How EFT Tapping Helps Release Shame Around Clutter with Dawn Norton | Heather Aardema

What is EFT and how do we connect it to clutter?

Okay. So EFT is an abbreviation for Emotional Freedom Techniques. And most people know it as tapping. You might've seen people or experienced it yourself tapping on these points. But there's a lot of people don't know it's Emotional Freedom Techniques. There's 48 different ways to apply EFT for different things. And so I just basically do the what we call the basic recipe with most people. And then if needed, I pull in other little things that I know with it. How can it help with cluttering? Well, to start with, since I, I do focus on mind-body, the mind and body are connected and our exterior world is a reflection of what's going on in the interior. So if you have scattered thoughts, scattered emotions, it's going to reflect in your surroundings. And I would even say that when we have really heavy attachments, and I'm going to use the word heavy, if we have heavy attachments to things like, I can't get rid of that because, and I get that because I have beloved family members and some things I'm like, it's years to finally let go of some things. So I get that, but consider that it's really an emotional attachment when you investigate and resolve that emotional attachment, sometimes it's really easy then to say, oh, well, I would love to give this to someone else, or I really don't need this like I thought I did. And so it's just, it's bringing a coherence between mind and body that settles things down, reduces the internal clutter. So now you can express or act on the external clutter.

Wow. It really actually gives you so much more agency when you're looking at your things and they no longer have that hold on you.

Yes.

So you no longer feel helpless. I can't get rid of this. I can't. And instead it's like, oh, you have that bigger picture.

Right.

You would say?

Absolutely.

I love it. Well, I know— well, I did not know that EFT is Emotional Freedom Technique. So that is new information for me. I do want to focus though on the nuts and bolts. And I know there's a statement in EFT where we say, I deeply and completely accept myself. Help us understand why that statement is so powerful.

Okay. So Gary Craig, who was the founder of EFT, and he actually passed away in January. I was so sad to see him go. He went very peacefully. As a, you know, the creator of this technique and using it in his life for decades, his default statement was the cause of all negative emotions is a disruption in the body's energy system. So when we can restore that disruption, restore the flow of energy, then we feel better. What was your question? I wanna— Yes.

So I deeply and completely accept myself.

Okay. So he created that phrase. And the reason he created it is because, you know, we have a conscious and a subconscious mind and we express that through our bodies. That's What the mind is made up of. And we have a lot of subconscious programs running things. So you might be someone who says, I'm such a loser. I'll never amount to anything. Well, first of all, it's not true, but at some level you believe that and that's running around in your subconscious because somebody told you that at some point in your life, or they treated you in a way that it became a belief for you. And so that default statement is really to start, it's kind of like a positive affirmation to, to address the negative thoughts that are going on within us. So the default statement is, even though I have fill in the blank, or even though I feel fill in the blank, I deeply and completely accept myself. So if people have a hard time saying that, sometimes I'll change the phrasing a little bit, but when I can get them a little more comfortable, I also have them say, I deeply and completely love and accept myself. Because we don't love ourselves enough. I agree.

I agree.

We're so—

we can be so cruel and so mean to ourselves. So I want to fill in that blank for a second.

Okay.

Even though I haven't started decluttering, even though I haven't finished decluttering, even though I notice it's hard for me to let go, even though I feel embarrassed, even though I no longer let my friends come into the house, even though I feel like something is so, so wrong with me. I deeply and completely love and accept myself.

