In this bonus episode, Kate discusses the critical importance of emotional regulation for ADHD and how understanding your nervous system and the concept of co-regulation can impact the quality of your relationships, both with yourself and others.

Learn why 'Emotional Freedom Technique' (tapping) could be the tool you need for better emotional regulation. You'll also hear from Pearl Lopian an experienced EFT practitioner. Pearl recounts her initial encounters with EFT and its transformative effects on her clients, underscoring the technique's ability to facilitate profound emotional releases and shifts in perspective.

Join Kate in this episode to gain a sense of hope and empowerment, learn how to control your emotions, and cultivate a supportive environment for yourself and your loved ones.

Click here to find out more about Reclaim Your Calm

Reclaim your Calm is a two-part LIVE online workshop introducing the power of EFT tapping to help you break free from emotional overwhelm, calm your ADHD mind, and reclaim your peace – any time, anywhere.

Check out Kate's many resources on her website and free ADHD EFT resources: 

Introduction to EFT https://adhd-womens-wellbeing.mykajabi.com/intro-eft-adhd

Tap N' Talk Technique: https://adhd-womens-wellbeing.mykajabi.com/tap-n-talk

Calming Tapping Technique: https://adhd-womens-wellbeing.mykajabi.com/calming-tapping

And read her ADDitude article on how EFT can help calm the ADHD brain and nervous system

Chapters:

• 00:42 - Understanding Emotional Regulation in ADHD
• 10:27 - Reclaim Your Calm: A New Approach to ADHD and Emotional Regulation
• 14:33 - Introduction to Tapping and Emotional Regulation
• 22:36 - Introduction to EFT and Its Benefits
• 28:01 - Understanding the Mind-Body Connection in Emotional Healing
• 37:00 - Understanding Trauma and Tapping
• 41:24 - Exploring Surrogate Tapping
• 48:56 - Healing the Inner Child

Takeaways:

• Understanding co-regulation is crucial for creating safe and connected relationships in our lives.
• Emotional regulation techniques like EFT tapping can significantly improve our ability to manage ADHD symptoms.
• Recognizing and addressing generational trauma can empower us to heal and thrive with ADHD.
• Tapping can help rewire our emotional responses, allowing for greater self-compassion and acceptance.
• Using EFT, we can release stuck energy and emotions that have been held in our bodies.
• The workshop 'Reclaim your Calm' aims to teach practical techniques for emotional regulation.

Links referenced in this episode:

• adhdwomenswellbeing.co.uk
• Pearl Lopian - https://www.efttappinginstitute.com/

If you're wondering where today's Toolkit episode is, please don't worry.

After a little bit of debating and pivoting, I've realized that it's working better for everybody, including myself, that the Toolkit is released every other week.

We have about nine or 10 episodes already out there, and what I'm hearing from you is that you're loving the Toolkit, you're finding it incredibly helpful, but to get through two episodes a week, you're finding it a little bit difficult.

So we're going to do every other week on the Toolkit.

But today I wanted to bring you this very powerful, special exclusive bonus episode that everyone can enjoy.

So here it is.

Welcome to the ADHD Women's Wellbeing Podcast.

I'm Kate Moore Youssef and I'm a wellbeing and lifestyle coach, EFT practitioner, mum to four kids and passionate about helping more women to understand and accept their amazing ADHD brains.

After speaking to many women just like me and probably you, I know there is a need for more health and lifestyle support for women newly diagnosed with adhd.

In these conversations, you'll learn from insightful guests, hear new findings, and discover powerful perspectives and lifestyle tools to enable you to live your most fulfilled, calm and purposeful life wherever you are on your ADHD journey.

Here's today's episode.

Hi everyone, welcome to this short bonus episode which I wanted to bring to you on a topic and a conversation that's is something I'm really passionate about and something that I am wanting to constantly help and guide people with and that is with regards to emotional regulation and adhd.

Now I've done quite a lot of work with helping more people find more calm, find more fulfillment groundedness, just find a place where they feel a bit more rooted and grounded with where they are right now in that situation.

That is why I have launched a two part workshop which I'll tell you a little bit about later on.

I think the reason why I wanted to just record this short episode is to emphasize why it's so important that as adults we take responsibility for our regulation and it comes down to something called CO regulation.

And this is something I learned when I was doing a five day course on polyvagal therapy and understanding all of this with regards to the nervous system and I was seeing this through the neurodivergent lens.

So when I was learning, I was understanding how powerful it is to understand our nervous system and all the interconnections and recognize that many of us who have probably grown up In a neurodivergent household, without understanding or knowing what that is, probably didn't experience something called CO regulation.

