Video & Transcript titled
‘Effective Psychological Therapy’.

Jeremy Griffith explains effective psychological
therapy techniques, in particular the Emotional Freedom
Technique (EFT) or ‘tapping’, in Sydney on 3 May 2017.

 

(This video is part of the ‘Candid Discussions’ series that appears on our WTM Community page at www.humancondition.com/community/#candid-discussions)

 

 

A few weeks ago when [Zambian WTM Centre founder] Franklin [Mukakanga] and [Austrian WTM Centre founder] Stefan [Rössler] were here, I was talking about my health and I was worried about my big tummy, and I explained that because I write, which is such a consuming job, all writers tend to end up grazing, going to the fridge and it’s just a bad habit; and I have had trouble shaking that habit. Also I just absolutely drive myself all the time because as I’ve explained, when you realise that you can deal with this forbidden subject of the human condition—this off-limits subject—and from there make amazingly precious insights, the responsibility is just enormous. While we haven’t sort of acknowledged it about Charles Darwin, he was also an unresigned thinker who was able to think truthfully and that’s how he came up with the idea of natural selection. Darwin also suffered from this massive responsibility and he also suffered from chronic fatigue. In fact at one stage they were going to call Chronic Fatigue Syndrome ‘the Darwin Syndrome’ a few years ago. So I’ve had this problem with my tummy and I’ve been trying to beat it. Well what I want to tell you about is this device called ‘tapping’ or Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) which I’ve used, and it’s made all the difference in the world.

Now I need to explain tapping—it’s a very powerful tool. It’s a similar tool to acupuncture, to Scenar and Physiokey, and all these things that are working on the body’s meridians. The human body, like all living things, is full of electricity and there are all these main highways through the body of these energy pathways called meridians or in Chinese medicine, Qi, and so on. The human body is just an electrical system and that electrical system is organised into two pathways and these pathways run right through the body in front from the head down right through the arms and through the body.

 

 

What happens is when we live with stress in the abnormal, human-condition-afflicted, distressed, upset angry, egocentric and alienated world that humans live in now, these highways become blocked: they get jammed up. What the body does when it can’t deal with something is that it departmentalises, it parks the issue off to the side and leaves it because it can’t deal with it or resolve it. So in the end the body looks like one big mass of blocks and the body ends up hardly able to work. It’s like the pipes in the body aren’t flowing anymore.

 

 

When I got chronic fatigue my body started splinting my adrenals [adrenal gland dysfunction is often associated with chronic fatigue] which means it started putting a box of muscles around them to try and protect them. So my body sort of departmentalised them off to protect them. In fact when I had a massage from someone very good at it, immediately she touched my adrenal area, she said ‘Gee whiz you’ve got some real unresolved knot in there’. In fact she pushed so hard on it to try and work it out that she nearly twisted my rib cage and it got sore for a long time. She was tapping into the splinted musculature around my adrenals as my body was trying to protect it. That’s an example of how the body, when it can’t deal with something, or like the mind when it can’t deal with something, it has to park it off to the side, leaving it unresolved.

In fact the body and the mind are obviously totally connected and most sicknesses are psychosomatic; they’re mind-produced. So the body, like the mind, ends up compartmentalising and the whole body gets locked up and nothing is working—it’s all jammed up. So clearly what you’ve got to do to get the body to work is to try to unlock these pathways and make them flow again, so everything can start unravelling and healing. That’s the power of acupuncture which hits these key points, these interfaces where the meridians are strongest, where they are running, interact and cross over, and it lets the energy out. It allows those tangles to be unlocked and suddenly everything starts to flow and work. You get an amazing healing effect if you come out of a good acupuncture session, and you feel enormously relieved and calm. Scenar and Physiokey are working on the same meridians; they are using the same system. They are sending in very minute currents into the body which work on these knots and help unlock them and so the system starts to work.

Now this tapping is an incredibly powerful system and it’s doing the same thing; it’s helping to unlock all this mess and tangle and let the body start to work, and once it can start working then you get some healing effect, you can get some therapy. Since what you are doing when you are tapping, as I’ll show you in a split second, is that you are actually tapping on these main points as the meridians come down through the body, and where the meridians are closest to the surface. They are just under the eye, above the eye, above the lip, under the chin, on the chest bone, under the arm and on the top of the head.

