How comfortable are you with interrupting?

When I was first learning EFT, I can honestly say that my answer to this was not very. (And sometimes my answer is still not very!) Interrupting my clients felt rude and bumped up against my desire to be polite. I thought it was important to let my clients say all that they wanted to say, to finish their (often long) thought before I moved in. I’ll never forget one client who literally had a ten-minute enactment (I thought it was so beautiful! And in a way it was, but as you can imagine the many pieces diluted its power); and another client that could go on and on—like white water rapids, none of us could see the individual colored stones underneath his gush of words. But I let him finish. And then we were all a bit lost. So I have learned the hard way…in EFT we have to interrupt.

Here is what I have come to understand: if you believe in the model, if you believe that what you are doing can heal, then interrupting becomes less of a choice and more of a necessity.

I had been planning to do one post on The Art of Interrupting, but as I began to write, I realized that slower is better here. Because in EFT, there are so many times that we need to feel empowered to interrupt, such as:

• when clients are escalated
• to “catch a bullet”
• to zoom in on an emotional handle
• to interrupt content
• to focus the session
• to stay with emotion
• to block an exit
• to choreograph an enactment or the processing of an enactment
• to keep one partner from prematurely rescuing another
• to separate out the “but”
• to heighten and hold in a warm moment
• to break something into parts….

Wow! The ability to interrupt is key to our work in so many important ways! So in order to stay with my goal of keeping each tip short and sweet, this week, just notice interrupting. How do you do it? When do you do it? Does anything get in the way for you? Are you brave in your interrupting?

I remember something Michael Barnett said at his EFT and Addictions conference in NYC a few years ago (a conference he presented with Jim Thomas): If you can trust that interrupting your client right now, right there will be so much more relevant, so much more powerful for them than leaning back and waiting, you’ll be more confident jumping in. (Michael Barnett is a wonderful EFT Trainer and Director of the Atlanta Center for EFT. Find him here: http://www.eftatlanta.com).

So this week, pay attention to your own art of interrupting. And perhaps be bolder in it. It will be one of the best things you can do for your clients.