Now, the important thing about this is that when we understand what CO regulation is and perhaps where we didn't have it and where we now, through this understanding of our own neurodiverse divergence, how important it is for us, but also for our children, if we are living with children, or perhaps if you are with a partner and wanting to feel safe and connected at home or in any situation.

Now, I'll just give you a little brief explanation of what CO regulation is according to polyvagal theory.

So it lies at the heart of all human relationships, and it is the reciprocal sending and receiving of signals of safety.

It is not merely the absence of danger, but connection between two nervous systems.

So two different people's nervous systems, each nourishing and regulating the other in the process.

And because it is baked in our evolutionary past, it is not a desire, but a need, one developed to facilitate survival.

And as humans, we are therefore programmed to seek interpersonal connection.

It's a imperative.

It's a biological imperative.

Now, the reason why, with regards to polyvagal theories, theory, there's a huge focus on safety and connection.

And if we are feeling safe and we're feeling connected ourselves, then other people around us that we perhaps are caretaking or in relationships with or helping or looking after, also feel safe and connected.

And I go back to many of us going through our lives, and we potentially may have had some generational trauma.

We may have dysfunctional families.

There may have been chaos.

There may have been separation, addiction, Lots of behavior from the adults in our families that we didn't understand.

And perhaps they didn't understand it either, because we understand that neurodivergence is highly genetic.

So if we're only understanding this ourselves, Perhaps in our 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, the generation before us really didn't understand any of this.

And because we're only just understanding why addiction shows up with adhd, why all the mental health illnesses and crises show up, why suicide is much more prevalent in neurodivergence.

Disordered eating, sleep problems, financial crises.

So many different debilitating traits and symptoms show up in undiagnosed adhd.

The power is understanding that having that awareness and then finding ways to help ourselves thrive, because we can't change the past.

We can't change what happened to us as children, but we can lean into more understanding and education and awareness.

And we can recognize perhaps, where the people in our family, maybe they did fail us, maybe our caretakers did fail us.

We could have had safer environments, we could have had better connections, but we can't change that, but we can see it through more compassion and forgiveness.

And then if we are wanting to break these chains, break these cycles, it's so important that we do this inner work ourselves, we do the inner healing, so we can then have safe, connected relationships in our lives and actually live well alongside our neurodivergence.

I'm not saying that these challenges won't be there, but when we see and understand them for what they are and instead of constantly questioning them or shaming ourselves and judging and blaming all this sort of negative reaction, we're able to see this all a lot more through the eyes of compassion and we can respond accordingly.

So going back to co regulation, we can't co regulate with the people in our house, our children, our partners, our friends, different relationships.

If we are not feeling regulated and calm ourselves now, as women, many of us will be going through or have gone through very, very difficult hormonal challenges.

And we know that with ADHD in girls and women, hormonal difficulties are again more common.

So we will have had more difficult puberty, we will have had more challenging postnatal symptoms, postnatal depression.

And then perimenopause often comes earlier for us and it comes a lot harder.

So the symptoms just sort of show up and they exacerbate our adhd.

So we're sort of balancing more difficult, more challeng, challenging perimenopausal symptoms alongside more prevalent ADHD symptoms.

This is a really hard storm to navigate.

And when we're navigating this without understanding, without awareness, without tools, without practices, without things that we can do to help reduce these stressors, it can feel like chaos is taking over and we are losing complete control of our, of our life.

And this is why I love working with women who are just discovering their adhd, who are finally understanding themselves, because I want to help you, them and me and us find a way to live where the past isn't controlling us, where this lack of understanding, this awareness.

And again, we will have experienced a lot of invalidation, would have experienced dismissal, medical dismissal, medical ridicule, we would have been questioned, we maybe probably have been put on the wrong medication, misdiagnosed, and this is still happening right now.

So this isn't a historic thing.

Many of us will be going to the GP and saying, I think I've got adhd.

And they'll be like, oh, no, you've got Anxiety or you've got depression or no, it's not perimenopause, you just need antidepressants.

And there's sadly still not enough education, there's not enough evolution from speaking to different experts in the research field recently.

What we know is that any of these, the research and the work that's happening in doing all of these evidence based projects is that it's not filtering through to the mainstream medical kind of professionals and those of them that are training them in medical school for many, many years later.

So the drip down effect is slow, but it is progressing.

So what we need to do, we need to advocate for ourselves.

We really need to find a way to understand this, educate ourselves, be empowered with the information, the knowledge and then advocate for ourselves.

And yes, that takes time and yes, it takes energy and yes, it is hard work.

