Dyslexia is a learning disorder that manifests itself as a difficulty with reading, spelling and in some cases mathematics. Many people struggle with it their whole life. They experience shame, embarrassment, and frustration in school and are often ridiculed by students and teachers leading them to take on beliefs that they are not intelligent. As adults, they develop strategies to hide their problem yet still experience the frustration and anger of not being able to process information quickly like everyone else.
Some time ago I was giving demonstrations of EFT and was approached by a mother and her daughter. The mother explained that the daughter was dyslexic and that doctors and specialists had told them that it was incurable and that they had spent over $20,000 on her condition over the years. I asked if they would like to experiment with EFT to see if we could get achieve some improvement in a short 15 minute session and the mother gave me permission to work with her daughter.
Let’s call the daughter “Susan”. I first asked Susan if she felt any embarrassment or had experienced any ridicule to do with her condition and, surprisingly, she said “No”. This was great as we could then get straight in to working with her condition. In the few moment I had been speaking with Susan I could tell she was very intelligent and I was keen to see if EFT could help.
I found a book for Susan to read from and asked her what she saw when looking at the page. She responded that she saw “rivers of white running down the page” and that the text didn’t stand out at all. Using the basic wording of EFT I used Susan’s own words with phrasing such as:
“Even though all I see is rivers of white running down the page, I’m still a good kid and I accept myself”
After a few rounds tapping on the “rivers of white” I asked her to look at the page again and see if things had changed. Susan said that the rivers of white weren’t so bad but that she still saw the horizontal white spaces more than the words. So we applied EFT again:
“Even though I’m still seeing the big white lines and spaces, …”
After a few more rounds I asked her to look at the book again. This time she could clearly see the words and I asked her to read a bit. Her reading was jilted and she would go over words haltingly and quite over retrace. I asked her to describe the experience and she said “I have trouble reading words that I can’t picture. Words like ‘cat’ and ‘dog’ are Ok but words like ‘the’ and ‘and’ have no pictures.” So we added that in to the next round of tapping.
“Even though I have trouble with words that don’t have pictures, …”
After a few more rounds I asked her to read again. This time her reading was quite smooth and there was very little retracing. I wanted to check her comprehension as well and asked her to close the book and explain what she had read. Susan was able to give a basic explanation of what she had just read and was excited and surprised at how easy it was.
At this stage, Susan’s mother returned and I asked Susan to read to her to demonstrate her progress. Susan’s mother was very surprised that we had achieved so much progress in just 15 minutes.
What surprised me though was that, even after the progress achieved in just 15 minutes of EFT, the family never contacted me for further sessions after demonstrating such amazing results.
Notes on my approach:
I did not at any time try to use logic to explain what Susan should have been seeing. I simply used her observations of what she saw to tap on. I also had no specific outcome of what I wanted Susan to achieve I simple checked in after each round to EFT to confirm what had and hadn’t changed. I find not having an agenda leaves an open space for clients to share whatever is going on for them versus what you think they should be experiencing.
Procrastination came be obvious and subtle. There is procrastination where you set aside time to do something and then consciously do something else in that time. This might be acceptable once or twice but more than that and you are procrastinating.