 

 

If you think about, and you feel all these points, you are almost tapping on the skull itself, so there is hardly any ‘meat’ between the bone and the surface so obviously the energy meridians are very close to the surface, so they are very effective points to touch on. And if you touch on them in association with your mind thinking about a subject, it’s very powerful, it’s absolutely extraordinarily powerful in unlocking and assisting with those problems. So that’s the basis of all these energy healing systems of acupuncture, Scenar, Physiokey and tapping.

What I want to show you is how much this tapping system worked for me because I had this tummy problem and it’s virtually gone, and that’s after only two weeks of tapping. So it’s an incredibly powerful system. I will just give you a quick demonstration of what I did. You have got to be in a compassionate frame of mind, which I will talk much more about shortly, and you start with a compassionate statement. You start tapping on the ‘karate chop’ point [the outside edge of the hand] and you say ‘even though (in my case) I feel like eating when I’m tired, I deeply accept this habit and understand why I got into it’. ‘Even though I feel like eating when I’m tired I deeply accept this habit and understand why it happened. I deeply accept myself.’ Once you’ve established that, then you can start tapping. In my case this is the sequence of tapping I do, you start at the edge of the eyebrow, and I’m saying the following as I tap through the different points, ‘I feel like eating. I feel like eating. I feel like grazing. I feel like eating sugar. This habit of overeating when I’m tired. I feel hungry. I feel like eating. I feel like grazing. It’s this habit I’ve got that I get when I’m over-tired. I feel like eating and grazing. I feel like eating sugar. I’m over-eating. I just need to rest.’ And then the feelings start shifting a bit, and I say ‘but I don’t really need food because I can’t digest it at my age anyway. I don’t need to eat. I don’t need to eat. And my body is enormously relieved to not be eating. I don’t need to eat. My body is enormously relieved not to be eating. I’m not feeling hungry. I don’t need to eat. I’d be so relieved when I’m not eating. My system will be so relieved. I have been over-eating but I don’t need to over-eat anymore. My body is enormously relieved not to be overeating. I don’t need to be overeating food. I don’t really need to eat so much. I can stop grazing. I’m not really hungry. My body doesn’t really need that excess food.’ And you keep doing that right? Now what happens after you do a session like that, you can actually feel—whatever the problem is that you are tapping on, you can tap on any feelings that are coming up or any concern or whatever—and it’s astonishing how the whole body will respond, how your mind will calm down on those issues. You will be effective. In fact when I was starting to get hungry through the day I would start tapping, so now I only eat one reasonably small meal at lunchtime at midday and one at 4pm and that’s all. I know there are a lot of people who are really thin only eat one meal a day when they’re when they are my sort of age.

This tapping, or Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) has been the tool I needed to help me stop eating, because I just start tapping when I’m feeling hungry and, honestly, after it I don’t feel hungry, it’s astonishing! You can look it up on Google. It is an amazingly effective device, tapping. It just seems to have this almost magical effect, because again you are tapping right on those meridians, that’s the points where they put the acupuncture needles, the same places, and it sort of opens a pathway into you, it’s like a doorway; it’s a really powerful tool and, in the future, it is going to be very important which is something that I’d now like to talk about.

I want to talk about the use of tapping in particular, but other forms that I’ve mentioned as well, of therapy, and their value to humanity as a whole. In chapter 9 of FREEDOM I explain that with understanding of the human condition we’ve got the means now, the bridging understanding, to heal all our psychosis because we can now reconcile the upset in ourselves; we can love ourselves from a basis of first principle biological understanding. As Carl Jung was forever saying, ‘wholeness for humans…depends on the ability to own our own shadow’, our own ‘shadow’ being the dark, volcanic, angry, egocentric and alienated part of our being. We needed to ‘own our own shadow’, be able to accept it and understand it, love it and bring compassion to our lives and that is the basis for any psychiatry. From the original Greek word, Psyche means ‘soul’ and iatreia means ‘healing’, so psychiatry is the healing of our child within, our soul. So psychosis is a sort of distressed soul and I’ll talk more about that in a minute.

