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Using Personal Resource States in EFT

By Dr. Patricia Carrington

Gary Craig's Introduction:

This article by EFT Master, Dr. Patricia Carrington, has HUGE potential because It represents a possible turning point in the lives of almost everyone.

From time to time most of us "feel stuck" somewhere in our lives...in business...in relationships...in sports performance...and so on.  We need to "get off the dime"..."get moving"..."start the ball rolling"...and, until we do, our birthright to abundance is nowhere to be found.  This is expensive.

What Pat describes so well in this article is the borrowing of the concept of "Personal Resource States" from NLP (Neurolinguistic Programming) and blending it with EFT.  In essence, her stuck client ("Maria") recalled a time when she went "FULL OUT" during a softball game and, with Pat's skillful help, blended that "Personal Resource State" with EFT to become unstuck in her vocation.

Also, for more details on how to locate Personal Resource States which can be used in EFT, see Chapter 8 of Pat's Choices Manual

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I am increasingly impressed with the effectiveness of using what are called "Personal Resource States;" a Neuro-Linguistic Programming  (NLP) term and concept, with EFT.  The result can be excellent. By accessing personal resource states and inserting them into the set-up and reminder phrases of EFT, we can often make breakthroughs that might otherwise not be possible.   

Recently, I had an experience with a client which illustrates this use of EFT. Here a personal resource state was used in EFT to make the first inroads into a long-standing self-defeating pattern that had been a part of this person for nearly her entire life.  

"Maria" is a natural as a teacher -- intuitive, resourceful, and sensitively attuned to her pupils and their special needs.  But until recently, she couldn't recognize her considerable competence because of her persistent self-criticism.  However, she had been using EFT diligently over the past few years ? both within and outside of her therapy sessions. She made enormous gains in confidence and has substantially improved the areas where she needed to make improvement in her teaching; organization of her lesson plans being one of them. 

But now, Maria faces a challenge.  In the school system where she works, teachers must progressively improve during their first three years of teaching to a point where they can be rated as "superior"? not an easy rating to obtain.  This is a rigid requirement of the system and one which has intimidated Maria to the point where she sometimes feels despair about ever succeeding by their standards.

Recently, she was told by her school that the administration does not understand why she is showing such remarkable improvement in her third year of teaching ? that is, why didn't she show this improvement before ?why this sudden jump?  None of her explanations as to the reasons for this seemed to make sense to them, and so at this point she became genuinely uncertain as to whether she would receive tenure.

However, no matter what the school authorities may or may not do about this, the real problem is Maria's self castigation for not having a been as good BEFORE, as she is becoming now, and her fear that a tendency to procrastinate to some degree with her lesson plans will persist unaltered and "do her in".

In her therapy session, when I asked her what she thought she was doing incorrectly with the lesson plans, she answered, "I don't know how to go FULL OUT.  I never go FULL OUT on anything!"

The word "never", made me prick up my ears.  It seemed highly unlikely that a teacher as good at her work as Maria, and as good at parenting as well, was never able to go "full out" on anything.  Aware of her devotion to her own children and her pupils, I began to discuss with her how going 'full out" is actually a very relative matter.  I was sure, for example, that she would go full out to save her children from a fire or other danger.  While she readily agreed to this she was still holding to the concept that as far as her classroom preparations were concerned, she always held back somewhat and did not do her very best, did not allow herself to open up to her full potential.

What was alarming to her now was that she felt she would never be able to reach the standard of excellence demanded by her school within the next few months because of this resistance.

In order to break what I perceived as an almost airtight conviction on her part that she was would be unable to go "full out", I helped her search for a personal resource state which we could use with EFT to begin to shake this conviction.

Accessing the proper personal research state is the first step when using this method.  A personal resource state, by the way, is not a GENERAL state such as "being competent" or "feeling I can do things well".  On the contrary, such general statements do not do very much good because they lack the compelling personal meaning that a true personal resource state needs to have in order to effect real change.

Then, a thought came to me.  

Maria is an athlete.  Although not a professional athlete, she is competent at sports and exhilarates in getting out in the open and playing a game of softball, going to work out at the fitness club, or engaging in other activities of a truly invigorating physical nature.  I had a feeling that her reluctance to go "full out" might not apply to athletics.  I asked her if she could think of any time when, during athletic activities such as baseball, she had ? even momentarily ? gone "full out", no holds barred.

She thought for a moment, and said "I guess I have when playing softball."  Then she described how, after hitting an infield ground ball, she found herself running at super-speed (with no brakes on) to first base.

This was just the kind of personal resource I had been hoping she would uncover.  It was emotionally compelling as well as highly specific.  In Gary Craig's terms, it would make an excellent "mental movie" for EFT.

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