Sally's anger towards her parents - The main block to her weight loss and underlying anxiety to her binge smoking & drinking

Sally came for her first appointment about two months before Christmas 2008. In her early twenties, she was working locally with children and wanted to loose weight. Rapidly, it became evident that we were going to have to work on the unresolved anger that she was holding towards both her parents, but mainly towards her mother.

Sally had had a very unhappy upbringing with her parents who separated when she was only 10 years. The situation was made even more painful by the fact that her mother had a tendency to control and manipulate people in her entourage, including Sally. Sally was being torn between both parents, never knowing how to act to please either of them, and ultimately, feeling very responsible, guilty and angry. Her mother had always used food as her controlling tool, and Sally ended up overeating to please her mum. 

Sally came to me for about 5 or 6 sessions and each time we never tapped on the problem of overeating, nor really on her relationship with food, because we had to deal with the anger first. We tapped mainly about her mother, but we also did an entire session tapping about her relationship with her dad, whom she felt had not been there to protect her from her manipulative mother. 

Each week Sally was coming to see me, she had gained some more weight and was getting more and more frustrated. However, each time we could not really tap about the issue of overeating as more pressing issues of anger with different people kept arising. Sally stuck with the EFT sessions and, one by one, we tapped on each issue that was arising. All that tapping resulted in Sally realising that she herself was not responsible for everyone else's mistakes. And that she did not have to "fix" everybody that she felt was not behaving properly.

We also tapped numerous emotional charges of various memories of when she was younger, and that were still painful to her. 

One such issue was Christmas. She always had bad memories linked to Christmas, as she could not remember ever having a happy Christmas. So we tapped about this issue that was bringing some more anxiety to Sally as we were, by then, coming close to Christmas. We tapped on various aspects of the "sad Christmases" and then used the “choice procedure” to instil some new, happier feelings about the rapidly approaching festivities.

One by one, we tapped away the big trees in her emotional forest.

By our last session before Christmas 2008, Sally's anger against her mother was no longer an issue. During that session we tapped about the fact that the extra fat that Sally was carrying was a protection against her mother who was using her as a punching ball. And also on the fact that she did not really need that protection anymore.

Sally went back to her home country to visit her parents at Christmas. She came back to see me for a completely different problem (a blocked ear) in February 2009. 

The Sally I met then was quite different from the Sally before Christmas:

• The first noticeable thing about her was that she had lost some weight (over 1 stone) as she had joined a famous slimming class and was enjoying every minute of it. She told me: "It is so easy to loose the weight now, and I really enjoy the recipes!" 
• Also, she said that for the first time, she had enjoyed the Christmas festivities. 
• But her main news was that she had finally managed to reestablish the relationship with her mother. Her mother no longer repulsed her (Sally had once compared her mother's behaviours to "Hitler's") and she was now able to have a normal conversation with her without feeling threaten or "responsible" in any way.
• She also told me of the positive side effects of the tapping on her smoking and drinking habits (although she never mentioned these issues to me and we never tapped directly on these problems). She told me she used to smoke socially only, but sometimes she would manage to smoke two packs (even three packs) a night, even though she didn't smoke every day (sometimes just one cigarette a day). And the same is with her drinking habits. She used to drink a fair amount as part of her young adult life. She wanted to get rid of both bad habits but her eating issue was the main thing she wanted to deal with. She told me: "... I am 100% sure that the fact I stopped smoking and drinking is a side effect of our tapping. I just don't drink and smoke at all even if I go for a girls night out. I don't need it and I don't want it anymore."

I wanted to tell Sally's success story and was going to ask for her permission to publish it but she beat me to it, and before I even had a chance to ask her, she told me: "If you want to tell my story on your Web site, please go ahead, because that thing with my mother is a really big thing for me!!!"

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