In chapter 9 I explain that while we do have the means now to heal any psychosis—because there’s no condition of humanity, if you are a murderer or whatever, that you can’t find the first principle, deeper understanding of, and bring compassion to it and that compassion is what will heal it. It will make you ‘whole’ as Jung said, being able to understand the dark side of ourselves, make sense of that at last—that healing process is a huge exercise that you can’t really attempt in one lifetime. In fact, it will take many lifetimes to heal the human race using this understanding that we now have and, in the meantime, it makes sense that we can’t try to heal ourselves completely. We can just leave all our upset behind in a suitcase as dealt with, because we know it is dealt with, it is all defended now and it’s no longer needed. The upset that got us here—the angry, egocentric and alienated behaviour that was necessary to cope with our lives while we couldn’t defend ourselves and couldn’t explain why we had to become so upset—is now finished with. The battle is won, we can all, as it were, leave the football field and go to the showers. There’s no longer any legitimate need to continue that upsetting search for knowledge. So upset is now finished with, it’s played its role and is no longer valid. So that’s the whole point of chapter 9, explaining how we can leave that behind and transcend all our upset. It’s still in there unresolved but we can leave it behind as dealt with, so we transcend that, we become transformed.

All humans can immediately become transformed from the upset state of the human condition, and it is to some degree artificial because you’re just leaving it behind unaddressed. So that’s what generations in the immediate present can do and should do to cope with the human condition; it will take generations to actually ameliorate and heal through therapy all the upset in humans. That’s the overall truth but what’s going to happen is a lot of people, especially those with extreme upset, are going to want to try to get that under control. So there will be a big industry dedicated to therapy to try to help the more upset at least get their upset—their psychosis and neurosis—under control. It’s going to be a huge industry because it’s almost impossible to be effective if you’re too crippled by your psychosis. So people with extreme psychosis will want to go into treatment and there’ll be a lot of people dedicated to doing it. Then all these things like acupuncture, Physiokey and tapping especially, will become incredibly popular and there will be people who become very good at using them.

So therapy is going to be big business; there won’t be ‘businesses’ in terms of money making enterprises, but it will be one of the biggest activities being practised in the new human-condition-resolved world that’s coming. And one of the most powerful healing tools or forms of therapy will be tapping because it’s so effective in opening, as it were, a doorway into our repressed, hurt self and allowing those repressed feelings to come up and for our adult selves to be able to deal with them, make sense of and heal them.

Saying, ‘our adult selves’ is very significant and this is why: it’s mostly during childhood, the first six years of our life, where all the upset that’s in the world causes its greatest devastation to our soul; our soul being our original instinctive self or child within. As I’ve explained in my books, the human race has never been able to admit that humanity once lived in a cooperative, loving, harmonious state, as the bonobos are living in now [see chapter 5:6 of FREEDOM], and that we developed that through nurturing [see chapter 5:4 of FREEDOM] because until we could explain why we spoilt such a magic place, destroyed paradise, as it were, while we couldn’t defend our loss of innocence, our departure from the Garden of Eden, however we like to describe it, it was an unbearable truth to face. So the way we coped with that was to pretend that our ancestors were brutish, savage and aggressive and we’ve got savage instincts like lions and other animals which, as I explain in all my material, is absolute rubbish because we have a cooperative, loving, altruistic, moral soul so we obviously once lived in a cooperative, loving state. [See Video/​Freedom Essay 4 for more about our motivation to adopt the false ‘savage instincts’ excuse.] So we’ve been living in denial that humanity once lived in a lovely, beautiful, happy, cooperative, all-loving, all-sensitive state.

Now that we can admit that; now that we can defend our loss of innocence and explain that, we can afford to admit that truth that we were once incredibly loving and what innocence is really like. Now what is significant about that is that when children come into the world they come in more or less in our original instinctive state of expectation of encountering a loving, cooperative world like it always was, and suddenly it isn’t. It’s this massively angry, egocentric, alienated and upset world that they are encountering. So it’s incredibly distressing to children to encounter that world, which is why when they finally start thinking about the philosophy of our condition when they’re about 12 or 13 and they go through Resignation and all that horror [see chapter 2:2 of FREEDOM]. This is the most damaging thing that happens to children. Because they are so trusting in that the world is cooperative and loving, when things go badly wrong and they’re ill-treated—basically when they encounter the extremely upset, egocentric world in the case of men, and alienated, neurotic world of women—it is an incredibly distressing interaction for them; and what children tend to do is they blame themselves. This is what is so devastating, you see because they are so trusting, our soul is so sensitive and so loving that when things go wrong, children in all their incredible naïve honesty think ‘well it’s either them that’s wrong or it’s me that’s wrong’, but because they are so trusting they cannot believe the adults, the more mature established people, are in the wrong; it has to be their own mistake. So it’s a measure of just how trusting children are that they end up blaming themselves, and they blame themselves very easily. Now watch this. This is really important. When they get to that conclusion that it’s their fault and—as I said, it’s ridiculously easy how quickly they will blame themselves—when they make that realisation, then their honesty kicks in again and they say ‘well I shouldn’t exist on this Earth if I’m that evil’. Again, you have got to understand just how innocent our soul is, our original instinctive child within is. So when we are a child we are living in this idealistic-expectations-world and it’s not like that and it’s devastating.

