This really is an article about the deepest inner game work a man (or woman) can do …

Be forewarned, this is a sad story. It has a hopeful ending though and broad applicability to whatever ails you … including the ever-popular topic of “sticking points” (those parts of pickup or dating that seem to frustrate you over and over again, no matter how much you try to change your old patterns).

So I hope you have the heart to keep reading.

The Sad Story about My Kitten

When I was four years old, we got a little kitten. His name was J.J., and he was a tiny little gray tabby with lynx markings on his forehead. I loved that little guy. We lived out in the woods with no neighbors nearby, so it was just me, my brother, and J.J.

One day my dad and I crossed the highway to do something in a field across the way. J.J. followed us. Later it was getting dark, so my dad said we should go home. We had lost track of J.J., so I said, “we need to find J.J.” But my dad said it was ok, he’d find his own way home.

Well, the next morning J.J. didn’t show up for his breakfast. I remember being so worried but hoping of course that he would come home. He wasn’t showing up though, so I asked my dad to come with me to look for him. Which we did. We went back down to the highway. And we found J.J.’s body down by the road. He had been hit by a car during the night. My dad, ever the rationalist, explained how animals sometimes get paralyzed by the lights of oncoming cars. (I love my dad very much, but wow could he have used some empathy training.)

We buried J.J. near our treehouse up in the yard.

The Impact of J.J.’s Death on My Young Life

Why am I telling you such a sad story when I’m supposed to be on a 30-day positivity challenge?

Because of course by the time I reached adulthood, I didn’t think about this story much. We had other cats who lived into their old age, and life went on.

It wasn’t until I started practicing Emotional Freedom Technique a few years ago that I finally realized what a profound impact J.J.’s death had on my life. Why? Because that trauma never got processed. I grew up in a family that didn’t have a good outlet for negative emotions like grief, guilt, and anger, so I bottled all those emotions up, and here were some of the beliefs that were built on top of that trauma:

* It’s not safe to fall in love (because the person or animal I love could be taken away at any time)
* It’s not safe for anyone to love me (because obviously I don’t know how to take care of people or animals that I love)
* I can’t be trusted to take care of someone else
* If I love someone a lot, they’ll probably be taken away from me, so better for me to keep my emotional distance
* It’s not safe for me to trust my dad (because I wanted him to help me find J.J., and he said J.J. would be ok, but J.J. wasn’t ok)
* It was my fault (I should have persuaded my dad to find J.J. and get him safely home)

Old Traumas and Emotional Freedom Technique

So in yesterday’s article, we talked about Eckhart Tolle and the pain-body. Here is what Tolle has to say about traumas stored in the body:

“The remnant of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not full faced, accepted, and then let go of join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body.”

The traumas that are stored in our body usually represent extreme incidents where for some reason we never had the chance to feel the emotions and let them go. The solution, according to Tolle, is to FEEL your feelings:

“You can’t argue with what is. Well you can, but if you do, you suffer. Accepting [what you feel] means you allow yourself to feel whatever it is you are feeling at the moment.”

Unfortunately, though, many of us have experienced traumas that were never fully felt and released. Either we grew up in a family where there were no tools for allowing emotions to be felt fully, or the traumatic event was too sudden and extreme, and we went into a state of shock.

Those emotions don’t go away. They sit there in our bodies, and they fester, as disruptions in our energy system. Over the years, we build new negative beliefs and new traumas on top of the energy disruptions that the original trauma created. These become karmic loops: the seemingly inescapable patterns that people fall into in their lives.

You know what I’m talking about: The relationship that always ends the same negative way. The person who always attracts the same type of “wrong-for-them” person. The addictive or self-punishing patterns that people get into and then can’t get themselves out of. All of these things are built on old traumas that were never released. And if we keep those toxic emotions around too long, they turn into chronic conditions and diseases.

Why Emotional Freedom Technique Is So Powerful

Like nothing else I’ve ever encountered, Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) has the power to break people out of these patterns and free them from these painful old thoughts. For readers who are not familiar, EFT is a simple acupressure-based healing practice that involves tapping lightly on key acupressure points while tuning in to specific negative beliefs or memories.

EFT allows us to go back in time, and release the emotions. I’ve now “tapped” about the incident with J.J. several times, and more tears have flowed each time. I don’t remember if I cried when I was four years old, but somehow I don’t think so. Now I’ve finally been able to feel the grief and release it. I even tapped while writing this article as more layers of grief came to the surface.

Emotional Freedom Technique and “Sticking Points”

The reason I’m writing about this here is that I see a lot of people (both guys and girls) very frustrated that they seem to be reliving the same dating or relationship pattern over and over again. Kind of like Groundhog Day. There are many techniques for creating change in our lives, but frankly most of them are just too damn slow.

EFT is powerful because it works quickly. I would be willing to bet that nearly every “sticking point” a guy or girl has in his or her dating life originated in a trauma that happened way back when. Something that sounds silly now, like being picked last for a sports team. Or the day her mom took her sister shopping and left her behind. But do not underestimate the power of the subconscious mind. Children draw very strange conclusions from seemingly silly or trivial or long-ago events, and those beliefs become their reality. Many men and women are still holding on, at a subconscious level, to beliefs that were formed in response to these sorts of events.

To become free, we must let go of those old memories and old beliefs.

The ego had me in a chokehold until I discovered EFT. I hope everyone will try it out and see just how powerful it really is.