- As I said, and you were asked about,
is it always about anger?
No, it's not always about anger.
But a lot of times there is anger involved
because it's one of the main primary emotions
that everybody has and it's normal.
But it's the emotion that often times people
who come for this work have a harder
or more difficult time finding or approaching.
Or they say, "Yeah, I'm always angry.
I get angry at this, and that, and the other thing."
But they're still maybe avoiding anger
towards a particular person,
or towards a particular situation.
Or, as I said earlier, having a little bit
of anger that festers all the time
as opposed to letting it all out, letting it go.
And Esther asked earlier, you know, is it really anger?
What about fury? What about rage?
And my goal is to help people experience
the full range of emotions, whatever emotion it is,
to the fullest that they can, and to teach them,
and to teach their brain that emotions are not dangerous.
They're not harmful. It's okay.
You can be as angry as you want.
You can be as rageful as you want.
And I tried to demonstrate that in just my own stories.
But sometimes people need a little bit of help or coaching.
And so, one opportunity is to use
our own experience to help normalise the fact
that we have this wide range of emotions.
And that's why I tell my stories to you so that
you can hear them and normalise that for yourself.
And you can tell your own stories to your clients
and to normalise that for them.
Sometimes, all they can feel is the hurt of the situation,
and you wanna honour that hurt and then
turn that hurt into compassion, but if there's
true compassion for yourself, at some point
you're gonna ask the question,
"Did you deserve to be treated that way?"
And that question is an entree out of the hurt
and into the resentment, anger, rage, fury, et cetera.
You can ask, I had a guy imagining
his own life when he was a child,
and he'd say, "I didn't deserve any sympathy."
I was being a brat, or it was my fault.
Or, that I was a wimp.
And I said, "Well, okay."
So let's imagine you're going back to the same situation,
but it's not you in that situation.
It's your son in that situation. How would you feel then?
How would you feel if he was being treated that way?
Yeah, no, that would not be good.
I would be so angry if someone treated my son that way.
And so, it's another way of helping people
to see if you, you know, a lot of times people say,
"Yeah, my childhood wasn't that bad.
You know, it was just normal.
You know, that's how kids were treated in those days."
And then you can ask if your child, or niece,
or someone you loved was brought up in
that exact same situation, how would you feel about that?
So, just another way of getting to emotions.
There's a lot of people who do this work
who feel that they're very kind, and caring,
and compassionate to other people,
but they have a hard time being kind,
and caring, and compassionate to themselves.
We see this every day.
And so, one of those simple things is to ask them,
if you had a very close friend that you dearly loved,
or a relative that you dearly loved
who was in the exact same situation as you,
what would you say to them?
Now all of a sudden, they can be very kind
and compassionate to this other person.
And then we may be able to ask,
"Well, can you say those things to yourself?"
Can you treat yourself with that same caring
and compassion that you just demonstrated you
have the capacity to do towards someone else?
And then often times, I'm saying,
as I'm hearing people's story,
as I'm listening to their story,
I'm kind of reflecting, boy, that sounds rocky.
It sounds difficult. It sounds horrible.
I can't imagine that. I would feel so upset.
I would be so hurt.
I would be so angry if that happened to me.
Just being honest, just connecting
to people and being honest.
How far do you go with this anger? That's always a question.
A lot of times, there's a lot of therapies that say,
"Yeah, we do anger, we approach anger."
And a lot of times, what I've seen
in these therapies is they're kind of like,
"Oh, did that child get what they needed?"
"Yep. Yep. They got what they needed.
They got a little love. They could express themselves.
Great, okay, let's move on."
But it's often easy for people to say,
"Yep, I did the anger, I did it."
And I say, "Well, was that really enough?"
Let's explore.
Let's be open and honest and explore
the feelings to their fullest.
I often give people words to say, you know, it's like,
you know, was it just a little bit annoying?
Was it annoying, and was there actually resentment?
Was there really anger? Was there rage? Was there fury?
Just allowing the expression of emotion.
Giving permission.
Giving permission to say, 'cause I tell my story,
I was slamming his head, you know, it seems crazy,
but that's giving permission to say that's acceptable.
That's normal.
It's healthy in your imagination
so you can hit, bite, jokes, push, shove,
whatever, you know, just whatever.
It's up to you.
So I'm giving people that permission, I'm nudging.
Take your time, do as much as you need to.
Don't hold anything back. Keep going. It's up to you.
You can do whatever needs to be done, but it's not you,
it's actually your anger doing this.