The adults can’t even admit they are alienated and upset because they can’t defend it, so they pretend they’re not, they’re laughing and acting confidently and it’s incredibly bluffing. Children are codependent to adults. Psychologists coined the word ‘codependent’ to describe someone who is ‘reliant on another to the extent that independent action is no longer possible’ (Macquarie Dictionary, 3rd edn, 1998). Children are codependent. They can’t think independently and realise that it’s not their fault—it’s the parent’s fault or the fault of the world that they’ve grown up in. They can’t help but blame themselves. They are codependent, incapable of being independent of that conclusion—of being adult, as it were, about the world. Adults of course know the world is not perfect, it’s all self-evident to them that the world’s not perfect—but for children it’s a massive problem. And if a lot of hurt happens then they can blame themselves, and when they blame themselves, the next thing is they conclude that therefore they shouldn’t exist, that they’re monsters. When they come to that conclusion, that is such a terrifying conclusion for infants and children that they can’t live with that truth and they immediately have to split off from it, separate themselves from it, because they cannot deal with that—that they shouldn’t exist. And so what they do when they split off from that—they departmentalise like as I mentioned earlier—that whole issue of that they’re evil, and then they create a mechanical life to live in; they are living in this surface superficial existence because they don’t want to go near that issue. It’s like what happens at Resignation. Everyone tries to understand the human condition, and there being no understanding of why they are not perfect, they block that off. So that’s a separating off from a soulful truth as well. But children do it in a different sort of way; this is a much earlier time in their life when they are infants and young children and they blame themselves, and then they split from that conclusion because it’s too unbearable to live with. So thereafter they’re living an artificial mechanical life just making do, just getting by, just not dealing with anything deep. And they create this totally mechanical existence for themselves. But it’s a dysfunctional life and a superficial life.

So that’s what happens, for those of us who are unlucky enough to encounter the human condition in the extreme, because it’s an outright raffle. Everybody’s variously upset in the world—that’s an unavoidable reality in this heroic journey that humanity’s been on. But obviously some people are lucky and escape encountering the full horror of that battle, like I was lucky enough to do, and other people are unlucky enough to be born in the midst of it and suffer enormously.

So what I’m saying is that while the human race has finally found the redeeming understanding that will heal all its psychosis, it will take a few generations. In the meantime we don’t need to heal it, because we know that the battle is won, so we just give up all that upset behaviour, leave it behind and transcend it and just live for this new world, this human-condition-resolved new world and support that—and that we can be part of the human-condition-free world by doing that. So we just put our upset in a suitcase and move on. So in general we won’t be trying to therapise ourselves given it’s just going to be too preoccupying and take too long and we can’t achieve much in our lifetime. But, as I said, those people who are extremely upset, that I’ve variously encountered, especially these children who have split off from their true self and develop an extreme psychosis; underneath them is this hidden stress that keeps bubbling up and expressing itself. There are these feelings that are coming up and they’re all coming from this distressed childhood state, this unresolved issue that ‘they’re evil’ and this fear that ‘they’re bad and they shouldn’t exist’—this dark shadow that is plaguing them and that shadow is the fear that they shouldn’t exist. So that’s the most destructive and hurtful psychosis, and people suffering from that are really going to want to try to make some improvement on that; try to help that to some degree in the new human-condition-resolved-world that’s coming, and that’s understandable. So there will be a big industry trying to help those more extremely suffering that I’ve just described.

And tapping is a very powerful tool because it opens these highways, these pathways and allows the feelings to express itself. Tapping is a two way street, it’s like an open doorway. Any form of acupuncture or Scenar, Physiokey or whatever does that, it opens up these pathways, so all the energies can start to work and feelings can finally come up. But also the adult understandings that the world isn’t perfect—that children didn’t have when they were so young and vulnerable—can flood down from the from the top.

