

You can work with the statement “I release all my emotional attachments to ____” as this passes the need to know where it was from.   

In other words, play around with it and see what happens. 

The emotions might already be neutralized, but the meaning you created as a result of it might still be active.  
 
You can tune into a particular memory and then ask yourself: 
 
“What did that mean to me at that time?”  

“How did I interpret what happened?”  

“What meaning did I create out of that experience?” 

“What decision did I make at that time?” 

“What did that mean to me about myself?”  

Then, tap on the beliefs you uncover.  
 
When you work on these beliefs, you likely need to clear the resistance to release the belief.   

It could also be that you still have resistance to not having anxiety. If so, that is something to work on too. 

Remember: When you are not comfortable with the outcome that you're after (no anxiety or social ease), then that means that it is not safe. Then, there will be resistance. 

ISEE stands for Initial Significant Emotional Experience. And this refers to the painful life experience that kick-started your social anxiety.

Not everyone has one, but many people do.

While you might not have one, it is common for people to initially not know what their ISEE is. And then often when they start doing some deeper inner work they find out that they do have an ISEE.

So in case you haven’t found one (yet) my first invite to you is to consider the possibility that there is one, but that you haven’t uncovered it yet.

From this place, I’ll talk a bit about the ISEE and what to do in case you cannot find one. First of all…
… if there is none, NO WORRIES!

Sometimes there is no specific experience that kicks starts your social anxiety.

Your social anxiety might very well have already started in early childhood, and then gradually developed (though usually, there is an ISEE here too).

Sometimes social anxiety starts during a stressful period, like changing jobs, or schools, or where you live. And sometimes the stressful period is just a whole bunch of things happening at once.

A divorce often is what causes it also (usually you as a kid experiencing your parents getting a divorce). Not necessarily the divorce itself, but the stress leading up to it, the time you heard it first, and the aftermath of it. This can be a very stressful period. And something within this stressful period can cause you to change how you see yourself. Which may lead to social anxiety.

It might also be a period of time, such as being bullied for a while.

So there are quite a few potential causes that aren’t necessarily a specific significant experience.

So you just want to look at what was going on in your life around the time your social anxiety started. Or when it got worse.

What was happening around that time in your life (and up to 6months prior to it) that was difficult or challenging?

And then tap on whatever you can find. Tap on memories, feelings, beliefs, interpretations, etc.

If you can’t uncover your ISEE right now, simply move on. If it exists it will naturally come up at a later date.

Don’t stress about this, it will come up once the time is right. Often after you’ve released some past baggage in the way of you uncovering the ISEE. Clients often “suddenly remember it”.

Just keep doing your inner work.

Usually you feel relief during, and after a tapping session. However, it is possible to (temporarily) feel worse.

If that happens, it’s nothing to be worried about. 

It can feel really uncomfortable, but it’s temporary discomfort. It passes.

And, as you work through it, there is a huge reward at the end of it.

It actually doesn’t happen often that you feel worse. 

There are 6 rare reasons that can make you temporary feel worse.

1. Tapping has dissolved dissociation
2. Sadness and regret about time and opportunities wasted
3. Resistance, resistance, resistance!
4. Not getting to the core issue
5. Too much complexity/overwhelm
6. You’re focusing on several issues at a time

In this presentation called 'The 6 Rare Reasons For Feeling Worse' (which you can find inside the Club), I explained what the likely causes are, and what effective strategies are for in handling the situation gently and effectively. 

So when this happens, remember that it's:

A. Relatively rare

B. Nothing to worry about

C. Provides an opportunity to sharpen your tapping skills

D. Presents a healing opportunity

So, it’s all good. 

When it happens, I suggest starting out by doing the grounding exercises. You find these under core content inside the Club here.

Further, I’m always available on the forum for support when you need it. 

Tap before, during, and after. You can simply ask if you can talk about it more. It's your therapy session, after all :-) 
 
And, I would discuss tapping. You might share some of the research that has been done. 

Yes, there are loads of EFT practitioners. You can find them on the EFT Universe website.   

You can get an analysis from a psychotherapist. This may help you.  
 
Some people get a diagnosis and then begin to obsess about it. "OMG, I'm this now!". In the end, it is all labels.  
 
But it can be helpful to know what is going on, as some treatments are more effective for particular labels than others.  
 
It could also be that you are just over-worried, like many in the world, and especially many here in our little gang. It's a pattern, and it'll break eventually.  
 
That said, you decide what is best for you. 

Sorry to hear that the therapy never helped.

It might be helpful to consider the following fact: not all therapy is the same.

There are many different forms of therapy, and one will be more suitable for you than another.

Also, some forms of therapy are more effective for certain conditions than others. So it's helpful to do a bit more research and figure out which kind of therapy is most helpful for you.

