EFT, or Emotional Freedom Techniques, has worked wonders, often in an amazingly short time, with a wide range of mental and physical “issues” by addressing underlying negative emotional energies that seem to cycle endlessly within the subconscious body.
This article is meant to give hope to gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people who, depending on the era they grew up in, have their own set of self esteem challenges, fears of rejection, and rage issues. Having had the opportunity to work with gay and lesbian issues, including parents of transgender children, I dedicate this article to those individuals who have suffered discrimination and rejection from their own parents, siblings, and peers that profoundly hurts at the deepest and most fundamental levels energetically.
This is not a generalization of what I believe the entire gay population is currently feeling. This is just a small glimpse into the silent and sometimes not so silent suffering of the fearfully closeted and disenfranchised clients of mine who grew up before the pre-gay pride era, before the beginning of the slow cultural shift in accepting alternative lifestyles. After all, it wasn’t until 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its official list of mental disorders. If you can remember your parent’s “Medical Book”, which was a standard “must have” for most families, and reading about such deviant behaviors, it assuredly reinforced their abject shame and humiliation of ever having such “evil and abnormal” urges.
Yet, thankfully enough, there are parents who love their gay and lesbian children unconditionally, without judgment, and as a result helped to form confident adults who are not challenged by the love and acceptance barriers experienced by most of the older homosexual generation. I’ve been able to witness firsthand, from my own experiences in my family, two contrasting examples of being gay and living in a loving and accepting environment, and what happens in a not so accepting one due to cultural and religious expectations and beliefs. Through my cousins, I have a first hand account of what happens when you are loved and supported without judgment, and what happens to your self esteem when you aren’t.
In EFT sessions, I speak with individuals who have deep-six-ed their self loathing and shame for fear of discovery–the girls who early on shunned the dresses and all the female regalia, (beyond tomboyish), the boys who didn’t measure up to the athletic expectations of their fathers and their peers. So expert are they at the rosy facades they have constructed, you would never guess the deep sadness and anger that they harbor inside. Intuitively, I surmise that the combination of both negative emotions (sadness and anger) equals rage. In the long run this negative emotional cocktail catches up with them and presents itself as a serious illness or chronic pain syndrome that, per my observations, culminates in a self-destructive implosion.
As I have mentioned in writings of mine elsewhere, I have experienced similar issues with well educated, professional clients, especially women born prior to the feminist movements. The main difference between feminist and gay issues is the horrific deep fear of discovery for being “abnormal”, the repercussions of which could often lead to severe physical abuse and even death– shades of the movie “Broke Back Mountain”. Because gay people were forced to move invisibly within the periphery of heterosexual society much like the Jewish people of Europe during the Nazi occupation, they make especially difficult clients for the suppressed emotions that were necessary for survival.
The similarities between the two include the need to be perfect with the added personal pressure and heartache that comes with achieving this perfection on every level. The need to overachieve for the sake of parental and familial acknowledgment despite their “deficits” has inadvertently created some of the most gifted and driven people I know. For most, the act of ingratiation was a tool to insure love and acceptance in order to maintain a non-hostile environment.
However, these coping mechanisms come with a price of deep resentment for having to play the role of the “pleaser”. As an EFT client this is one of the main stumbling blocks because they will have the propensity to tell you what you want to hear as a practitioner, and will navigate and manipulate you completely around the real core of their issues. The good news is that the larger part of their psyche truly wants your help and that is why they seek energetic help in the first place. But the “pleaser” strategy has to be addressed early on for EFT to be successful.
An additional complication is the usually unrecognized fear that letting go of painful past issues would negate who they are, and all that they’ve been in their lives. It’s as though the painful memories can be worn on their chest as personal badges of courage, but ultimately it only hurts the person who wears the metals, not the person or persons responsible for pinning them on.
Of course, this isn’t strictly a gay issue. I decided to write this article specifically to address a major stumbling block that many older gay clients have because my heart goes out to all of the beautiful gay people in my live who blessed me with their presence. But after all, isn’t this just another example of what I call a love problem? If you were raised with conditional love, on a subconscious energetic level, it is exactly how you learn to love yourself, and ultimately, love others.
As an EFT practitioner, I frequently speak to those who have been shunned and traumatized by their own families, authority figures, or peers — to those who have felt alone and contemplated suicide at one time or another as an only way out, to those who consciously or subconsciously loath themselves and express it sexually by brutality and other means of self degradation. True love begins within the confines of your own heart, and because of this new “emotional acupuncture” self help technique, it is just a matter of opening the channels to true emotional freedom. With Emotional Freedom Techniques, there is an opportunity to release the negative blockages to actual self-love, and therefore a truer love of others.
Dr. Rossanna Massey, D.C., EFTCert-I, focuses her practice on the use of EFT to augment the body’s natural healing abilities by eliminating the negative emotional underpinnings of serious and chronic diseases. Available for private sessions, in person or by phone (worldwide), workshops and lectures, visit her website for more information at http://www.EFTHelp.com
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dr._Rossanna_M._Massey