So, I went bowling…

On Friday Jeff and I went on a double date - out to dinner and then bowling. I warned everyone: "Either I'm going to be amazing or terrible." I'm consistently inconsistent. On the first frame, I got a strike. I did pretty well for a while, and then I got too in my head and started getting gutter balls. I just can't.

You know an analogy is coming, don't you? Therapist types, we can't help ourselves. I tell my supervisees often, there's the science of EFT and there's the art of EFT. You have to know it so well that you can stop thinking about it. It's hard to be attuned when you're thinking so hard about the model. And yet, if you don't know where you are and where you're going in the model, attunement only goes so far.

Give yourself a lot of grace. You're going to be in your head as you're learning. You have to. 

A supervisee taught me something when we last role played. She wanted practice on staying with emotion. As the pretend withdrawer, I fumbled for words. She practiced the position of therapist and when she started to take me down the elevator of emotion, she got to a point where she didn't know how to stay with it. She went to her head and although there wasn't anything specifically wrong with what she said, but she left me. I went to my head. Then, I stopped the role play and said: "What's happening for you right now?" She said, "I don't know how to stay with it so my question is from my head, and when I go to my head, my clients go to their head." We were able to go back into it and she stayed with the emotion.

Such great insight. See if you can notice in your sessions when you go to your head instead of trusting what you already know and staying in the emotion - using the clients words.