Cognitive approaches to resolve social anxiety, in my opinion, are not very effective. Because social anxiety is mostly an emotional problem.

Working with a relational psychotherapist is probably going to give you a lot more benefits and this is the most common.

When you start adding energy psychology with your therapy work, now you've got a really, really special mix that can start to change things on a profound level.

Hope this helps.

When you can’t seem to make any further progress. When you want to make faster progress.
When you want to get an outside perspective from someone who can see the patterns you might be blind to.
When you want to go through the journey together (and have fun doing it) For details on 1 on 1 with me, go here.

If you actually have other compounding problems aside from “just” social anxiety, you need to think about having therapy and doing this online course separately. Ideally when you’re stronger after therapy so you get the maximum benefit.

It’s best to consult with your mental health care provider when you suspect this may be the case. Therapy makes you sufficiently emotionally stronger and you need to be strong enough to use this system and get lasting benefits.

Usually you feel relief during, and after a tapping session. However, it is possible to (temporarily) feel worse.

If that happens, it’s nothing to be worried about. 

It can feel really uncomfortable, but it’s temporary discomfort. It passes.

And, as you work through it, there is a huge reward at the end of it.

It actually doesn’t happen often that you feel worse. 

There are 6 rare reasons that can make you temporary feel worse.

1. Tapping has dissolved dissociation
2. Sadness and regret about time and opportunities wasted
3. Resistance, resistance, resistance!
4. Not getting to the core issue
5. Too much complexity/overwhelm
6. You’re focusing on several issues at a time

In this presentation called 'The 6 Rare Reasons For Feeling Worse' (which you can find inside the Club), I explained what the likely causes are, and what effective strategies are for in handling the situation gently and effectively. 

So when this happens, remember that it's:

A. Relatively rare

B. Nothing to worry about

C. Provides an opportunity to sharpen your tapping skills

D. Presents a healing opportunity

So, it’s all good. 

When it happens, I suggest starting out by doing the grounding exercises. You find these under core content inside the Club here.

Further, I’m always available on the forum for support when you need it. 

Most people’s SA starts in early childhood or during puberty. But I’ve had known plenty of people for who it started afterward (around college, when they leave the house, or when they start working).  

Usually, there is something that happens around the time when your SA starts. That can be bullying, losing your job, a divorce of your parents, going to a new school – that can be a whole bunch of different things.   

The common questions I ask are: 
  
“What was happening in your life around the time that your SA started?” 

“What was happening in the past 6 months leading up to it?” 

“Was there anything that was difficult or out of the ordinary?”   
 
Usually, people find something in that way, but it doesn’t have to be the case.  
 
Other times, there is nothing special going on with your life. Then, all of a sudden, it starts to come out of the blue.  
 
What happens is - TRAUMA CAPSULES are starting to leak.  
 
Let me explain: I interviewed one of the EFT masters. She studied the work of Dr. Robert Scare and Peter Levine (who are both leading trauma researchers). She cited from Dr. Robert Scare’s works: when a trauma forms, there are specific conditions for trauma to occur.    

When something happens in your life, where your expectations are violated, or something that you don't see coming in, it's a shock. It's a surprise, but a very unpleasant one. That can be as relatively in a sense as your teacher screaming from the back of the class, or being beaten up, or like getting into a car accident - you name it.   

#1: Something that violates your expectations.  

#2: Feeling overwhelmed with emotions.  

#3: Not having any control over the situation, feeling helpless, and not knowing what to do about it.  

#4: Being alone while dealing with it.   

When those conditions are in place, a trauma capsule is formed. You can imagine that to be like a little capsule where the sights, sounds, smells, sensations, emotions, feelings, and the meaning of “what it means” all get stored. That trauma capsule then gets stored in procedural memory or active memory.   

It doesn't process. That experience doesn't process. It doesn't go too long term process memory.  
 
Now, you go about your life where people, circumstances, and events can trigger that trauma capsule.   

As you go on about your life, eventually you get to a particular point where it's peaceful.  
 
But then, these trauma capsules start to leak. It's almost like your brain is saying, like, “Hey, it's time for you to deal with that stuff that you couldn't deal with back then.”  
 
That's how she taught it to me. There you go.  

For what it’s worth, trauma is very personal and very unique to the individual. So, the trauma for one person is no issue for another person, so don't compare yourself with your trauma to other people's trauma. You're a totally unique person, as is everyone else.  
 
