Personal Peace one story at a time…
The Personal Peace Procedure is the first step in effective, life-changing EFT. It involves making a list of all the things that have happened in our lives that we wish hadn’t happened or the people we would’ve preferred to skip and systematically applying EFT Tapping to the unresolved emotions these memories hold.
The premise of EFT is that these unresolved emotions are the key to unlocking our limiting core beliefs and allowing us to see our true, unlimited, unconditionally loveable selves.
Our identity, who we believe ourselves to be, our goodness or badness, our beliefs about what we deserve and our beliefs about all the things in the world around us begin to form as soon as we begin to think. Any event, circumstance or situation of our lives causes us to feel certain emotions and come to conclusions, generally about ourselves or our role in the situation we’re in. These conclusions are often flawed, yet they contribute to our internal fabric and become part of our identity. Sometimes to great detriment.
Life events and conclusions we’ve come to before the age of seven are even more influential in creating our identity because these are formative years when we interpret everything that happens in our life as being ABOUT us, even if it wasn’t. If Mom and Dad are fighting, a child under the age of seven that is still thinking about the world only from THEIR perspective comes to the faulty conclusion that the fight is somehow about them and that they’ve done something wrong to cause it. We may not recall thinking these thoughts, as they are often below the level of consciousness, but that makes them even more powerful than conscious thoughts.
Would you trust a seven-year-old (or younger) to accurately evaluate a situation in your life now and tell you how you should think about it?
No, you wouldn’t, but unfortunately, most of us are walking around listening to the voice of that little version of ourselves and reacting to our current life with the belief systems we forged long before we had a fully functioning adult mind.
The goal with the personal peace procedure is to recall these memories as we tap away any unresolved negative emotional charges that may accompany them. In releasing the emotions that are tangled up with our memories we (somehow, although we’re not sure how yet) open our minds to a complete cognitive shift on the memory and can suddenly see it with fresh, adult, rational eyes in a way we’ve never seen or understood it in the past. Now we have a more accurate response to it, truly feel differently about it, and come to a new level of self-compassion and understanding that unlocks the self-imposed limitations we created with our childhood perceptions and conclusions.
Emotional Freedom and Personal Peace are the natural result of shifting those limiting core beliefs we created in childhood as a result of our faulty conclusions.
It’s very common for us to lock away or repress our emotional pain, but OFTEN when we sit with the process and make an intention to really see where our unresolved emotions lie, we may see that residual upset about things that happened to us as a small child. We make an assumption in EFT that if it was a situation that seems like it should be upsetting and you haven’t already cleared that emotion in some conscious manner, the emotions are there, festering below the surface and still causing disruptions in your energy system and having a negative effect on your life.
It’s often an ongoing process and at your first writing session, you may find it difficult to recall these uncomfortable events or you may think that you don’t have any emotions about them now. Don’t expect to find every event that you still have some upset with when you make your list, but recognize that if you can’t easily find at least fifty events you’re probably not tuning in deeply enough.
Once we’ve identified an event we also want to get a rating on that event. The rating is a 0-10 rating called a SUDS score, or a subjective unit of distress. A 10 on this scale would be extremely intense emotions that cause a visible emotional reaction, sobbing tears, intense fear or anxiety, sweaty palms, and serious discomfort. Sometimes we know a memory could be this emotional, but we keep it at arm’s length as a means of protection, but any event that you know could be this upsetting should get rated as a 10. A zero on this scale indicates a neutral feeling, but not a repressed feeling. A repressed feeling can often pose as a neutral feeling but they are VERY different. It can be difficult to tell the difference between repression and neutrality and that may be a case for working with a skilled practitioner.
A truly neutral feeling feels like peace and ease and even compassion or understanding about the situation. Repression often comes with a mild feeling of resignation, annoyance or with the sense that re-visiting this old story is pointless and a waste of your time. Sometimes our emotions are SO repressed we feel frozen to a degree, like it’s just a complete void of emotion. If that’s the case, mark down the intensity that you guess you would feel if you could feel it, or simply put an “R” beside that event, but don’t leave events with repressed emotions off your list.
Our goal is always to find a genuine sense of peace about all of the situations in our life, but as any practiced EFTer will tell you, that is a life-long process of growth and development, so don’t expect to get this work “done”. As we work through events, life gets better and better, our stress responses become more accurate and less intense, relationships improve, we take better care of ourselves and we become much better managers of our own lives, but like anything else in this life, there’s always room to grow.
Clearing the ten most intense events from your list is generally enough to see some dramatic shifts in the quality of your life.
You could do that in a week, or you could do it over three months, but it’s definitely something worth undertaking.
Here is a sample of my own Personal Peace List to give you an idea of what it looks like:
| Specific Event | SUDS score 0-10 |
| A girl I looked up to was mean to me- “No wonder you’re so fat” | 7 |
| Slamming Dad’s hand in the car door- “I hurt Dad” | 7 |
| Messing up my speech in front of the whole school | 7 |
| Being told to “get lost” by my older brother when I wanted to hang out with him | 5 |
Once you have your list you have a great starting point for a regular EFT practice. It’s recommended that you start with the events that have the highest charges first and systematically tap on one event per day or at least three per week. The faster you clear the old emotions, the faster you evolve into a better version of yourself.
In order to help my clients work through this life-changing process, I’ve developed a Facebook group where I can offer professional EFT guidance, group tapping sessions and a community of like-minded people that are committed to their own personal development. I’d love to see you in the group!