And I would add, even though I feel so heavy about this, even though I feel so overwhelmed by what needs to be done. Yeah. I deeply and completely love and accept myself. I'll just tell you my experience with that phrase, because when I first started this in 2000, 2003. I just had my last baby. And I found EFT in 2003. She was just a few months old and I started using this thing and I didn't know exactly what I had, but I had heard so many amazing things and I was kind of curious and like, this is weird, this is different. It's very paradigm shifting once you have an experience with it over and over and over again. But I was a young mom with 7 children and I was overwhelmed and I had all this history, this back history, a pretty rough childhood, parents getting divorced. When I was 19 years old, my mom took her life. And so there was a lot of grief and sadness and upset and feeling there was trauma. And I brought that into my marriage and my motherhood. And I just felt so scattered and I didn't trust myself. I didn't— unworthy. I thought I was stupid. I thought I was a bad mom. Like, I can't imagine. I can't imagine that was me, but it doesn't feel like I'm the same person. And so over the, let's see, 22 years now that I've been doing EFT, I have literally said that phrase in my own experiences tapping for my own things and with hundreds and hundreds of clients over the years, because I always vocalize for and with them. I deeply and completely accept myself. It would never occur to me now, 22 years later, to despise myself, to hate myself. To belittle myself. Every once in a while, you know, I'm a human being. I have a thought like, oh, well, that was really dumb. Why'd you do that? But it's just gone like that. I don't live there stuck in those thoughts and feelings and beliefs anymore because I have said this phrase. If you did nothing else, if you get nothing else from this interview and all you do is make that a part of your life, I deeply and completely maybe love and accept myself. It will change your life. But if you add the tapping to it, Let me tell you, miracles. Peace.

Miracles. Miracles.

Yeah.

Tell us about some of those miracles. Tell us some of the things that you've seen with the tapping. And if you're thinking, hey, do we get to experience the tapping? Yes, we will absolutely go through a tapping experience with Dawn. But I want to hear.

Okay. I'll tell you a couple of quick stories. Oh gosh, there's so many. But my first big success was I had a son who was in junior high at the time, and I had— it was within the first year that I was trying this and he was, he was coming home from football practice saying, I'm having this pain, ow, it hurts. And I'm like, well, what is it? He's kind of embarrassed. He's like, this pain down there. And I'm like, I don't know what to do with that. So took him to the doctor. The initial diagnosis, if you will, was that he had an inguinal hernia. So the doctor told him he's probably going to need surgery eventually. My doctor told me not to tell this story, but I'm telling it anyway. He's probably going to need surgery. Let's wait a week and see how he's doing. And so waited a week, took him back. He said, okay, well, he can play. It's his choice. You can do the surgery now, or you can wait till after football practice and then we can do the surgery. I'm like, okay. And so he went back to football practice. Oh, it hurts. And then I was like, wait a second. I have this thing. Sit down. So I sat him down on the couch and I, and I, I had him identify where he felt the pain and I had him identify on a scale of 0 to 10 how high that pain was. He said it was an 8. And so I started tapping on him because I didn't think he would follow me. So I was like, you know, he was, I took his hand, I made him say the words, but I was, you know, tapping on his points on his face. And the first round I had him take a breath. How is it now? Oh, it's about a 6. Okay. We did it again. Oh, it's about a 4. And it went down to a 2. And the last round, he just had his head back on the couch like this while I'm tapping on it. And the last round, he opened his eyes, he's got this big smile on his face, and he goes, Mom, how did you do that? I'm like, what? I don't know. What did I do? And he said, I felt the pain leave my body. So I was like, I don't know. I have no idea. And so he went back to playing football and every day as he's coming home from football and I kind of just forgot about it, you know, he, coming home, how is it? No, I'm fine. And after about a week of that, he's like, leave me alone, I'm fine, it's fine. Like, okay, I don't know what happened. And I've been turning it over in my head, like, what did that do? The pain left? Did it? And all of a sudden I was like, wait a second, I gotta take him back to the doctor. So it was probably 2 weeks later, I took him back and saw my own personal doctor. It was a different doctor, so, you know, and he, he checks things out and he says, I don't think there's a hernia. Like he says, there's a tiny bit of difference. Like when a doctor goes in and feels that they can feel the space and the previous doctor had said it was like a quarter size, you know, difference. And he's like, no, it's pretty tight. There's a little tiny difference, but I wouldn't call it a hernia. And I'm like, how often does that happen? He goes, not often, rarely. And it was, it was gone. Here's my theory all these years later. Cause I'm like, did it heal it? Like what happened? I really believe the body is created to heal. Yes. As a health coach, you know, I think you would agree with me. Our bodies are amazing and marvelous, miraculous. And you know, if you cut your hand, you don't ever think, oh my gosh, it's not going to, you know, I'm going to die because it's open and it's not going to be fixed. It just knits itself back together. You get, you clean it up, you put, you know, something on it or get some stitches in it. Sews itself back together. It's miraculous. So my, my thought is, and this is why I say that I, that I help people with stress and trauma, is for whatever reason, I don't know if he got hit wrong or what happened, or if he had a thought, but he had this injury, call it an injury. And when we did the tapping, it removed the stress, whatever the stress was around it. I can't tell you exactly, specifically identify what that is, but it removed that stress. And when the stress was removed, The body can now do what it's designed to do, go in there and kind of start fixing things and healing them and putting them back together. So that's one of my favorites.

