Going Further with EFT · Seven-part course
Download Let It Go · Course contents
Start gently, at your own pace
You can begin by learning the tapping points and trying them with a small, everyday frustration. There is no need to start with your hardest experience or search for an earlier memory.
Choose something you feel comfortable giving a little attention to while still noticing the room around you. Stay curious about what you notice, without needing a particular result.
You are in charge of the pace. You can pause, change your wording or finish at any time. Even a brief tapping practice can be worthwhile. Any easing in intensity, however small, is worth recognising. You do not have to reach zero or resolve everything in one sitting.
If you know an experience is traumatic or feels overwhelming to approach, leave that one for supported work with a qualified professional experienced in trauma. You can still use this guide to learn the basics.
If strong feelings or memories arise
Pause the exercise if you feel overwhelmed, disconnected from your surroundings, or as though a memory is happening again. Look around, notice a few objects near you, and bring your attention back to where you are now. You do not need to push through or work out what it means.
If you need help settling, reach out to someone you trust or find free support through the link below. You do not have to work through this alone.
You can stop at any point and come back another time. There is no need to push through or complete a full round.
PART TWO
Finding the real issue
Part of Going Further with EFT, a free seven-part course. This one builds on getting specific, which Part One covers, though it should make sense on its own if you’ve landed here first.
This part of the course can ask a little more of you. Take your time, and give yourself room to pause.
Last week was about getting specific, turning "stress" into a real moment you can actually work with. That's a genuinely useful skill to have. This week is about something harder underneath it. The specific moment you land on is very often not the actual issue. It's where the issue happens to be showing up today.
The presenting problem is rarely the problem
Say you tap on the tightness in your chest before opening an email from your manager. You get specific. You tap well. And the number barely moves, or it moves and comes straight back tomorrow with a different email.
The email isn't really about the email. Something about being addressed that way, or watched that closely, or caught off guard, is landing on old ground. The reaction today is out of proportion to what actually happened, and that's usually the clue. When a feeling is bigger than the moment that triggered it, it's an old feeling being triggered, not a new one being created. That idea is in your ebook, and it's the whole reason this part exists.
The email is real. The tightness is real. But the size of the reaction belongs to something earlier.
What the hunt actually involves
Finding that earlier thing isn't guesswork, but it isn't simple either. In a session, it usually looks like tracing a feeling backwards. That means sitting with the tightness, asking where else in life it shows up, and following the charge rather than the story. The story is what your mind offers first, usually something reasonable and recent. The charge is what your body actually holds, and it doesn't always agree with the story. Part of the skill is noticing when your body responds to something before your mind has explained why.
This is genuinely difficult to do alone, and I don't want to pretend otherwise. Most people can get partway. They can sense there's something under the surface, or get a flicker of an earlier memory, or notice the feeling has a much older texture than the situation warrants. Getting the rest of the way, actually finding and working with what's underneath, is a large part of what a session is for. Someone alongside you can help you keep perspective and notice when it is time to pause.
If even approaching this feels like too much
Sometimes the idea of asking "when did I first feel this way" is intimidating before you've even started. If that's you, there's a gentler way in.
Tap a round on the dread of looking, before you look. "Even though I'm scared of what I might find, I deeply and completely accept myself." Keep tapping until that fear itself settles a little. Only then move into the exercise below.
Working with your hesitation gives you a chance to notice how you feel about approaching the experience. Take your time with that decision.
Try this
Start tapping through the points before you begin, and keep tapping the whole way through this one, rather than stopping to sit with the feeling and tapping afterwards. Bring to mind a specific moment you've already identified, something with a real charge to it, and while you keep tapping, ask yourself, when did I first feel this way?
Keeping the tapping going while you ask the question matters here. It's what keeps you resourced and present while something surfaces, rather than dropping fully into the feeling on your own. If you notice the feeling building rather than settling, your heart racing, or anything that feels more like being swept up than simply noticing, keep tapping, but let go of the specific memory. Swap it for something plain and repeatable, "this feeling," or simply "stay with me," and keep going until things settle. That's not the exercise going wrong. That's exactly what to do.
Don't force an answer. Let whatever comes, come. It might be a clear memory. It might be nothing at all, just a vague sense of "younger," or a decade, or a room. Notice what comes to mind and leave room for uncertainty about what it means.
Give yourself full permission to stop at any point. This isn't an exercise in pushing through. If nothing surfaces, that's fine, and it doesn't mean you're doing it wrong. If something does surface and it feels like more than you want to sit with alone, stop there too. You can bring what you noticed to a supported conversation.
Tapping is complementary support for general wellbeing, not a substitute for professional care, and if what surfaces feels too big to hold alone, that's exactly what sessions are for.
Why this part is different
I'm not going to teach you a step-by-step process for doing this on your own, because this may not actually serve you. What I hope you'll take from today is recognition, the sense that your presenting problem and your real issue might be two different things, and that finding the gap between them is a skilled process, not a personal failing if you can't do it by yourself.
Recognising that connection may give you a useful question to explore in a session.
The next part looks at what it means when the number simply won't move, even on something specific, and what's usually happening underneath that.