Recent shark activity at beaches close to me has swimmers very wary of venturing out into the not too deep these days. With good reason, I might add.
Primal fear has surfaced.
This got me thinking about a woman called Mary, who since infancy had been hounded by a severe water phobia.
So crippling was Mary’s fear that she couldn’t bathe her children, let alone herself. Her showers, I might add, were extremely brief and highly stressful.
Even rain terrified her. So too did driving along Pacific Coast Highway in California, her hometown, which sent terror running through her veins.
Horrifying nightmares about being in water plagued her.
In fact, the movie Jaws was her salvation. It was only after watching the blockbuster that her children stopped begging her to take them to the beach!
Mary, now in her 30’s, had been seeing her psychotherapist, Dr. Roger Callahan, for over a year.
Callahan had been using conventional therapeutic techniques to have her confront her fear.
And whilst his treatment approach produced slight success, in that she could sit poolside at his home office and dangle her feet in the shallow end, Mary found the treatment sheer torture.
What’s more, she copped serious headaches due to the stress of being exposed to water for an hour each session.
Needless to say, Callahan, who was at his wit’s end, felt that he was going nowhere fast with his long-term client.
But during a particularly frustrating session, when Mary was highly agitated and complaining of feeling queasy in the pit of her stomach, he had an idea.
He told her tap firmly on a spot just below her eye and to focus her thoughts on her fear of water.
Lo and behold, after two minutes of tapping, Mary suddenly stopped, looked at him incredulously and exclaimed that it was gone.
Unsure of what Mary was referring to when she told him it was ‘gone’, she said the feeling in her stomach. It had evaporated, vanished, vamoosed.
Though never formally trained in acupuncture, but familiar with Chinese Traditional Medicine and the flow of energy through meridians, Callahan knew that this spot below the eye corresponded to an endpoint to the stomach meridian.
Fast forward to that very same evening…Mary headed down to the beach, waded up to her waist in water and smiled. Her fear was gone.
Little did he know but Callahan had stumbled onto what would become Thought Field Therapy (TFT), the precursor to Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), also known as tapping.
So how does a lifelong phobia disappear in two minutes?
Honestly, researchers are still working out the mechanism. Callahan explained it through meridians. The current way of thinking holds that tapping while you zero in on your fear calms the body’s stress response – a bit like exposure without the full-volume distress. Studies point to lower cortisol and changes in fear-related brain activity.
Now while one story proves nothing, and I can’t promise you Mary’s result (though I did had a client blitz a fear of drinking water in minutes – linked to almost drowning in a swimming pool when she was young), the trials on anxiety and phobias are very encouraging, and the experiment costs nothing.
So, give it a shot week. If something makes your stomach sink (a shark headline will do), tap lightly under your eye on the cheekbone, name the feeling out loud, and notice what shifts. It’s just one of several tapping points but it’s a great place to start.
Magic happens, it turns out, and it’s more interesting when you know why.
If there’s a fear you’d like to shake, hit the reply button and we can talk about whether tapping might help.
Till next month, swim safe, tap often, and stay Airborne!
