EFT for 4 year with Constipation

Lovely case of clearing the deeper fear underneath a symptom and using the box technique so that the tapping can get to the scary stuff.

by Anonymous Mother

My four year old daughter Lucy (not her real name) has had a history of occasional bad constipation, with cramping pains in her tummy because of it. I have noticed that it seems to be worse when she is anxious or tense and neither changing her diet nor visits to the doctor have alleviated her discomfort.

Recently, Lucy was holding her tummy in pain and we could actually feel a lump where the poo was in her gut! I wondered if EFT would help. I asked her if she would like to tap on her magic points and see if we could make it better. Lucy is familiar with the tapping process as I have used it before (with some success!) when she was trying to stop sucking a dummy.

This Poo is Stuck

We started off:

“Even though I have this poo pain in my tummy, Mummy and Daddy love me very much, and they always will”

“Even though this poo is stuck and it’s not coming out, I’m a lovely girl and my whole family love me very much.”

“Even though it’s really sore in my tummy, I’m a good girl and so is my tummy.”

We then tapped round on: “I’ve got a really sore tummy” “It’s so sore” “the poo won’t come out” “But its a good tummy” “Maybe my tummy can feel better soon” For a couple of rounds. Lucy seemed to really like the occasional positive affirmation about feeling much better soon.

After this, the pain in tummy had gone, but she now complained of a pain in her chest area. So we tapped again: “Even though I’ve got this sore pain here now…” After one round I asked how the pain in her chest was. “Much better,” she replied, before crumpling into tears “but oh, mummy, I’ve got to tell you about a really, really scary dream I had… it was about dying. I just really, really don’t want to!”

The Bad Dream

I asked gently if she would like to tap about the bad dream and see if we could help her feel better and she nodded, in tears. She had been able to say things with me for the previous rounds but now she didn’t want to speak and so I began to tap, speaking for her.

“Even though I had that really, really scary dream, I’m a lovely girl and Mummy and Daddy love me very much.”

“Even though I had that dream about dying, and it was so scary, I’m a good girl and my whole family really love me.”

“Even though I had that scary dream, Mummy and Daddy love me and I’m safe now.”

We began to tap about the dream and the fears that had been coming up about death, which I suspected concerned leaving Mummy and Daddy and not knowing what would happen to her, but she got very upset and I quickly realised that (unsurprisingly for a four-year-old!), these issues were just too big and upsetting for us to be able to work with in this way.

Putting it in a Box

I decided to try the “put it all in a box” technique. I asked, “Shall we try something different? Would you like to put all these feelings in a big box and shut the lid?” Lucy brightened up and nodded enthusiastically. I told her to put the scary dream and all the horrible feelings into a box, and close the lid. “And lock it,” added Lucy. “And it has two big ropes tied tightly in knots around it, and the ropes are made of really strong metal.” She got into the whole process with great gusto and enthusiasm, describing the sealing of the box at great length and with obvious enthusiasm, chiming in with her own words all the time.

We began: “Even though I’ve got this box, and it’s shut and locked, and it has two strong metal ropes knotted around it…” “Even though I’ve got this box, and it’s made of very hard, hard wood, and it’s rusty so that nothing can open it…” “Even though I’ve got this box, and it’s at the bottom of the rubbish dump, with rubbish on top of it, and nothing can open it”… Then we tapped round with Lucy talking the whole time: “and the box has hard wood around it too” “and it has metal walls around it too” “and it’s really small so that the things in it can’t move much” “and the metal ropes are tied in such tight knots that you can’t untie them” and so on. I was wondering where it was all going to go as we kept on tapping – Thea showed no signs of wanting to stop and the box was getting more and more covered in impenetrable layers!

She was however looking increasingly more cheerful. Suddenly, Lucy said, “Now the feelings in the box are burning.” We kept tapping and Lucy kept speaking: “and some fairy sprinkle magic is going on the box too…” “and the stuff in the box is burned now, it’s gone.” I asked her, “Is it all gone?” and Thea replied, “Yes.” Then she added, “And now the whole box has disappeared. God has made it vanish.”

At which point she calmly got down and ran off upstairs to have her bath! When I came in later to see her, she was able to chat to me calmly about some of the issues that had been worrying her previously: “Why do they bury you under the ground, Mummy? I don’t want that. What else could they do? – and we had an interesting discussion about cremation!!

EFT and Mummy helped the Poo

And I’m happy to report that she subsequently had to jump out of the bath to have a poo… I just wanted to note that she had told me nothing about the actual bad dream the morning after having it. The deep fear involved only seemed to come up as something she could discuss after we tapped on her physical symptom – maybe it’s difficult for small children to articulate their thoughts and feelings about big issues.

I’m grateful that EFT gave us the chance to broach this fear and also, hopefully, to clear something which was affecting her physical and emotional well-being. EFT helped the Poo!

Anonymous Mother trained in EFT with Gwyneth Moss