So you're taking away, I wouldn't do that.
Well, of course you wouldn't.
You shouldn't, you couldn't. It's not right.
It's not socially acceptable.
But your anger can do whatever it wants to do.
And that's using that, you know,
two parts of the brain, so to speak.
And then we're looking, when you're working with somebody,
I'm just looking for a sigh, looking for relief,
looking for a smile, looking for something
that helps to, you know, see that
there's an end, or they're ready to move on.
And sometimes people are saying it out loud.
They're saying, "Now I'm doing this.
Now I'm doing that. Now I'm doing this."
Or they're yelling and screaming, "You idiot, you asshole!
I can't stand you. I hate you."
I'm gonna, blah, blah. Or they just do it in their mind.
They don't have to say it out loud.
I don't have to hear what it is, it doesn't matter to me.
They can just do it all in their mind.
And you'll see a video, I'll show some of each of them.
And then helping them to let go,
to wipe their hands, to walk away, to choose.
'Cause the beauty of this work is
to make emotions not scary, not dangerous.
So you're allowing anger to be not scary.
Every time you allow yourself to go to strong anger,
and then you practise letting it go,
you're giving your brain a great exercise, right?
It's like exercise for the brain.
When you exercise, does your blood pressure go up?
Physical exercise, of course it does.
When you physical exercise, does your heart rate go up?
Of course it does. Is that good for you?
Yeah, it's good for your heart.
Give it some exercise, get your blood pressure up,
get your heart rate up, and then it'll relax.
It's healthy.
That's how we measure heart health
is by how high the heart rate can go,
and then how much it drops.
It's the same with anger, how much anger
we can have and how much we can let it go.
And like I say, it's easier to release
after you express it fully.
And then you're always watching, you're using this
as a model to say, when you're talking to somebody
and they say, "Yes, I had this situation
that really bothered me."
And then their hand goes to their neck, right?
So you can see the connection there.
The connection of emotions to discomfort.
After doing an exercise, what we'll usually say is,
"Well, how do you feel in your body now?"
And almost all the time after doing this
kind of EAET session or exercise,
what people are saying is, "I feel lighter."
And I'll say, "Yeah, emotions are heavy."
They say emotional baggage.
Yeah, it's baggage you're carrying around. It's heavy.
You let it go, you feel lighter.
Often times the body relaxes,
pain disappears on the spot after this.
And then you can, again, reinforce the idea
that the pain is mind-body pain, just went away.
It's related to emotions, and we have tools
for dealing with both of those.
It's fantastic.
There's a meditation on my website called Time Traveller.
And Time Traveller is a meditation taking someone
to go back in time to an earlier point in their life.
And it's just a guided meditation, and you can listen to it.
You can have your clients listen to it if you want.
Again, the password is meditations.
And people can do this work on their own.
It's not that hard.
We're trying to make it less medicalized, less pathologized.
We're also trying to make emotional expression
normal and acceptable.
I think children should have in their bedroom
a little board that says things that make me sad.
Things that make me mad. Things that make me glad.
They can write.
Showing them it's normal, your things that make you happy,
things that make you sad, things that make you mad.
Write about 'em.
This woman says, after reading about EAET in your book,
I took the steps I believed I needed
to open the door to my feelings.
Let me just open the door and see what's there.
She says, I let the emotions arise.
Grief and sadness, and also anger.
I tried to allow the feelings to come up,
but not to overwhelm me.
I remembered thinking as the emotions rose up,
it's too painful.
It's too painful to feel these emotions.
A lot of people feel that.
And I don't know, I can't describe what happened.
I cried, I wailed, I said out loud, I can't bear this.
But after a while, the rage and the grief began to decline,
and I went into a sort of a calm.
And later that night, I went into a deep sleep
and I woke up feeling refreshed.
It's like a magical journey or something, right?
It's like a hero's journey, you go into the cauldron
and you come out the other side.
How many stories tell that?
You know, fairytales, and fables,
and myths, and lore tell that story.
They all do.
I tentatively tested the experience again
by thinking about it and allowing the emotions
to come up again, but there was only peace.
She didn't go to therapy, right?
She just allowed herself to feel emotions.
Some days later, I realised the pain
in my knee was diminished.
It made me think that was connected to my journey.
Occasionally, I find my knee
will hurt again, but not so much.
I use calming words. I say, it's okay.
There's nothing wrong. Pain goes away.
I dunno, it's just beautiful.