There are a few things that constitute a trauma, however, and these are that: 
 
A. It's a situation that overwhelms you emotionally. 

B. There is a shock/ surprise - something that violates your expectations. 

C. You feel helpless and out of control, and all alone in dealing with it.   

D. It's often a threat but not necessarily a threat to your life, but a threat to your identity.  
 
Whenever these circumstances are in place, a trauma is formed. And that can be as subtle as your dad walking into the room seeing you, being annoyed, or giving you a disapproving look and walking off.  It can be seemingly subtle, but it can have a lot of meaning for you.

If this is a “Big T” trauma (war, rape, sexual abuse) I recommend you work with an expert on this.

If this is not a “Big T” trauma, but something that was really intense for you at the time, and you choose to work through it by yourself, I recommend following the steps outlined in the section on healing trauma.

I suggest you do this after you have dealt with several other less intense memories. After having done so, your confidence and experience with the tapping gives you confidence and better equips you to deal with this bigger challenge.

Make sure that you -as described in the instructions- first clear the general resistance to letting go of the memory, and you first deal with your anticipatory feelings about dealing with the memory.

This typically gets the edge of the memory already.

And take it really slow. Don’t rush this. Respect that it may take your system some time to heal this. As you start the tapping, take it apart bit by bit. Stay very general at first, do not get into the specifics of the memory from the get-go.

When you experience intense emotion, keep tapping. And when the emotion doesn’t come down, remember the resistance phrases to clear resistance. After the resistance has been cleared, keep tapping on the emotion.

When in doubt whether you can deal with this yourself, I recommend working with a practitioner.

Usually you feel relief during, and after a tapping session. However, it is possible to (temporarily) feel worse.

If that happens, it’s nothing to be worried about. 

It can feel really uncomfortable, but it’s temporary discomfort. It passes.

And, as you work through it, there is a huge reward at the end of it.

It actually doesn’t happen often that you feel worse. 

There are 6 rare reasons that can make you temporary feel worse.

1. Tapping has dissolved dissociation
2. Sadness and regret about time and opportunities wasted
3. Resistance, resistance, resistance!
4. Not getting to the core issue
5. Too much complexity/overwhelm
6. You’re focusing on several issues at a time

In this presentation called 'The 6 Rare Reasons For Feeling Worse' (which you can find inside the Club), I explained what the likely causes are, and what effective strategies are for in handling the situation gently and effectively. 

So when this happens, remember that it's:

A. Relatively rare

B. Nothing to worry about

C. Provides an opportunity to sharpen your tapping skills

D. Presents a healing opportunity

So, it’s all good. 

When it happens, I suggest starting out by doing the grounding exercises. You find these under core content inside the Club here.

Further, I’m always available on the forum for support when you need it. 

When you struggle to connect with your emotions, this can be for a variety of reasons.

One simple reason might be because you’re not connected to the issue. And in order to bring up the emotions connected to the issue, you of course first want to focus on it.

So in order to bring up feelings about your social anxiety and situation…

… think about it! How is it limiting you? What’s happening socially? What happened the last time you got super anxious? How are you held back in your life because of it? How do you feel in the moment? When you were in a situation last time, what happened specifically? Who was there? What do you see? What did you hear? How did you feel? Why is social anxiety a problem in your life? What are you missing out on because of it? What’s the most painful thing about it?

Etc.

These questions help you to tune in.

By being tuned into it, you can now focus on the emotions that have come up, and tap.

Same goes for when recalling a past experience, or imagining a future social scenario.

You might simply not be vividly imagining what happened. Or what might happen.

Some simple instructions to remedy this can be:

1. First center yourself in the present moment as best you can. Tap over your tapping points while you take 5 deep breaths SLOWLY (at about 50% of your usual speed) in and out.

2. Vividly image being in a particular situation again, step into your younger self's shoes, see what you saw, notice the details, the expressions on the faces, the look in the eyes, hear the sounds, tune into what you felt. Etc.

Or, see what you expect to see in a. Future scenario, and pretend you’re there. Or, imagine that it’s happening right now in the here and now, as you have your eyes closed.

Take your time for this. For some it takes a few minutes to connect with your inner world.

Give yourself that time.

If that all doesn’t work, you can focus on the feelings you have about the fact that it doesn’t work (frustration, hopelessness, etc) and thoughts that may come up (I’m a though case, there’s something wrong with me, etc).

And, you can also simply tap for 5 minutes, just observing whatever thoughts and feelings you have. Even if you’re feeling numb. And see what happens after 5-10 minutes.

Try all of the above first. 

If all of that yields no results, and you’re still totally numb, this may indicate that you have other compounding problems aside from just social anxiety, and you want to think about having therapy and doing this online work separately.

It’s best to consult with your mental health care provider when you suspect this may be the case. Good therapy makes you sufficiently emotionally stronger, and a warm empathic therapist may help you reconnect with your emotions over time.

