Asking the Right Questions, pt1

<-- Carol Look By Dr. Carol Look LCSW DCH Asking the right questions at the right time is essential to zeroing in on the exact issue your client needs to work on during sessions. Listening deeply to the answers to these questions separates good EFT practitioners from excellent, masterful ones. Many beginning EFT practitioners ask me in supervision sessions, "So how do you know what to tap on?" Good question! When I started asking more of the "right" questions, my EFT practice improved considerably. Practitioners need to establish rapport and ask questions that will get to the heart of the matter. This work is never one-size-fits-all. If you don't know what the "real" problem is, or the strongest emotional driver that's feeding your client's conflict, you won't be able to aim the EFT treatment in the right direction. If you aim the EFT treatment at the real issue, you dramatically improve your success rate and take less time getting results. My favorite brilliant question of course is Gary Craig's "If you could live your life over again, and there were something or someone in your life you would just as soon skip, what or who would it be?" This gives the clinician immediate access to troublesome memories, relationships, and time periods in the client's life that the client might not have associated with their emotional conflicts or physical ailments. The following list of special questions helps me decide where to direct my tapping and how to become more specific with the EFT treatment. While some of you will recognize these questions from my work with weight loss and other addictive processes, they can be used effectively whether you are working with anxiety, addictions, physical ailments or blocks to abundance. While these questions don't need to be asked all in one session, I am confident the answers to them will always improve my accuracy and success rate with EFT. Some of them are as follows: 1. How long have you suffered from this problem (conflict, ailment, disorder, concern...)? This question helps the therapist to orient themselves so they know whether this is a lifelong problem or it just surfaced since a recent stressor in the client's life. While it may seem obvious that you need to know this information, too many clinicians forget to gather this information. If your client has been overweight since childhood, the course of treatment is very different than if they started putting on weight during menopause. Suggestions for tapping for focusing on when the ailment started might be: "Even though I started feeling this pain in high school, I deeply and completely accept who I am...Even though I didn't feel these symptoms until my son left for college, I choose to accept how my body is responding...Even though I didn't start overeating until I felt grief about my grandmother's death, I accept all of me and appreciate how I have been handling my life." 2. What was happening in your life before or during the time of diagnosis, or when you noticed this problem arise? This is just another way of asking question #1. We all know that stress triggers emotional and physiological problems. Our immune systems become weakened under stressful situations, and often we do not "connect the dots" between a family crisis or stressful employment situation and an emerging cluster of physical symptoms. Try variations of these statements: "Even though I didn't have my first panic attack until after that terrible family fight, I accept myself and love who I am anyway...Even though I didn't feel this pain until after I moved to the new home, I love and accept myself and my feelings...Even though I started overeating because of my loneliness after the relationship broke up, I choose to feel calm anyway."

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