If you’ve spent 20, 30 or even more years married to a sociopath, you probably feel like the life has been sucked out of you. But I assure you, even after years of narcissistic abuse, EFT Tapping can help you recover.
I’m writing this story in response to a request from a Lovefraud Live! viewer. She posted the following question on my video, Sociopaths exploit everyone in their lives:
Would like to know how tapping would help the effects of having lived with a sociopathic husband for 30 years?
What took so long?
I’ve heard from hundreds of people in this situation — long-term marriages with someone whom they finally realized was a sociopath. Maybe that includes you. So, what took you so long to figure out the problem?
First of all, you were in the dark. It’s only been recently that people have been talking widely about sociopaths, narcissists and psychopaths. I founded Lovefraud in 2005. We were among the first websites focused on these destructive personality disorders. Thirty years ago, when you may have married, little information was available.
Secondly, psychopathy, antisocial personality disorder and narcissistic personality disorder are all on a continuum, meaning that some people are affected more than others. Highly disordered people may be violent criminals and easy to spot. Those who have mid- to low-level disorders — not so much. They manage to stay out of jail, blend into society, hold a job. Although they were difficult to live with, you may not have seen a clear reason to leave.
Finally, you, the survivor, may have thought that your marital problems were your fault. After all, that’s certainly what your sociopathic spouse told you. Plus, you frequently felt angry, emotional and out of control. Then one day you figured out why you were upset — you were reacting to your spouse’s terrible treatment of you. Your partner was always the root of the problem.
Now, after so many years of narcissistic abuse, how can you recover?
Releasing the distress
EFT Tapping can help you recover by releasing the distress of your experience. How? By relieving the trauma, fear, anger or other negative feelings attached to particular memories.
Emotional Freedom Techniques, called EFT Tapping for short, is the most well-known method of energy psychology. Evidence shows that energy psychology protocols can quickly change longstanding patterns in the brain — like the damage from 30 years of narcissistic abuse.
The information I’m about to relay to you is discussed in the following scientific journal article by David Feinstein, Ph.D.
What Does Energy Have to Do With Energy Psychology?
The article goes into depth about energy and brain science. I think it’s all fascinating. But I’m just going to explain part of the article — how EFT Tapping can help you recover by enabling you to release your experience.
Emotional Learnings
Not too long ago, scientists believed that after early adulthood, your brain was static and couldn’t be changed. Now researchers know that isn’t true. They talk about neuroplasticity, which is the brain’s ability to change its structure and function in response to experience.
Some experiences cause intense emotions, such as fear, anger or shame. When you learn or come to believe something while feeling such strong emotions, it’s called an “emotional learning.”
For example, suppose during a heated argument with your disordered spouse, he or she shouted that you were mentally defective, could not take care of yourself and no one else would ever love you. In that moment, you felt like you couldn’t stand up for yourself, so it felt like your spouse was right. From that point on, you believed deep down that you were defective and no one would love you.
That’s an emotional learning.
Feinstein writes that emotional learnings “are locked in the brain by extremely durable synapses that normally persist for the duration of the person’s life.” However, researchers have found that the brain’s synapses can be chemically unlocked, so the neural pathways that sustain the emotional learnings can be altered or totally eradicated.
A particular sequence of events enables the synapses to change. EFT Tapping follows that sequence, which I’ll explain shortly. First, a bit of background.
How memories are formed
There are two types of memories, Feinstein says — explicit and implicit.
Explicit memories are what you typically think of as memories — the conscious recall of events or facts. Encoding them is one of the main jobs of the brain’s hippocampus.
Implicit memories are ones that you can’t consciously recall. Something happened, you don’t remember what, but because of the experience you have emotional reactions, bodily sensations or a certain perception of the world.
Feinstein explains that when you have an experience, the brain translates it into working memory within seconds, and then into short-term memory within minutes to hours. This is called consolidation.
Over time, memories are further consolidated and processed into a fuller picture, which feeds into your understanding of how life works. But when memories are based on trauma or other difficult experiences, full integration may not occur.
“Traumatic experiences may actually be stored in fragments—as sensations, perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and impulses to react, such as to flee the situation— that can re-emerge and impact current perceptions and behavior with no conscious recognition of their origin,” Feinstein writes.
Recovery through reconsolidation
Your brain is amazing. Scientists now recognize that it can update emotional learnings in a process called reconsolidation. This means it is possible to release the stress associated with emotional learnings and undo highly charged beliefs and views caused by them.