 

 

So if I draw a picture [see above] you’ve got the adult and you’ve got the child. And the child is all hunched over, with his arms around his legs in distress. So there is this child that’s got this repressed trauma in its system, and what happens as the child grows up with that trauma is it infects the whole body. It floods the whole body with the trauma. So just under the surface is this trauma that’s crippling the life of the individual. Now once you become an adult, the adult actually knows that the child wasn’t evil and is fundamentally good, just through the experience of living on Earth where you get to understand that the world isn’t perfect. And even prior to having understanding of the human condition there was a deep intuition that one day we would find the understanding of why this trauma, that we aren’t fundamentally evil, that no human is fundamentally bad or evil. So the adult does have an overview of life that allows it to understand that what the child was deceived into believing—it has a misreading that it was evil—isn’t true. But the problem is these red arrows in the diagram [see below]. You have been living your whole life with this trauma; it’s been infecting your whole being. And every day it’s been there, this sort of subliminal terror, and you’ve lived with it and it floods your whole life. You actually become unable to free yourself from it because it’s just infecting your whole life; it’s just under the surface. So even though the adult knows that the child wasn’t at fault, it can’t reach the child because the child is split off from that.

If you were to do Primal therapy where you go into sessions you would gradually work your way back. They ask you questions and you say ‘I’ve got this feeling coming up’, and they say ‘where’s that coming from?’ and you talk a bit about that, and gradually you work your way back and try to make contact with this child. Because until you can reach that child and it’s trauma, you can’t get it to renegotiate its fear, unlock the fear. So that’s Primal therapy which is all about trying to help someone work their way back through all the layers of block-out and denial to finally reconnect with the child, and basically break in on the child and say ‘you were wrong, you weren’t evil, you’re a wonderful person’ and the child can finally breathe easily. That’s primal therapy, it’s trying to work down like that, but that takes a lot to do.

The beauty of tapping and Physiokey and stuff like that is that it is a tool that opens these locked up pathways and lets these feelings come up, and then the adult can interact with those feelings and feed back down the true understanding towards the child [draws green arrows pointing down on the picture] and relieve the misreading.

 

 

So if you can open these locked up pathways and let the feelings come up, and feelings are only expressions of the deeper trauma, they’re the outward sort of expressions that you’ve got this anxiety. And if you tap on that anxiety it will start to express itself more, and the adult will start to make more connection with that trauma, and some healing will take place. So tapping can be a very effective way of opening the door. It’s two ways: it allows the feelings to begin to come up and you access them; and it allows the adult’s understanding that the world was never supposed to be that perfect, to filter down and you get this healing effect, you get this therapy happening.

Now this is really, really, really important. That’s all straightforward. Psychiatry, psychology is not rocket science, it’s just simple. Once you accept that humans were once innocent and they no longer are—and they had this horrific heroic battle to participate in which led them all to become immensely angry, egocentric and alienated—then you can understand that we’ve got this magic child within us and we brutalised it, and every generation had to catch up to the level of upset that’s now established on Earth. And so you come into a very upset stage in the human journey, which is now, and the world’s going to be incredibly distressful for the child. And it’s going to be incredibly hurt by the degree of wrongness in the world, seeming wrongness because we now know it’s not actually wrong, there was a reason for our upset behaviour.

So good therapy—like really well-managed Primal therapy, or really well-managed tapping or Scenar treatment—will manage this doorway of opening the feelings to come up and the adult to integrate with them and to get amelioration. Amelioration means kind of making peace, so the two parties sort of are reconciled and you get this healing effect taking place and the trauma subsides, and more and more the adult comes in. But this is the important point I wanted to make. When you start tapping on the repressed feelings, in other words the pain, those feelings that come up can be very powerful and overwhelming which makes sense because there’s a lot of pain down here [pointing to the distressed child in the drawing].