I suggest finding someone who’s both a therapist and an EFT expert (or someone who uses other forms of energy psychology, or trauma processing other than just talk therapy) who has experience working with clients who are “numb to their emotions”.

While this will take your time, dedication, and effort, it is well worth the investment.

The way you get to feel is worth a hundredfold of all of any effort you’ve put in. That might not be what you want to hear, but it is important you get the best possible help for your situation.

This is something I dealt with in the beginning of my EFT journey as well. And I have worked with a lot of different therapists to move past this issue. And I’m forever grateful I did. 

What happened for me was... I would get triggered in real life scenarios, but when I was asked in a therapy session how I felt about XYZ I had no emotional response whatsoever. Couldn't feel anything. 

For me, it likely was the case that my subconscious had temporarily “switched off” my ability to consciously sense my emotions, in order to keep me safe and protect me from the enduring emotional pain I experienced. 

I had experienced a lot of trauma for a long time, and my subconscious had shut off the ability to access my feelings about the past.

It took a lot of work of getting my subconscious to understand that I was safe before I started feeling emotions again. Now I’m very sensitive to my emotions.

Another thing that could potentially be going on, is that it wasn't OK to feel your feelings when growing up. So there’s a lot of repressed feeling. Your relationship with feelings and emotions needs to change.

And that doesn’t just happen with some logic. And it won’t just happen with the flick of your fingers. It will take some time, and some emotional work.

Your therapist can help you with this. And, other techniques aside from tapping (Logosynthesis, PSYCH-K, emotion code, matrix re-imprinting, inner child work) can also be very helpful.

There’s always a solutions. There are many ways that lead to Rome. 

There is a way out of this. Persistence wins the race.

When you're experiencing anxiety, your system is in that very moment in survival mode.  
 
This means that you're optimally prepared to RUN, FIGHT, or FREEZE (play dead). Blood goes away from your head and digestive system, heart rate is elevated, sweating increases, breathing rate goes up, etc.  
 
Great for surviving. Bad for being social. Bad for studying. Bad for listening to what someone is saying. Bad for coming up with jokes. Etc.  
 
So in conclusion, you're not stupid, you've just been anxious! 

When it's shit, it's shit.   

Just this morning I wasn't feeling very well, which I don't like. It's very mild compared to the way back then. Just wasn't feeling my joy.  
 
And the first few hours I was trying to figure out why.  
 
So I checked in myself: 
 
“Am I accepting my experience?” 

“Am I accepting my shitty feeling?” 

“Am I OK with not feeling great?” 

“Am I OK with feeling tired?"  
 
The answers were no, no, no, and no.  
 
So my little 10min tapping session focused on accepting my resistance to my shitty feelings, the fact that I felt tired, and that I wasn't feeling great.  
 
Once acceptance was achieved, I felt some relief.  
 
Did I feel great? Nope. But, I wasn't struggling with my feelings and myself anymore.  
 
I could now focus elsewhere (which happened automatically), and as I'm writing this now I'm still a bit tired, but in a pretty decent mood.  
 
Acceptance, it's your friend and your first go-to. 

Eye contact issues often have to do with shame and feeling that you have to hide particular parts of yourself that you don’t want other people to see.  
 
After all, if they really look in your eyes, they could see what you’re trying to hide.  
 
You can ask yourself: 
 
“What am I trying to hide?” 

“What is it that I don’t want others to find out about me?” 
 
There might be something going on in your life right now that you’re ashamed of.  
 
Or, there might be something when you were younger that caused you shame. 
 
It might be from right now, or when you’re age 5 or 10. It could also be both. 

You got to get rid of the belief that everyone should be interested in you, that everyone should like you and be attracted to you, that you are in competition with other people.  
 
That’s what I think is happening. That’s what I guess. 
 
“Feeling excluded” may come from feeling bad about yourself. Likely, it is because of the things I mentioned above. 
 
It could also be something else. It could be an old feeling, an archaic feeling, that you are re-living. 
 
How can you approach that?  
 
Begin by allowing the feeling to be there. Tap on it.  
 
Then, ask yourself, “What does this feeling remind me of?”   

Then, work on what comes up. 

It could be that there’s a part of you that really wants to be considered special, the best, the most attentive, and so on.  
 
It could be either:  
 
#1: You didn’t get that when you were growing up, or 

#2: It was emphasized that you had to be that way.  

So, your subconscious came up with the idea that you had to be that particular way always. 
 
When you work on this issue, you can verbalize these things while you tap.  
 
That would be a good start.

Do the Anticipatory Anxiety Buster Tap-Along found here. 
 
After doing that, ask yourself: 
 
“What's the worst thing that I expect might happen?”  
 
Then, verbalize it out loud while you tap. See what degree you come down. Likely, you will feel better.