You helped one of my kids, and it wasn't a physical pain, but it was an emotional pain. He developed some anxiety or had some anxiety after having a horrible thought that something had happened to his dad, my husband. My husband was a little late picking him up. Was on a mountain bike ride with another dad and they bit off too much or whatever that saying is. They were bonking, meaning they didn't have enough calories to get back. And so my husband, who was never late, never late, was late. And my son had the worst thoughts go through his mind, which opened the door to being very anxious if he couldn't see the two of us, just being very, very anxious. And you worked with him and you tapped with him and you just made a massive massive difference in his healing and kind of brought him back to us. So, because he wasn't an anxious kid before that happened.

Yeah.

And so that's one that I want to toss out because it's really impactful. This is a tool that we can all use. It doesn't cost anything. And it's available. It's available to anybody who's curious about it. Yeah.

And it's really important to understand because I think a lot of people think they feel a certain way and they feel bad that they feel that way. Emotions are not They're just energy in motion. It's what emotions are. And they're meant to stay in motion. But what happens sometimes is they get stuck. And there's a biochemical explanation for that. When you, when you have a thought, there's a cascade of chemicals that happens. And if it's an upsetting thought, those chemicals go down to the cell receptors on every cell and creates a feeling in your body. And you know, you might be able to go out on a run or pray or, you know, any number of things that help settle that. But every once in a while, something happens like with your son, it upset him so deeply that he then didn't want to be separated from you because what if something does happen? Nothing happened in that case. And I want to point that out because I don't want to say nothing happened to him. There was an unexpected separation. So for him, it was a tiny trauma, but you know, most people look at that, say, oh, get over it. Nothing happened. It's everything's fine. No, something happened inside of him. And so it's just, it just takes a minute. It might've taken 30 minutes to address that with him. And then those, that upset, the disruption, his body's energy system was restored, put back into alignment, and now he feels back to his normal. Self. And so those chemical things that are happening, you don't need to beat yourself up about it. Just need to find ways to settle it. And this is a way for really simple things and a lot larger things to, to settle those emotions and that energy.

So as we are saying, saying these statements out loud, you are tapping on different places of the body. How How did those places get determined?

So these are acupressure points. If you know about acupuncture, if you've ever had acupuncture, you know, they'll take the needles and they'll put them in different points and they'll spin those needles and it creates a flow of energy. That's what it's doing. It's unblocking that. It's creating that restored pathway in the energy system. With EFT, we don't use needles. We just use our fingertips. So, you know, you can also get acupoint massage, I think. You could just as easily tap on the points or just rub the points if that feels better. I've done that sometimes. I'll just take a deep breath and just kind of rub the points and go from point to point, just take deep breaths and it just helps calm everything down. So we borrowed it from the Chinese, their Chinese meridians. That's where it came from.

Brilliant. Brilliant. These aspects were brought together by tapping on the points or rubbing. I've never heard that before, but I'm going to try that as you take us through. I'm going to try the rubbing. I know I like the tapping. But yeah, let's, let's go through an experience. So for the person that is embarrassed or ashamed because of the physical clutter, and of course, you know, then there's all the mind clutter and usually a lot of body clutter, right? You're embarrassed, you're ashamed. So you go eat the ice cream and, you know, at least for me, right? I would go find the ice cream or the chips instead of going walking my dog. And so somebody who's just You know, thinking, wow, how did I end up like this? And with judgment, let's focus on that.