But I hope that through these podcasts alone, through my resources, through the many, many resources that are now coming out, I mean, social media has got fantastic resources, some maybe not so fantastic resources, but many incredible accounts that are doing a lot of work to help connect and join those dots for you so you can understand your hormonal health, understand the connections, the brain, body connections, whether it's to do with gut issues, chronic pain, migraines, hypermobility, all of this is one big picture that we're trying to understand right now.

But what you're having to deal with every single day is this exhausting kind of concoction, this cocktail of emotional dysregulation, which can come from many ADHD traits and symptoms such as RSD rejection, sense of dysphoria.

It can come from hypervigilance, our nervous systems constantly being on sympathetic mode, fight or flight.

It can come from overwhelm, it can come from lack of sleep again, it can come from a hormonal roller coasters where one day we're feeling fine and the next minute was sort of plummeted right down because our estrogen has dropped.

It can come from anxiety, it can come from overthinking.

There's so many different ways and so I would love to be able to help you with this.

And which is why I have, this is why I've created a two part workshop which is happening on the 4th and 11th December.

It's called Reclaim your Calm.

And this is blending my modalities together, this is blending my EFT training.

So I'm an EFT tapping practitioner and blending this with all my knowledge of adhd, working with so many women with adhd, speaking to so Many experts with the training and the understanding that I've done and using tapping to help us calm and regulate our adhd very heightened emotions.

So if you are ready to find a way that you can potentially just a couple of minutes a day, using some breath work with the tapping or using some affirmations or acceptance wording that I'm going to teach you anything that can help you bring you from that moment where you're just spiraling to a place of regulation and you're feeling in your body you're feeling a bit more grounded.

I promise you it's very, very helpful.

So something that I know many of us relate to is like feeling like stress and overwhelm is just this default state that we're in.

Many of us, from what I experience for with my clients and my community, but also with myself, like this is everything I experience.

Say they struggle to stay grounded in the chaos of daily life.

Or we experience these big reactive sort of moments to what other people may consider small daily triggers.

Again, it's this sensitivity or this fear of criticism rejection how imparts in so many different ways in our life, especially our careers and derails us with our self esteem and our confidence and our nervous system constantly not quite knowing are we in a safe space or do we need to be hyper vigilant, is someone going to criticize us?

And that's from perhaps years of being in that state where we have been criticized and then actually our nervous system is just responding to that.

And it's also this, this feeling of wanting to do so much and wanting to commit and being ambitious and having all these ideas and all this kind of energy and then all of a sudden something is, something just breaks us and the overwhelm kicks in and all of a sudden all the ideas and all the positive things that we wanted to do and all the excitement and the enthusiasm almost goes into a sort of self sabotage.

And we want to close everything down.

We want to cancel the plans, not turn up to the party that we were really excited about or something to do with our business or our career.

And it can just feel so exhausting navigating all of this.

And this is why I use tapping.

I really do use it most days of my life.

Some days I completely forget about it.

In typical ADHD manner I just kind of go, you know, I just love to feel calm.

And then it was only the next day when I kind of think I should have used some tapping with that.

So I'm still working on this myself.

But I really do know what it feels like to struggle with this emotional roller coaster of inner restlessness and worry and irritability and frustration and impatience.

And I know for years and years of my life I also struggled to manage my emotions.

It felt like they were ruling my life and I didn't understand why.

And it was when I got my ADHD diagnosis when I was 40, so that's nearly four and a half years ago.

And I could understand, I could, when I did all the learning and understand how connected it was to my mood and to my energy and my hormones and all of the things that that brings.

It encouraged me to be kinder to myself and to start this journey towards more self acceptance, self compassion and healing and recognizing how important it is for me to have balance in my day, in my week, in my month.

It's a daily thing that I work on and that is why I always bring tapping to any situation because it gives me a moment of perspective, it gives me some clarity, gives me some distance, it allows me to see the situation without all the different voices and factors and variables that ADHD brings.

And it just allows me to see the situation with a bit more peace and acceptance.

So I want to let you know the workshop details.

I'd love to see you there.

It's the 4th and the 11th of December and they're both going to be an hour long from 6.30pm to 7.30pm UK time.

It's all going to be on Zoom.

It's £80 for the two workshops.

Now, if you use the code EB Calm, that's EBCALM, you will get a discount.

So that's EB Calm and you will get lifetime access to the recorded replay so you can watch it back and watch it over and again, just allow it to process.

There might be certain things you didn't pick up.

You might just need a reminder again how to bring in the different tapping practices in for those different situations.

Now the most important thing about this is that tapping can be used to regulate ourselves, but we can also use it to help regulate children.

We can teach our children the very basics of tapping just to calm them in that moment.

