Emotional Freedom Technique for Anxiety in Children and Adults
By Karen St. Clair, AAMET Certified EFT Practitioner
t’s 2019. What’s relevant in your life? Do you have a comfortable home, a career, the right car, a strong reputation for being trustworthy and always doing a good job? Have you mastered the art of looking good to the world and yet feel like you’re on a rollercoaster of stress and anxiety? The inner feelings of anxiety may seem like a mystery but the reality is that they could very well be from beliefs you learned as a child.
I Pregnancy Through Age 7
Science tells us that from the last trimester of pregnancy through age seven, our subconscious mind is downloading every thought, every behavior, every word and every signal of right and wrong that our parents and community experience in- cluding their positive or negative respons- es. Every human on earth is in download mode during this time. We come into the world needing this all-important down- load to build our subconscious minds through observation.
The predominant brain activity during
the child’s first two years of life is delta, the lowest EEG frequency range. Between two and seven years of age, the child’s brain activity ramps up and operates primarily in the range of theta. While in the theta state,
10 ELM™ Maine - July/August 2019
children spend much of their time mixing the imaginary world with the real world. The predominant delta and theta activity expressed by children younger than seven signifies that their brains are operating at levels below consciousness. Delta and theta brain frequencies define a brain state known as a hypnagogic trance, the same neural state that hypnotherapists use to directly download new behaviors into the subconscious minds of their clients. Think of it as downloading personal software. Locked and loaded forever…until anxiety pushes its way into your daily life.
Teenage Years
Your children may be experienc- ing this same anxiety as they enter sixth grade through high school or younger. The stressors that our students are faced with are nothing like what most parents expe- rienced during their teenage years. The speed at which technology is advancing far surpasses most parents’ ability to stay up to date enough to even communicate with our teens.
Teens were born into the age of
technology, unlike most parents. You may be frustrated with your child if he or she always wants to play video games, is constantly texting friends or is always
head-down interacting with a device. You may resist your child’s behavior because it doesn’t match up to your personal software. This natural disconnect puts parents and teens into stress mode simply because their personal software is not the same. What is the same are the inner thoughts causing the anxiety that parents and children share.
Can You or Your Teen Relate to Any of These Thoughts?
• I have so much to do • It all needs to get done now
• People will judge me if it’s not 100% right
• It’s not ok to make a mistake
• Everything is riding on my performance
• I have to live up to my family’s expectations
• Perfection is the standard These thoughts may be buried deep
within you but the ripple effect that touches your entire family is at stake here. Just as your mother and father taught you by ex- ample, you too are teaching your children these same standards. The combination of our 20th century standards and our
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