 

 

This child was incredibly innocent; the human race was once incredibly innocent, so the wrongness of the adult world is incredibly hurtful to the innocent child. I mean now that we can understand how innocent the human race once was, everyone, all parents, are going to be super-conscientious and aware now of the importance of being a loving parent and so on, and trying to protect them from all the mess in the world, the hurt and pain, because we now can acknowledge just how vulnerable children are. But all under the umbrella that the human race has had to be upset to get where it got to—it’s a good thing, it’s a heroic state to be upset so no one’s ashamed of being upset anymore. So the whole business of nurturing now can gain enormous importance because again, the battle is won, we no longer have to go on with the battle, everyone takes up nurturing and tries to help children/​the next generation, to come out as nurtured as we can—so there is a huge change of direction from children becoming even more butchered by the second. The last 20 years the amount of alienation that’s increasing is just skyrocketing. We’re getting this snowflake generation. We’re getting a whole generation, the Y or Z generation, whatever you call them, that are just about paralysed with pain. That’s end-game, terminal alienation is upon us [see F. Essay 55]. So this understanding of the human condition has only come just in time. So there’s basically a whole generation, well all generations from here on until this understanding gets out there, that are going to be almost crippled to the quick, almost totally crippled, and needing help a lot. So they need what I’m talking about a lot.

But there’s something that’s very important and that is that when you start therapy, it can make things worse because it can let all the trauma out, and then you become flooded and overwhelmed with trauma and feel, ‘God I wish I’d never started therapy!’ And you get to this situation quite easily where you wish you never started therapy because it’s just made things worse, because you’ve opened the floodgates as it were, and all the repressed feelings are coming up and there’s not enough time in effect for the integration of this material that’s coming up to happen, to ameliorate it, to absorb it, to adjust to it, and to integrate it into your whole understanding and feeling system. So how do we manage that? Now this is the key question.

If we look at this diagram again, you’ve got two things happening. You’ve got the trauma from the childhood situation flooding up [the red arrows on the diagram] and you’ve got the mature adult awareness of the world flooding down [the green arrows on the diagram] trying to stop it or ameliorate it. Obviously if the red becomes excessive and the green not strong enough, then you’re in trouble of getting swamped/​flooded/​overwhelmed by psychosis, by trauma, right? Then you will feel, ‘I’m better off shutting this wall off again, not dealing with it, not allowing it up, not encouraging it to come up and yell and scream’ you know. In Primal therapy when you really get it, it’s called the ‘primal scream’ as the great psychoanalyst Janov called it. His book is called The Primal Scream, because when you finally get in touch with this and you connect with just how traumatised that child was when it believed that it was evil, it screams. And so they have these audio-padded rooms where people who are doing Primal therapy start screaming because they’ve made contact with the enormity of the misreading, of the pain of the misreading of the child that it’s evil and that it has blamed itself. This thing about the child blaming themselves is explained in FREEDOM in paragraph 988, and how we acquired our unconditionally selfless, loving, moral soul through nurturing is explained in chapter 5 of FREEDOM.

So this stuff coming up can be overwhelming if it’s not managed really well. And what is the key to management of this? This is what I want to talk about. Obviously given these two directions [on the diagram], if the red arrows are too strong you’re in trouble; the green has to be really strong, that’s the obvious. As I said psychiatry is not rocket science. Once you understand the elements that we’ve got this innocent child within us, and then we are living in this massively upset state, everything makes sense! As described in paragraph 63 of FREEDOM, ‘psyche’ means ‘soul’, we are psychotic, we have got a hurt soul; and neurotic, neuron means ‘nerve’, ‘neurosis’ means the mind is preoccupied with blocking out, so that is a neurotic state to maintain that cut-off. So there is a neurosis and psychosis involved. It all makes sense—these two elements, this instinctive child within and this intellectual self, you’ve got neurosis [in the adult] and psychosis [coming up from the child in the diagram]. Sorry these arrows coming down in the diagram is not neurosis, this is talking about the adult understanding.

Now what this adult understanding is actually doing is parenting the child. And it’s this parenting aspect that’s so important in therapy. That the adult takes a parenting role. And it’s very hard to do because this trauma has been infecting your life since you were a baby, or whatever, a child, and it’s got a huge hold on you. It’s your dominant state. So to suddenly become calm and reassuring and trusting for the child within—so that it calms down—is not easy to do, because you are flooded/​habituated with this terror. But that’s the trick. You have to be nurturing of the child to help it cope. If you can meet this flood of trauma with a flood, as it were, of love, then the child will cope and you will cope. But it’s so easy, if you’re in an impatient state, you get frustrated with these pains and you start actually adding to the denial of them, and try to push them down and attack them—that child is going to be more traumatised. So you’re getting nowhere. The whole thing will just mess-up in a big angry state of distress, a frustrated state and a hurt state, not necessarily just angry. It’s so important that you’re able to parent the trauma that’s coming up with calm, secure, trusting love—that is the secret. And that is not easy to do, to become that parent, that calm parent. Every mother knows if her child is in trauma and distress, that to help it she must be calm and reassuring. So if she can adopt a calm and reassuring demeanour, the child will calm down. So it’s about being a good parent in having this loving and compassionate state of mind for the child. So you’ve got to occupy, the parent has to occupy that state of mind, and it’s not easy because it’s actually habituated to being in trauma and subconsciously distressed. So it’s hard to separate that from that, and become the secure adult that you’d like to be.

