EFT for Hoarding

This is a fantastic example of the kind, supportive and gentle approach with EFT that helps so much to release the negative emotions that cause hoarding! What a huge difference from having to be brave and be tough with yourself!

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“Patti” stated she resorted to hoarding money just in case she would run out. No matter how big her “pile” was, she never felt there was going to be enough. She also admitted to hoarding food, and incidentally, has a weight problem. We tapped as follows:

Karate Chop Point:

“Even though I need to hold on to my money, I deeply and completely accept myself and my feelings…"

"Even though I’m convinced there is prosperity for others but not for me, I choose to release this doubt…"

"Even though I refuse to believe there will be enough, I accept who I am and intend to feel safe.”

Then we tapped the points for two rounds:

EB: I don’t deserve prosperity

SE: There’s not enough anyway

UE: I need to be careful

UN: Money makes me anxious

CH: What if I run out

CB: I need to hold on

UA: Don’t make me let go

H: I always need more

Then we tapped for more positive suggestions:

EB: I love believing in prosperity

SE: I love knowing there is enough to go around

UE: I love knowing I am valuable

UN: I choose to believe in abundance

CH: I feel safe about letting go

CB: There will be enough

UA: There is already enough

H: I accept prosperity into my life.

  ">Dr. Carol Look from Emo Free.com

This is a really interesting use of EFT for hoarding behavior. I love how gentle and caring the setup statements are!

Oprah's tips on overcoming compulsive hoarding

Oprah has some good tips on overcoming compulsive hoarding, but I disagree with them. All of these tips involve, in some way or another, fighting yourself.

Tip number seven is Be Brave, and number eleven is Be Strict With Yourself.

Hoarders and people who live in environments ranging from cluttered to squalor tend to be hypercritical of themselves and depressed. The last thing someone who's critical needs when they're trying to throw away something is to have another voice in their head telling them to be braver, to be stricter with themselves!

The path to genuine change isn't through being your own worst bully. It's through taking care of yourself, and through being gentle. You've beaten yourself up long enough!

You can use the EFT points and set up phrases to heal the hurt. If you can't bear to throw away a gift given to you by an old friend who abandoned you, being brave isn't going to make you feel any better, and throwing it away won't heal the empty feeling inside. Instead, tapping on the pain, the sadness, the loss, the abandonment, and the loneliness- the root causes for your hoarding behavior- and letting them go gently, is the way out.

If you change yourself, your surroundings will start to reflect it. If you change your surroundings, you will change them back to reflect yourself.

Demand Resistance and Flylady

I saw an interesting comment on Smackytravel's blog (which I just found, but is hilarious). The first comment is:

i hate flylady. hate hate hate. i hate it so much that i would just get mad when i saw the emails and then not clean my house just to spite her.

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Wow, did that strike home! Anyone else feel that?

Everyone who's had our sorts of problems has seen or heard of Flylady. Some of us have had Flylady shoved down our throat as the ultimate panacea. Those of us who are not happy flybabies right now usually have the same sort of reactions to her- she makes us ANGRY and when she tells us to do something it PISSES US OFF, or we feel guilty for not doing it all perfectly and decide that the answer to our troubles is to finish off the Chinese takeout from lunch.

I've heard this called demand-resistant behavior. I have a love/hate relationship to Flylady. The person who's demands I tend to resist the most are that of my Mom, who happens to be a dead ringer for Flylady. They look, talk, and dress the same, and sometimes if I'm already feeling bitter or angry about Flylady bossing me around, if she uses one of the nag phrases my Mom used to clobber me with that'll push me from dragging my feet to digging my heels in. And if my Mom starts to nag me about not doing Flylady perfectly, that's game, set, match. That sink is staying nasty, and no force on Heaven or Earth can stop me.

The lovely thing about EFT is that you can address and defuse the bomb of emotions that are the root cause of demand resistance. You can get every part of you on the same team, and pulling in the same direction. It's great! Instead of part of me feeling angry, part of me not wanting to do this, part of me feelng guilty for not having done it already, and part of me feeling overwhelmed, and part of me resenting this, so that the general consensus among the different parts of me is to go take a nap, and forget the sink, I just go, tidy up the sink, and then feel a lot better afterwards.

I can't imagine having to go back to living like that. I finally feel free.

Internal Resistance

One of the big problems I have found in helping compulsive hoarders with their problems is a huge amount of internal resistance they have.

One of the main patterns hoarders tend to have is that of wanting control over their environment. Many hoarders grew up with controlling or abusive parents, or in financial hardship. Any attempt at removing clutter or "helping" someone who is a compulsive hoarder is seen as meddling, and is incredibly threatening. I know when people go through my stuff, especially my papers, my heart used to race and I'd flat out panic. I felt completely invaded and violated, as if someone had their hands on my body and I couldn't get them to stop.

Of course, the more loved ones try to help, the more they are pushed away, and the stronger the internal resistance to change becomes.

For me, a lot of the internal resistance came from my Mom's attempts at keeping house. Chore time was never fun or happy. I remember constantly being lectured that I was never doing things well enough, or that I wasn't trying hard enough, when Mom had never shown me how to do it in the first place (I suppose I was supposed to just pick up how to sort laundry by osmosis!). I remember Mom forcing me to clean my room several times. Once, when I was five, she got so frustrated she threw my favorite doll against a wall so hard she broke it. Another time she went through all my papers when I wasn't home and decided what to keep and what to throw away.

I resented this. I was angry, and I wasn't allowed any way to express my anger. This meant that any time chores, cleaning, or throwing things away came up, even years after I moved out of the house, I still had to fight that internal resistance, that fiery defiance that refused to clean because no one could make me any more.

With EFT, those emotions are now gone. The memories are there, sure, but the anger, sadness, and despair around them have vanished. The feelings of hopelessness are gone. I no longer feel like I'm having to swim through bowling balls to clear off my desk, I can simply go and do it.

I can't even begin to describe how freeing this is. It's amazing. When you stop fighting yourself, when your depression is gone, your body feels light and free. EFT is the only thing I have ever found to work, within 20 or 30 minutes in most cases, at completely collapsing childhood angers like this.

You have to try it for yourself! Until your internal resistance is removed, you will keep sabotaging yourself and even if you do manage to change in the short term, in the long term you'll put yourself back in the same position.

You need to get all of you pulling in the same direction! EFT is the tool to do this!

EFT as a path to personal freedom from your clutter!

While everyone sometimes has problems letting go of things, or getting organized, with some people this problem becomes crippling. Even when they have let friends come in and help them clean, they have certain deeply ingrained beliefs, emotions, and patterns of thought that soon push them right back into the same place. Until those emotional patterns are broken, they will keep repeating the same pattern over and over again. Any house they move into will become more and more cluttered. The urge to surround oneself with things, to accumulate or acquire more collections, is going to win unless the underlying reasons WHY these urges exist are addressed and fixed. If your mess helps you deal with feeling depressed, deprived, and anxious, you will NEED your mess and clutter until you no longer feel that way!

EFT (emotional freedom technique- I think it's misnamed and should be intensity freedom technique) is a powerful tool that looks silly but works miracles. You tap on a series of acupressure points while repeating certain phrases with emotional charge, and after you go through all of the points... the emotional intensity vanishes.

Imagine things that you are currently intense about, for instance, feeling guilty about throwing away magazines, vanishing. All the sudden, getting rid of the newspapers doesn't seem so scary anymore!

Clutterbugs, squalor survivors, and messies tend to have the same basic patterns that hold them in their unhappy positions. I can't wait to share what I know about fixing these problems once and for all, with no pain and little discomfort!