If you’ve ever had insomnia you know how awful it can be. No matter how tired you may be, you just awake in bed, feeling the need for sleep, sometimes desperately, yet sleep won’t come. It can be excruciating.
Sometimes EFT can provide immediate relief. Many people have had great results simply tapping on “can’t sleep, can’t sleep, can’t sleep”, even if they are only tapping mentally so as to not wake up their partner. Sometimes this works and sometimes not.
I think this direct approach works best when the problem is mainly due to a build up of daily life anxiety. Most of us have times when our stress level seems to spike. Gearing up for exams, pre-wedding jitters, getting ready for an important interview, having a bad argument, all sorts of events can make us feel overloaded with unfinished business, worry about the future and regrets about the past. EFT can really help smooth out the anxiety and allow us the rest we need.
Chronic insomnia is a whole different animal, and in my experience, it needs a more in-depth intervention.
Our ego has a lot of important jobs to do. Most of these are pretty obvious. We rely on our ego to get us through the day, make countless observations, judgments and decisions. We can’t really function very well without this central sense of “I”. And at the end of the day we expect our ego to simply knock off work, shut down, turn off and leave us to the unconscious mind where we can rest and dream.
That’s all well and good, except for one little thing. Sometimes we’ve given our ego a special job, a secret job, a job that’s so important it feels like ‘do or die’. That job is to keep certain memories at bay. To keep them far away from our conscious awareness. To repress them by any means necessary.
Perhaps the original event we mustn’t remember actually was life threatening. Or perhaps it only felt so at the time. Either way, the memory is overloaded with too much emotion, whether it’s fear, horror, grief, guilt, shame or what have you. The ego’s job is to keep these memories at bay. This can be a top priority job, especially at times when outside circumstances have stirred things up or triggered the original feelings.
Sometimes, just as they are falling asleep, some people get a terrible jolt of adrenaline, forcing the ego back on the job. This is a likely sign that memories that have been kept at bay by the ego, have come rushing in, triggering the fight or flight reaction.
So how can the ego shut down and turn off and still keep these feelings and memories at bay? Maybe it can’t. In the face of this seemingly impossible impasse, the ego will pay almost any price to stay awake and keep you ‘safe’. No wonder so many people resort to various drugs to shut it down. Who can blame them?
When someone is suffering from chronic insomnia, and simple, direct EFT doesn’t help much, or at all, the true remedy is to address those highly charged memories and drain them of their emotional content. This may take more than a session or two, depending on how many traumas need to be cleared, but it should be very do-able, especially if you have help. And there will be many other benefits beyond a good night’s sleep.
If you feel anxious addressing your traumatic memories, or if you aren’t sure what they are and need some help with detective work, you may want to find a skilled practitioner for help and guidance.
