EFT for Relationships and Money
Cecilia was a client who wanted to work on her relationship using EFT
Like so many of my clients I see, she felt that all conventional ways of dealing with her relationship hadn’t worked so she thought she’d try something “out of the box”. In our 1st session together Cecilia said that money issues were at the root of her problems with Roc, her partner. I asked her how these money problems manifested themselves in her relationship so Cecilia created a very clear picture for me. “I don’t trust Roc with our money and yet I feel completely stuck. Our money issues are so big that even if I were sure that ending the marriage would make me happy I wouldn’t know where I’d begin to get the money it would take for a divorce and all the debt we have. I’d end up being responsible for at least ½ the debt we have – that’s over $20k at this point, “said Cecilia.
She told me that they had nearly the same fight each week- she’d find a new golf club, a new designer shirt, or a bill for an extravagant lunch. She’d been feeling the lack of money since she’d left her fulltime job in the corporate world and worked as a freelancer so she could be the primary caregiver of their 3 year old daughter. Cecilia had been in a powerhouse career where she earned 6 figures. After a few failed attempts at finding a nanny who she felt comfortable with she decided to leave her job. She didn’t expect it to be one of the most challenging roles she’d had in her life. She also didn’t expect it to be so all-consuming but she felt it was completely worth her effort.
Feelings of being overwhelmed at home caring for her highly active daughter had created so much stress for her that she was unable to telling Roc how she was really feeling. That lead to the sense that they weren’t a couple any longer, love was still present but romantic love was feeling more like a nice elusory dream than something attainable. When I asked her about their sex life she answered, “What sex life? We have sex on our anniversary and our birthdays. That’s it.’
For the first few sessions Cecilia and I tapped on her feeling around parenting which were related to the way she was brought up. She also made the connection that her relationship money issues had to do in part by her money issues growing up in a family of six where money was always in short supply. She had made a vow from the moment she took her first job at age 14 that she’d always have money and not feel powerless over it. The fact that she now relied on Roc to earn the money had brought up all those fears. She resented him for being frivolous in his spending and she realized that she’d been passive aggressive in and out of the bedroom as a result.
Roc for his part had completely supported Cecilia’s decision to stay home. The biggest problem for him was an unspoken feeling of pressure to be the sole breadwinner. This lead to his own set of unconscious passive aggressive spending. Because I had started to work with Cecilia on her issues that were leading us back to childhood I referred Roc out to another eft practitioner. Roc was able to release the burden he felt and began to have open conversations about their overall financial picture. Cecilia for her part began to feel more connected with him as a romantic partner. The fighting stopped, a budget was created and maintained, and they began to enjoy each other as a romantic couple again as a result of tapping.
