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EFT for Mental Illness & Retardation

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The Use of Anti-Depressive Medication with EFT

 Gary Craig's Introduction:

Even though we are shifting subjects to Trauma, Fears, Anxiety and the like, I want to back step a moment so I can present a particularly useful message on our previous topic of depression.

Dr. Patricia Carrington has a wealth of expertise and experience to share.  She is a treasure chest of ideas, warmth and wisdom and, as you will see in her detailed message below, she has substantial experience with depression.  She details her thoughts about different types of depression, the unique challenges they present and how best to handle them.  While she uses EFT in most cases, she also provides thoughts on how one might work with the really difficult cases that require medication.

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From EFT Master, Patricia Carrington

Since you called for input on EFT and depression, I've been giving thought to my own experience using it with depressed clients.  At the present time about 90% of my clients use EFT during a portion of practically every one of their therapy sessions.  Although I never articulated this before, I think now see a pattern in their reaction to EFT in those clients who have been depressed.

By far the most EFT-responsive depressions I've worked with have been what are (or used to be) called Reactive Depressions (to those who are interested, I don't use the present DSM IV categories for depression except for filling out insurance forms ? I find them quite meaningless for purposes of therapy).  The reactive depressions are those which are precipitated by a specific event or series of events in a person's life, and which usually occur in a person who wasn't depressed just before the event ? they are exactly what the name implies ?  REACTIONS to something.  The "something" is usually a loss or the threat of one.  It can be the loss of a person, or of a career, or of money, or security, or a limb, or the threat of dangerous illness to a family member, or loss of one's youth, or even of one's future.  The precipitating event triggers a form of mourning for the lost object or person or life circumstance and the result is a feeling of sadness and hopelessness.

This is the kind of depression that in my experience often lends itself remarkably well to EFT treatment.  It is eminently tap-able because it has identifiable boundaries, it's not vague or generalized, and there are plenty of specifics to tap on.  True, some people may not initially be consciously able to identify just what their painful loss or separation was, although I find that most clients I encounter with this problem do know what the event was and can tell me about it with little prompting.  For others it may be that it isn't until I've delved a bit into their life to find out when this all started and what may have occurred around the time the event happened, or what disturbing thing they may have been anticipating at that time, that the cause of their deep inner sadness can be unearthed.  Such people may not be able to tell me the precipitating cause at first, particularly if it was an "anniversary" of some unpleasant or painful event that brought on the depression ? anniversaries are scrupulously observed by the mini-calculators in our brains even if we don't consciously "remember" them, and they can be big trouble makers.

Another reason a person may not identify the event right away is that they may be downplaying in their mind the real impact of the thing that is bothering them ? maybe a former spouse remarried three months ago when the depression started and they didn't think it bothered them at the time (but it did!), or maybe their youngest child went off to college leaving a vacant house and it all seemed fine to them (but it wasn't!), etc.  I find that these precipitating events seem to come to the surface and identify themselves naturally and often very quickly as we tap on their feelings of sadness, or emptiness, or discouragement, or self-blame ?or whatever may be coming up for them.  It's as though the real reason wanted "out", that it was just waiting to be seen and dealt with.  Of course once it is out in the open then we can go to town with EFT by tapping for the SPECIFIC issues and those issues can often be handled remarkably quickly and with them goes the depression.  Voila!!

This isn't always that simple though, as we all know.  Underneath the loss that started the depression may lie a series of other losses and separations which are hidden in the dim recesses of the past, some are the very early and extremely painful losses which can occur in infancy before the child even had words to put to it.  If these have been reactivated by the more recent loss then they are the driving forces behind the depression and we have the familiar network of often multiple aspects to trace through tapping. 

Sometimes I'll have to help a client do this laboriously and it takes great patience, but the payoff can be tremendous.  Though sometimes, it goes much faster than I had expected.  More often than not there are some core issues to be addressed and the depression that brought the client to my office may just have been the more obvious problem, the "SOS flag" so to speak, that has motivated this person to come for help.  Once the help (the therapy) is there, then the deeper meaning of it all can be addressed. To this I say ? great!  I've often found that this process is even more important than clearing away the depression symptoms themselves ? now a person's whole life is being turned around, a new perspective is being born, light is flooding an existence that may formerly have been dull or lifeless ? warmth is there in place of coldness and numbness.  That, of course, is the real meaning of what we do.

I could give a whole bunch of examples of how EFT has acted as a life-saver to people I've treated who had all but given up in their lives and resigned themselves to a less than-alive existence ? which is what depression is.  But others are doing that on this list so well in their reports about the joy of helping another lift their depression that I won't waste time here on more of these wonderfully inspiring stories.

Instead I'd like to say something about the other depressions that we see, the so-called "endogenous" ones which are thought to somehow be inwardly caused because we don't know what really causes them. 

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