When an emotional memory is brought to mind in response to cues, triggers or suggestion, for a brief amount of time it can be reconsolidated in a new way. The old emotional learning, what you believed to be true, can be revised or completely eliminated. You still remember what happened, but the emotional charge associated with the memory is gone.
This is exactly how EFT Tapping helps you recover.
Tapping is the key ingredient
With EFT Tapping, you literally tap lightly on certain places on your hands, face and chest. The locations are particular acupressure points, some of the same ones used in acupuncture. Needles are not required.
Tapping with the fingers on the acupressure points sends electrical signals to the brain and other parts of the limbic system, which regulates emotions, behavior, motivation and memory.
Here’s what happens, according to Feinstein:
“Acupoint stimulation has been shown in published or pilot studies to reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol, activate stress-reducing genes, normalize aberrant brain wave patterns, and increase production of serotonin, opioids, and other neurotransmitters associated with pleasure.”
As I explained in a previous article, one of the neurotransmitters is oxytocin, which is associated with trust and bonding.
Process for releasing the pain
With EFT Tapping, you bring to mind all the details of a painful experience, especially sensory details. These are the memories of what you saw, heard, touched, smelled, tasted or thought. This is important, because the traumatic memories are often stored in sensory details.
At the same time, you tap on the acupressure points, which sends calming signals to your brain. Experts call this the “juxtaposition experience.”
So you bring to mind a traumatic memory or trigger that previously produced fear, anxiety or some other threat response. But because you are tapping at the same time, the expected physiological response does not occur. You’re not upset; you’re calm. Your brain experiences a mismatch.
“The juxtaposition of holding the troubling scene simultaneous with no physiological arousal is the mismatch that is the necessary ingredient for the scene that was mentally activated to be reconsolidated in a new way,” Feinstein writes.
You still have the memory, but it doesn’t upset you anymore.
Secret to success
The key to making EFT Tapping work is to be very specific in what you bring to mind and how you work on it.
Tapping on a statement such as, “My husband always rages at me” probably won’t be very effective. If I were working with you, I would ask you to think of a particular incident and describe it in detail.
For example, you might recount a time when you were in the kitchen and your husband walked in, loudly demanding dinner. You told him it would be ready in 30 minutes.
Instead of relaxing for a half hour, he flew into a rage. Your husband yelled at you, saying that you knew what time he gets home and dinner should be on the table when he walks in the door. His face was red and spit was flying out of his mouth. As he approached you, still yelling, you backed up until you were leaning against the sink with nowhere to go. In that moment you were terrified that he was going to hit you.
I’d ask you to tell this story slowly, in detail, tapping on every emotionally charged part of the memory. Your trauma may be attached to the sound of his voice. It may be attached to his red face and the spit flying out of his mouth. It may be in your feeling of being trapped against the sink.
The idea is to release the emotion attached to all these aspects of the event.
Going deep
As you’re releasing a disturbing experience with your disordered partner, you may suddenly get a flash — it’s just like something that happened to you earlier, maybe when you were a child.
When that happens, you’ve hit paydirt.
Sociopaths target vulnerabilities. It’s how they hook you. Your vulnerabilities may involve implicit memories — events from long ago that affected you, even though you can’t remember precisely what happened.
EFT is effective for relieving both explicit and implicit memories. The process is the same as what I described above. It works, even if you only have impressions, feelings or fuzzy memories. Releasing the charge of them, you achieve deep healing.
Generalization
We’ve all had countless disturbing experiences. But don’t worry — you don’t have to work on all of them.
EFT practitioners have noted a generalization phenomenon — when you release a particular experience, similar experiences are also released. So no, you don’t have to deal with every single time your partner yelled at you. Work on the first time it happened or the worst time it happened, and the energy of the experiences will dissipate.
Yes, you can rebuild your life
Even if you’ve endured 20, 30 or more years of pain, it is possible to let it go and find peace. In this article I’ve outlined the basic process. You can’t wait for time to heal your ills, because it won’t. Time doesn’t heal the pain; it just buries it.
Sociopaths may have ruined years of your life, but they don’t have to ruin all of it. Even if what you have endured was shocking and frightening, it can be addressed and released — very gently, if necessary.
Here’s the most important point: Only you can do the work. But EFT Tapping can help you recover.
‘Codependents Awake’ invites readers to question what they once called love