You could have teenagers who are doing exams, driving tests, going to university, perhaps they're feeling overwhelmed and stressed and anxious.

I've taught this to all my kids.

You know, some of them listen, some of them don't.

And it's just being open minded, it's leaning into the practice, understanding how the sensations and the feelings in our body kind of operate and releasing them.

And it's.

I See it as an energy cleanse.

I really do.

I see it as a moment to bring things to the forefront.

We may experience emotion very often we do, it can be, you know, whether we feel a bit choked up in our throat, sometimes we feel the emotions sort of moving through our body a little bit.

It can come out in tears, yawning.

We may feel really sleepy, sleepy and really drained and tired.

It's really, really good for sleep as well.

And we may just notice these subtle shifts that we can't quite understand or can't quite explain.

But we may wake up the next morning and something may have changed, something may have shifted.

And that is what is so fantastic about eft.

It's very much energy based, but it's also kind of like an energy clearing system as well.

So I kind of see it as like clearing the debris in our, in our energy fields, but also in our mind, in our nervous system, in our emotions.

And instead of letting it sort of build up somatically in our body, we're letting it go.

So we're reducing the stress in our body.

So even if we're tapping on the bodily sensations, we can't even quite work out emotionally how we're feeling.

So even if we're just tapping on something like our shoulder pain, our tight jaw, our sore head, our, you know, pain in our, in our stomach or the, you know, tightness in our chest, whatever that is, we will notice something dissipate, something will ease, something will, will lessen.

It may just move through our body a little bit.

And I'm going to teach you all of this because this is vital information.

I wish that kids could learn this, you know, from a really, really young age because kids definitely take this on and they kind of intuitively just get it.

And when we're adults, our logical mind comes in and all these different things kind of, you know, we kind of like question things and feel a bit silly because it feels a bit weird.

Tapping.

And especially if you're quite sort of cynical or science based, we kind of go, you know, doubt some certain things and start to kind of think, well, did I feel that?

Or you know, maybe if you're not.

Woo woo.

And I really don't think EFT and tapping is we, a lot of doctors are taking this on.

I know Dr.

James Custer, who has just written a fantastic book called how to Thrive with Adult adhd.

He is a very eminent psychiatrist.

He's working in a huge amount of evidence based research, working with lots of different universities and he has got a whole chapter in his book all about tapping.

And that's come from a doctor, a psychiatrist, if you are inclined and you like the science and you are wanting to sort of just read up a little bit about it.

I would definitely look at Dr.

Peter Stapleton's work.

She is evidence based EFT I think it's called.

And if you go on her website, if you just Google Dr.

Peter Stapleton, that's P E T A, you'll see how many trials she's done.

She's done this on long Covid, she's done this on pain, she's done this on postnatal depression, cancer, migraines.

I mean the list is endless.

She has really put the science in so people can stop kind of doubting it and mistrusting it and recognizing it is a really amazing component to therapeutic work, to healing, leading us to inner peace, acceptance, self compassion.

And I'm really happy to see a lot more doctors and psychiatrists and psychologists training in it so they can bring it to their therapeutic modalities as well.

So what you're going to learn in this workshop is to unlock the transformative power of tapping and again like I mentioned, the science and discover its effectiveness in reducing stress and overwhelm and calming the mind.

We're going to learn how to regulate your ADHD emotions.

So that's whether that's navigating RSD emotional dysregulation while also boosting self compassion, the calm, this resilience that's so powerful, this inner strength and mental wellbeing.

We're going to work on changing your inner narrative and embracing authenticity.

So we're going to really kind of note what is sort of driving that inner narrative and the self criticism and letting go of the limited beliefs and negative patterns that are keeping you stuck and learn more to live life with authenticity and intention.

We're going to try and reduce rumination and overthinking.

So we're going to create that mental pause set where we are reframe this self doubt and criticism with positive affirming thoughts.

And we're going to identify the different triggers and the stresses and help reduce that reactivity.

So it could be when your kids get home, it could be when you are having a meeting with a colleague, it could be a certain relationship, it could be something your partner does, it could be something with a parent and we're really going to identify that for you.

You're going to be able to identify that and we're going to work in a group with understanding how we can maybe work more Individually.

So this is going to be a group work.

I'm gonna probably not make it too interactive because I want to be able to teach as much as possible.

But there will be a chat and people can put questions and you can put your reflections and your thoughts.

So we're going to use the chat box to really hope, you know, bring meaningful connection so people can see there's a lot of validation and common denominators there.

And I want to help you support your children as well as your family.

So this isn't just a transformative tool for you, it's also going to be an incredible technique to share with your children and your loved ones.

And then we're going to just find these really simple techniques to ground yourself daily.