It’s very interesting to watch Cesar Millan, the great dog whisperer, helping people with distressed dogs. He walks into their house—and you can see him do it on nearly every episode of his series on TV—he comes in and he starts talking; he introduces himself and they introduce themselves, and then they say, ‘here’s Snippet’ and he meets the dog, and Snippet’s an angry, ferocious little whatever sort of dog. And Cesar says ‘oh right. So this looks terrible’. And then the dog owners say ‘look this is where Snippet bit me the other day, and he bit the postman, and we just don’t know what to do, we’re in absolute tangle about what to do with Snippet’. And you see Cesar he’s actually—he talks about the dog, ‘oh show me Snippet, oh right Snippet’—but actually, if you watch enough shows, he’s not interested in the dog, he’s watching the owners. Because he’s learned—see dogs are not like humans, they live in‑they’re not coming from a loving, cooperative state, they’re coming from a highly competitive, must-reproduce state where dominance hierarchy is everything. Dominance hierarchy is what gives other animal species, non-humans and non-bonobo species, the ability to live together to some degree, to be social. Because in a dominance hierarchy everyone sort of wrestles with each other and whoever becomes the strongest becomes the dominant, and then you get this peck order, and there’s only ever a war or a battle when one or someone wants to move up the peck order, otherwise it’s peace.

So you walk into a chook house and everything seems peaceful, but I remember seeing a chook twist a leg and suddenly all the other chooks are on top of her, because that’s their opportunity to move up the peck order. So suddenly at that moment you realise they are all under stress, they’re all trying to move up the peck order. So dominance hierarchy is what keeps social animals in some sort of a state of peace. And what happens with humans is they try to love the dogs because that’s the way we became cooperative and loving through nurturing. They try to nurture the dogs and that doesn’t work. Dogs want dominance, they want to be slotted into a hierarchy and then they’ll find some peace. And whilst you keep trying to love them instead of showing dominance you’re letting the dog believe that it’s the dominant one and if it’s not up to it, it’ll become a raging lunatic, and Cesar knows all this subconsciously at least. He knows he’s got to establish dominance and so he’s looking at the owners of the dog and he sees that they really haven’t got any control over the dog. They’ve got no self-belief, they’re not carrying themselves with any kind of belief and sense of strength. So you’ll see him, he’ll say ‘right, come over here Mrs Jones’ and he says ‘right’ and he pulls her shoulders back, and he says ‘pull your head up, stand up straight. Now I want you to walk across the room in front of Snippet looking like you own the world and you are able and confident and in control. And when Snippet starts jumping up to you wanting the usual smothering of supposed affection, you’ve just got to maintain your demeanour and focus on your centre core strength and see what happens’. And Mrs Jones does that, and blow me down if Snippet doesn’t absolutely fall in line and is calm, and they think it’s a miracle! It’s like that. The child isn’t suffering from dominance hierarchy, not given any framework to live within, it’s suffering from a similar but an equivalent situation where it needs a strong, calm, reassuring adult to calm it down. And as I said all parents know, all mothers know that if the child is distressed, you have to be calm and reassuring.