First of all, and I actually love that you're choosing shame and embarrassment. Those are the lowest on the scale of emotions, the lowest energy you can possibly feel. The only thing lower than shame and embarrassment is death. So that's one that you really want to clear as quickly as possible. And, um, what I can do if you want, after we get off the call, is just make it a nice neat little script that you can send out to your people on, on the shame. But how would you verbalize that? How would you, what words would you use about feeling shame about the situation?

I'm so embarrassed I let it get this bad.

Okay. All right.

I'm so ashamed that I don't, I don't, I don't know what to do next. I feel frozen. I, I can do all these other things in life, but why can't I do this?

Yeah. Now, of course, you and I would go down a rabbit hole asking all kinds of questions. And I would usually do that first to get some more information, but just with what you've said, so that we would create the statement, even though I feel so ashamed about this situation. Okay. That covers everybody's situation. So the first thing that you do is really think about, because this isn't a traumatizing thing necessarily. I'm happy to let them explore this. If it was something traumatizing, I would say, don't, don't, don't go into that memory, but, you know, walk around your house and look at it and really take it in and say, how, how do I feel? Okay. They're going to have some shame come up. So where in the body do you feel that? And it's different for different people. Some people are like, I feel it in my core. I have a headache. My throat is tightening. I feel so anxious in my chest. I feel sick to my stomach. So pay attention to those kinds of things. Where do you feel that? Tension in your shoulders? You know, it's, it's different for different people, but I'd say about half the people are like, it's a kind of an anxiety in the chest. And so then you're going to say on a scale of 0 to 10, how high is that number? So you just write this down. I feel ashamed. I feel it in my gut and it's an 8. If you have tears coming up, it's a 10. If you're really upset about it, it's a 10. You're like, oh, it doesn't bother me that much. It might be a 2 or 3, and you can even just say low or medium or high, but just, just make a note of that. Okay, so now that you've done that, and we're just going to say the statement, you're going to tap, we're going to tap 3 times and say something here. And then we're going to go from point to point, which is the top, the eyebrow, the side of the eye, under the eye, the nose, this curve of the chin, and the collarbone isn't like way out here. It's where it starts. Go to the V neck and just go slightly to the right or left and slightly lower. You can do either side. You can tap with either hand, you can tap with both hands. And then under the arm, about 4 inches under your armpit. It's going to be right about the top of your bra strap on women. And it might feel a little tender there. That's because you have lymph nodes that go through there. And the more you tap, my experience has been the more you tap, the less sensitive that gets. So, okay. So even though I feel ashamed about this situation, I deeply— and Heather's not going to reply, repeat after me, but normally I would have you repeat after me just to keep it less confusing.

So I'm gonna actually say it, but I'm gonna keep— be on mute.

Okay. Even though I have this shame about this situation, I deeply and completely accept myself. Even though I feel ashamed about this situation, about the situation, deeply and completely accept myself. Even though I feel ashamed and I feel it in my— just put the word in there— my gut, my throat. I deeply, completely love and accept myself. And we just say a little reminder phrase: this shame. And you can vary it. I feel so ashamed. This shame feels heavy. I wanna let it go. I don't wanna carry this. It's heavy. I feel so ashamed, but I'm willing to let it go. And then just take a deep breath. And then just notice how you feel. Check back into your body. Is that number still at 8? Has it changed? Um, I'll tell you one really quick story. Every once in a while, and these are few and far between, but it happens. I have what I call a one-minute wonder. Um, there was a guy who was a friend of mine and he had quit smoking pot. He had had years and years of smoking pot and he was baptized into a church and didn't want to do that anymore. And he had just out of sheer willpower, I have no idea. Had decided not to do that anymore, but every day it was like a beast, you know, just he wanted it and he still had friends that used it and he was just, you know, so I came over to help him and we did the, even though I think we probably did, even though I'm addicted to pot, you know, I don't smoke it, but I'm addicted to pot. I deeply and completely accept myself, went through the whole thing. And he got this funny look on his face and he kind of moved his head and he goes, it's gone. I'm like, what are you talking about? And he said that almost the same thing my son did. He said, I felt something in my neck release. It just left and it's gone. One round.

