Accessing Suppressed Emotions
EFT: Attachment Science in PracticeSo let's look. Somebody turns to you in therapy and I say, what happens to you when your wife turns and says this to you and says that she's probably going to leave? Nothing. So if you don't know anything about emotion, and you haven't, and don't know anything about EFT, you might actually believe him. But in EFT, we don't believe him, because he's a bonding mammal, and his wife, his main attachment figure, has just brought up a threat, which is I'm going to leave you. I'm going to reject you, reject you and abandon you. So if he's not dead, and he's not a lizard, if he's a bonding mammal, he's going to feel.
The issue is then that he's probably trying to tamp it down and suppress it. Right, which doesn't work very well, but that's what he's probably trying to do. I know that. So all I do is repeat the cue. I say, could you help me when your wife turns and says, this to you, you feel nothing as she turns and says that she thinks she's going to leave you? For most people, that would be so hard. I guarantee that he won't be able to stay with nothing.
Because you've just run a powerful survival threat past his amygdala 4 times, and he doesn't have enough glucose going to his brain to continue to damp it down. So he's going to start to feel something. And I say for most people, this would be difficult. And he says, Yes, it's hard. I know those emotions are there because I have the map given to me by 30 years of experience in EFT, working with couples, families, and individuals, and the map given to me by attachment, which says we all have certain basic longings, basic fears, basic needs.