Now what I’m saying, I doubt, I honestly believe that anybody listening to this won’t really appreciate what I’m saying. It’s just too hard to appreciate just how difficult it is to become that calm and reassuring person, to not be ‘infected’. People involved in therapy—and I know a lot of them, because we’ve got 50 founding members and they’re people I’ve grown up with and know, they’re like brothers and sisters to me, and sure enough there’s a significant proportion of them, no different to any group of people in society, who have got lots of distress and they’re trying to deal with that, and I’m trying to help them with that. And they’re using tapping for example and they’re experiencing these problems. And it’s not easy for them to adopt this. They know when they can do it, everything starts to work; the child is incredibly responsive to this love. Instead of being denied and ‘get out’ you know, and ‘I’m sick of you’, and ‘you just make my life a misery and push you away’, you change your attitude and be loving and accepting of the child and say ‘I’m here for you, I’m here for you’. You actually tap on those words. ‘I’m here for you. I love you. I’m sorry I’ve been dismissive of you and even pushed you away. I want to help you and be here for you.’ People cannot believe it, it’s like a miracle that they actually find that they are actually talking to the hurt child within them. That’s how relieving it is, finally to show up, it’s as if the child has been there waiting all its life for the adult to come down and help them and rescue them. And suddenly the cavalry has arrived. And honestly that child comes out and receives this love like you wouldn’t believe, it’s so therapeutic. It’s incredible the effect of it. But it’s so hard to do, to become—people think what happens is they think ‘look I’m definitely inhabiting this calm, secure state of mind’. But what they realise a few days later is that, ‘I really wasn’t. I was still infected; I was still owned by the frustration and I was still flooded with the trauma in my system. I wasn’t trauma-free. I was still basically living in a state of trauma. I wasn’t living in a state of calm centeredness and security’. So it’s not easy to become that.

And so I did try to make my point, I predict that when this industry of therapy begins in earnest in this human-condition-resolved-new-world, one of the greatest skills that’s going to be taught is how to be a good, how to be a parent to the hurt child within, and that’s not easy. You have to—it requires what we call the 100 percent rule—you cannot afford to drop back into being frustrated and troubled, you have to be living in that calm state all the time, 100 percent of the time. If you can stay in that calm state, enormous therapy will take place, but if you lose it and start getting infected with this historic habituated frustration, then your therapy will founder and you will very quickly get into the situation where you will feel that ‘I wish I never started therapy’. So this parenting aspect of therapy is just critical and it’s totally legitimate because you have to understand this child is—that state is a misreading that it’s a bad person. So that’s a lie, and the adult world knows that that’s a lie, so the adult is in charge of truth. This is truth flooding down here and this is lies flooding up [on the diagram], so the truth has to win over lies.

It’s the same equation that the whole human race is now in, now that we have found understanding of the human condition. It’s under the historic fear that the human race is all bad, that we are evil, should have been thrown out of the ‘Garden of Eden’, banished, that we’re fundamentally bad. That’s been the whole insecurity of the human condition, but now that we can understand that, we understand that that’s a lie. We have found the defence for ourselves. So the defence—which is the truth that we are good and not bad—has to replace the lie that we are bad, and that has to win out over that misreading, and that’s the big turnaround for the human race. And when we start flooding the world with love, understanding of ourselves and each other, then the trauma will be subsided. It’s the same equation. So the whole human race is under therapy now; is in therapy now, because the truth, which we are good and not bad, is able to replace the lie that we are bad that caused us so much pain and suffering.

All our upset anger and egocentric behaviour are a result of that misreading that we’re bad. We blocked out the criticism—that’s alienation. We attack the criticism—that’s anger, and we try to prove it wrong by getting wins all the time—so we’re egocentric. They are all responses to feeling that we’re bad, to not knowing, to being insecure, to not knowing whether we’re good or not—but now we know we are good from first principle biology. So we can replace all that misunderstanding with love, and that will flood through us and heal everything and make sense. And the therapy will start spreading across the world. What I’ve been talking about is just a personal situation where this pain is in the extreme, how it works, and it’s the same thing. We can parent the whole human race now with love because we have found love i.e. understanding.

And in this equation, when you’re tapping and stuff’s coming up, you need to be able to stay in this place where you’re secure and trusting and loving and calm. If you’re in that state you can practise therapy and it will be very effective. If you’re not in that space, as I said it’s very hard to maintain, and you’ll continually find that you have been ‘feeding’ and falling for it, you’ve been falling for and ‘feeding’ the old habits of being angry towards yourself and frustrated and upset and not in a loving state of mind at all. And people tend to feed or fuel that frustrated, upset, distressed state. So that has to be changed, and that’s not easy to change, but when you teach yourself, it’s just the same as when you become transformed. When you become transformed you leave one way of thinking behind and adopt another. This is the same. It requires the same, it’s the same difficulty and the same solution. You’ve got to leave that behind and take up this state where you now trust in yourself and in the world and you’re holding onto the truth that the child within you is good and not bad, and the healing will be effective. Without it it won’t be effective. So that’s just a very simple outline of psychological therapy, how it all works. It’s not rocket science. It all makes sense. And they’re the raw descriptions of the principals involved in therapy.