Wow. It's rare.

Wow. But it can happen. And these are the kinds of miraculous things that I have just over and over and over have seen. Name any, anything I've, I've seen something dramatic. And it's funny because I both, on the one hand, I'm like, how does that happen? Even though I've had so many experiences. And on the other hand, I'm like, it's just a miracle. It's so amazing. All right. So what we would do for the next round then is we would just say it again. So now we're feeling a little bit of release. Maybe it's medium now. And we just say it again and we might think of new thoughts that have come up. Why am I so ashamed? Maybe somebody made fun of you at some point. You can bring that in if you want, but we're gonna stay to the basics. So even though I've, I feel ashamed about my situation, I deeply and completely accept myself. It's been so overwhelming. I feel so ashamed, but I deeply and completely accept myself. It feels so heavy and I don't wanna feel this anymore. And I deeply and completely love and accept myself. All this shame.

All this shame.

This heaviness is not letting go. I want to let go. I'm willing to let go of the shame, to let it move through and let it go, to stop being stuck. Releasing this shame. And then take a deep breath. Okay, we're going to do one more round. We're going to change it. So if you were, if I were talking to you and I said, okay, you've been feeling shame and I like to ask, what would you rather feel instead? So if you were your client, your typical client dealing with this issue, how do you think they would answer? What would they rather feel instead?

Wow, that's such a powerful question. I've never even thought to ask it. What would you rather feel instead? I think the top of mind response would be like, well, I just want to feel good. But that's not really descriptive, is it? But what I mean, it's a little bit of a ladder to get there. But really what they want to feel is peace and freedom and space and calm, a sense of calm. And so Are we talking about kind of like the end goal? Those are the end goals. But in terms of this one feeling on top of the, like one, one that's not quite as heavy. I'm not sure what that would be.

Well, I'm saying the end goal because sometimes you can get the feeling before you get the actions. And that's the point of this is if you can feel like, if you can let go of those chemical responses that are keeping you in shame, and, you know, I know you would have all kinds of coaching conversations around that, you know, does it matter what people think or all of that, you know, and people would be excited to see them making this change and letting go and expanding their space. But yeah, we want to, we want to embrace that possibility in the current situation.

So it really, it's relief and freedom and some peace, right? Some peace as well, but really just the clutter can be so, it's just so heavy. It's so distracting. It's all encompassing. And so we just want to feel free from that so that we can focus on the next season of our life without this heaviness.

Yeah. And I love that the word you used at the beginning of the call was agency. It gives us our agency because when we are enveloped in this heavy feeling, And then it's showing up in our external world with all these things that make, make our environment feel heavy. We don't have the agency that we really do want to have, which gives us possibilities. So, okay, we're going to do, um, Peace and Freedom and we'll bring in some of those other things, but let's say maybe they're down to a 3 or 4 now, you know, and we, we want to get them to a low number before we do this. So if you need to do a couple more rounds on the shame, go right ahead. And it might take a few more times. You might feel better today and then you walk around your house for a couple of days and you're like, oh, it's still here. But tune in, does the shame feel as bad? Is it a little bit lighter? And just, you just apply again. So even though I have felt all this shame, I'm ready to release it and I want to feel free. I want to feel at peace, even though I've had all this heaviness and overwhelm. I prefer freedom. I prefer peace. Even though I've felt all this shame, I deeply and completely accept myself. Today I choose peace. Letting go of the shame. Embracing the possibilities. I want to feel free. I want to feel peace. I choose to feel freedom. I choose to feel peace. Letting go of this shame. Embracing peace. Okay. Take a deep breath. That one went all the way through for me too.

That was amazing.

Yeah.

That's just amazing.

It's, it's still crazy to me that in 3 rounds you can feel a difference.

You can feel it.

And if I would say, if you do this every day, I mean, if we didn't stop and talk in between, you could do that in probably about 5 minutes. If you did that every single day on some aspect or element of the clutter, the hoarding, the addiction, whatever it is, if you did that every day for 5 minutes at the end of 30 days, I guarantee you, you're at the least, you're going to feel different. But you might have also at some point in there gone, hey, I think I'll clean this corner.

