How Can I Overcome Disappointment with EFT?

By Juanita Ecker

We all have had to learn to deal with disappointment in one form or another. Disappointments start when we are young and continue throughout our lives. Most of us have learned to accept those disappointments as part of life. See if you can relate to any of these scenarios: Maybe you wanted to go to a certain university but never got accepted there. Maybe you had your heart set on someone you loved who never reciprocated those feelings.  Maybe you were vying for a promotion and were overlooked once again. Maybe you always wanted to have a child but it was never meant to be. Maybe you always wanted to play on a college sports team but never made the cut.  Everyone is unique; your list of disappointments could be totally different from someone else.

I recently worked with Bella, a college student in her senior year of nursing school. (Her name has been changed). She dreamed of starting her nursing career in women’s health. Everything she had done up to this point had been to prepare her to work in that field. But unfortunately, she was assigned to pediatrics for her practicum internship in her final semester.  She had this overwhelming disappointment; this was not what she had expected to happen. This assignment took away the excitement she once felt. She told me she started to question her beliefs. She kept asking herself “Am I not supposed to go down this path?” She was concerned how she could get a job in women’s health when her experience would be in pediatrics. She felt the opportunity to ever work in women’s health had been ripped away from her.

I asked Bella to give her disappointment a rating on the 0-10 scale. (At zero it is completely gone and at ten it is at its worst.) It was an eight.  I then asked her to tune into her body and see if this experience reminds her of anything from the past. Two memories came up. She remembered being six years old and riding horses competitively. During one competition, she came in last. She remembered feeling tearful and embarrassed. From that experience, she created a belief about herself that if she is last, she is the worst. We tapped on the feelings she had when she was six.

Then, we tapped on a memory when she was in college. She had earned a horseback riding scholarship on a team that was one of the best in the nation. Even though it was an honor that she had qualified to be on this team, she didn’t feel that way.  All she could focus on was that her skills didn’t compare with the rest of the team. She felt like she was at the bottom and therefore the worst of the team.  I found it interesting that instead of viewing this situation as an opportunity to really hone her skills, she ended up quitting instead. We tapped on all of the emotions she was feeling around this event; feeling like a failure, feeling disappointed with herself for wanting to quit because her mother had been a champion rider and the feeling that she was letting her parents down.

Next we addressed her current feelings towards her internship: her anger at the person who did not assign her to a position in women’s health, the sadness and the sense of loss, the worry that she won’t get a job in the field she is interested in and her worry that she might not do well in pediatrics. After a few rounds of tapping, Bella’s intense disappointment started to shift. Her initial intensity of an 8 quickly came down to a 0.

The reason the nursing assignment felt so strong to Bella is because of the unresolved emotions stuck in her body from the two previous situations. Once we cleared the unresolved emotions from the past incidents, things began to shift for her. She said she felt lighter about it all and no longer had that heavy feeling in her chest. She also experienced a cognitive shift that wasn’t available to her prior to the tapping session. She said she now felt more positive about making the best of her current situation and no longer saw it as a doomsday scenario.

This story illustrates how a disappointment that you feel today, may be linked to disappointments from the past. Those unresolved emotions may prevent you from moving past the disappointment in the present. You don’t have to live with disappointment. EFT tapping is a tool that can make a profound difference in your life. When you are able to shift your perspective, how you see the world will change too.

 To learn more how EFT Tapping can work for you, contact Juanita at image3@nycap.rr.com to schedule your free 20 minute strategy session.