I had a wonderful evening driving around in traffic for a total of two and a half hours because in the middle of it was a half an hour of fireworks at Kaboom Town in Addison and an hour sitting down at a restaurant with my Lili and Miles. It’s really all Kira’s fault because I’m not that into fireworks – once you’ve seen the Big Show over the Hudson River in New York, all other fireworks displays kinda pale by comparison – but Lili especially wanted to go, so go we did. Yes, I opted to leave at around 8 instead of 5, but I couldn’t really see us either sitting out in the 110+ degree heat or camping at a restaurant for four or more hours… it worked out well, though. Miles has great “car questions”.
He says stuff like, “You have the green light to make any movie you want. What movie do you make?” Lili and I both named scripts the we’re each working on. Another question was, “If you could have any superhero or fictitious person as a mentor, who would it be?” Lili said Batman, I said the Guardians of OA, and Miles said, “Severus Snape!” We all agreed that his answer was definitely the best.
Recent emotional activities have caused my “head count” problem again. I’ve always tried so hard not to make the kids live with “empty rooms” – the poignant awareness of missing people – and the best way to avoid it is to talk about those people as the situation arises. Today while we were driving around, I kept wanting to turn around to talk to … someone who isn’t there. And I kept reminding myself to tell her something important… but we haven’t spoken yet. And then there are the dreams…
Yeah… the dreams… it’s been years since I’ve woken up disappointed that the thing I was dreaming about wasn’t reality. Maybe I just shouldn’t take naps anymore. Or sleep at night. :-/
Regardless, life goes on. Machinations and permutations and nefarious undergoings are… going… on…
I’ve started recording video on the distance sessions that I do with people. They’re up on my YouTube page, and I imagine they’ll only be interesting to people who are really curious about EFT and Reiki. It’s a lot of hand-waving and talking – I edited out a lot of dead air, which is why it looks so choppy – but the effects are profound. I think I go through times when I forget how powerful a modality it is (especially using both at the same time), and then something happens that reminds me all over again.
I think I have discovered a limitation to EFT, however. Well… maybe not a limitation, but certainly something to consider.
When we think of autism, it’s difficult in many ways to define because there are so many expressions of it. In one fellow’s case, it’s like the world is constantly separated by a wall, and the experience on the “inside” is very frustrating, isolated, desperate sometimes, feeling the effects of an intense energetic empathy but none of the capacity for developing the coping skills necessary. On the other side of it, there are autists who very well understand empathy both energetically and observationally, but their responses are based on a non-typical logic that goes against social norms. For more on that, check out Rachel’s post on it on Journeys With Autism and also take a gander at Autism and Empathy.
Anyway, back to the point, I realized that if an autist is stuck on the other side of “the wall” and cannot energetically or emotionally directly connect with other people, EFT with a practitioner doesn’t really work. In the cases that I’ve worked with (and there have been a handful), the energetic response is almost like the practitioner isn’t “real”, that their experience, being unlike the autist’s experience, is not true. This makes it very hard to get in and get work done. Every now and again, a sliver of opportunity will show that allows a little bit of progress to be made, but on the whole, it’s really a constant effort of beating one’s head against that wall, and for precious little result.
There are, of course, ways around it, but to other people exploring EFT, be aware of this circumstance, and when it happens, stop. Back away, examine the situation a little differently, see what foundational remedies or therapies might be used first to allay the effects of “the wall” (it is not a “normal” state for autists, merely a common one for some), and only after those other efforts have shown some progress can you get in and get the Good Work done.
I’m not completely sure if “unguided” or “solo” EFT would work for autists in that position since it’s still introducing an element outside of previous experience (one of the weakness points of “the wall”, not letting in new ideas without a great deal of convincing), but it’s worth a shot. The manual is freely available for all, and it’s not like they could make something bad happen. The worst that could happen is that nothing would happen. I’d like to hear about it if someone in that position tried something like this.
So, to tie all this back in with the first part of my post here, I had thought about tapping on that anxiety, and I decided… no, I don’t really need to. It’s a natural side-effect of my very real and hard-earned emotions, and I choose to accept the good with the uncomfortable. Besides, it’s only a temporary thing. I’ll never come up with the right “head-count”, but I know that one day, I’ll get closer.
And in other, other news, this goes out to someone very special:
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