It gives you a new perspective. It totally gives you a new perspective and permission to lean in to the discomfort of decluttering without judgment, without any of those heavy feelings. Dawn, I loved when you said, I choose. To feel peace. I love how you brought the agency back, like back into this.

Yeah.

It does get to be a choice, doesn't it?

It does. And, and I'll tell you, it's funny, the transformation that, that was me when I was about 22, 23 years old to now, I'm, I'm 59. Um, I remember the very first like motivational kind of talk that I went to attended. Uh, it was a training at my husband's work. And the man at the front of the room said, um, you can choose how you feel. And inside I laughed. I was like, that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard of. You can't choose how you feel. Like, I thought I was at the mercy of my emotions. You have thoughts, you have feelings, things happen, you have emotions that, like, you, you're just at the mercy of it. Oh my gosh. Yeah, it's true. You can choose your emotions. Now it takes practice and persistence and patience and a lot of compassion on yourself. But over time, if you keep trying, you'll get to a point where like, it wouldn't occur to me to hate myself. I don't think it's possible for me to hate myself at this point in my life.

This is the work. This work is so worth doing. We can get really good at Netflix, right? We can get really good at Netflix and, you know, looking at social media or, and it doesn't have to be, you know, this or that, but we could Maybe be less good at Netflix.

It's 5 minutes.

And put these 5 minutes towards ourselves.

If you say, after I tap for 5 minutes, I can watch Netflix.

There you go.

There you go. Or scrolling on social media.

It absolutely is life-changing, this work, when we get curious about ourselves and our health and our potential. I so agree. Okay. So Dawn, finish this sentence. Let me finish the sentence. The lighter path is—

the lighter path is embracing the truth of who we really are.

Embracing the truth of who we really are.

Really are. We we seem to be almost like in a dark room, feeling around, trying to figure out everything. Um, when you know who you are, things have more clarity. It doesn't fix everything, but if you know who you are as a person, not, not what people think of you or the things that you've done or haven't done or accomplished, like, who are you at the core? Yeah. The lighter path is, is really understanding that and believing the truth of who you really are.

Believing the truth of who you really are. And that just, oh, that makes all that mind clutter just dissipate. It's not true. We aren't horrible human beings. We aren't, I should have done this. I should have done that. I shoulda, shoulda, shoulda. That's not who we are. It's so distracting, isn't it? So getting to the truth of who you are. I, I agree that can be one of the greatest gifts we give ourselves while we're on this planet.

Yeah. And going back to agency, it opens up that agency to be such a greater influence and impact on others. You know, when we are turned inward and, you know, self, whatever it is, beating ourselves up. We can't really see anybody else. We're just focused on ourself and how we feel and our problems. And, and, but when we have a vision of who we are, who we can be, or who we can become, we get to choose that too. We can now look outward and see like, who's out there that needs my help? Who needs the light? You know, you said Light Our Path, but also light is in that word. Who needs light and who can I give it to? When we know who we are, we have the capacity and and the power to do that.

Dawn, what's the best way to follow you?

I'm on social media, some version of The EFT Coach. Uh, on, uh, I have a YouTube channel, The EFT Coach. Sometimes it's like EFT.coach, but I'm on Instagram. I'm on Facebook. You can email me if you want more information. I can send you some free information. Tap W Dawn, so like tap with Dawn. @eftcoach.com. And I'd be glad to answer any questions or share some little freebies, point you in the right direction.

What a gift. What a gift of your experience, your wisdom, your compassion, your love today, Dawn. And we'll make sure to put all the links in the notes. And also you did mention at the beginning that you would be open to putting together a script. And frankly, I think we have a beautiful script with what you took us through just now, but we'll make sure to link to that as well. Dawn, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much.

You're so welcome. I love to be with you and talk to you and we don't get to do it very often. So I, you know, like I said in the beginning, we, we have this mutual admiration and, and, uh, anytime we could get together would be awesome.

I agree. It's always a fun time. Oh, Dawn, I appreciate you. Thank you so much for this gift today.

Thank you for having me, Heather. I sure appreciate you.

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