So maybe a simple morning practice or something to do in the evening to help you sleep better.

And with all of this, I've got two hours.

I'm going to just impart everything I know and everything I can do as an intro.

This is purely an intro to help you in your ADHD life, your ADHD journey and to finally thrive instead of just barely surviving alongside your adhd.

So if this sounds like something for you, and it sounds like something you'd like to learn and bring to your toolkit, I would love to see you there.

If you head to my website, that's ADHD womenswellbeing.co.uk it's all there on my homepage.

And remember, if you use the code EB CALM, you will get £10 off.

So instead of it being £80 for the two sessions, it will be £70.

And I really hope to see you there.

It's two hours, it's over two weeks, and I've done it over two weeks to allow this information to integrate so you can practice it.

And then on the second workshop, you can bring in the chat box your reflections, what it's helped you with, what you've struggled with, what you need to know more of.

So now I wanted to share with you a conversation that I had with my mentor, my trainer in eft, and it's Pearl Lopier.

Now, Pearl taught me everything I know about eft and she has mentored hundreds and hundreds of other people.

She trained them and is a fantastic expert in the knowledge of emotional freedom, technique, tapping and how to bring it into our daily life.

But also she specializes in trauma as well.

So you'll hear from this conversation with Pearl how we can use eft, what it is and all the amazing benefits it brings.

Here is my chat with Pearl Lopien can I ask, where did you begin your journey with tapping?

How did you find it?

Where did I find it?

I found it purely by chance.

Purely by chance, because I was known as being a little bit, what I use word, quirky.

I like alternatives.

And I'd learned Reiki.

I'd become a psychotherapist.

And then someone said to me, you've got to try this.

You got to try this.

And I went along and I tried.

And there was two things that happened that actually made me see how amazing it was.

One was just for a toothache.

It was for a toothache.

I just went along.

I decided I'm going to learn it for myself.

And my very, very first person I worked with, she said she had a toothache.

And I said, I've learned this thing that you can tap.

Like, when you think about it, how does it make sense?

Just tapping on these points can remove some physical pain.

But it did.

She tapped on the symptoms of her toothache.

And that is something that anyone can do when we have a physical ache or pain and get relief.

I did that.

And then the second thing that I did with somebody was working on a very, very painful traumatic memory that she was speaking about with me in a regular psychotherapy session.

And I said, I've come across this new technique.

Let's try it out.

And she spoke about a situation that had been bothering her, and she was in her 50s and been bothering her since a child.

And I said, as you talk about it, let's just tap together on these points.

And that's what she did.

And when she came the next week, she said, it's completely gone.

So I was completely blown away about this system that you can just do in a few minutes, regulate yourself, use it in therapy, and do so much with it.

And you said all the different things that it takes elements from all those different things.

There's so many ways that you can actually use it for yourself.

Yeah, I think that's what's really interesting, isn't it?

Is that we are understanding that, yes, there's energy, it's meridians.

We utilizing the acupressure points that we've got in our body that have been identified for thousands of years.

But we're blending it with the Western modalities of understanding our brain, understanding how our neural pathways work, our nervous system, and we're sort of blending it together with something that is really hard to explain and can look bizarre.

And when you start saying, oh, I do this tapping on my face, and then the memories kind of like disappear and.

Or lessons or the intensity of the memory or the trauma lessons.

It is hard, but whenever people have tried it, I always find that it's a very quite.

Not an extreme reaction, but they're blown away by how different they feel within just a few minutes.

Yeah.

Are you able to explain any of that?

I wish.

I wish.

I've probably after doing maybe 7,000 individual sessions, my work.

It's all anecdotal.

It's all anecdotal.

I think first of all, just tapping on the points is sending a calming message to the stress area of the brain.

So that's something that it's doing and what are we also noticing.

And that's more what happens in a therapy session.

We're changing our brainwave state.

So when we change our brainwave state, so the repetitive tapping on the points changes the brainwave state.

And when we change our brainwave states, we get in touch more with our subconscious areas and it gives us the ability to see what's really going on in our deeper mind and where our issues have come from.

And that's why we use it in therapy sessions as a retrieval technique, which is very different from.

Anyone can do this any day to feel better.

So to do it any time to feel better.

It's just a matter of tuning into whatever's bothering us, then just gently doing some rounds.

Gently just going around the points and that is calming the nervous system down.

But I have to be honest, I'm not medical.

My work is all anecdotal.

It's the results that I see.

And also I'm seeing how you can help a loved one by tuning into their energy system and helping them.

So we'll have an energy body that's living inside our physical body.

That's how we operate.

So when we're tapping, we're connecting to our energy body and something that we often don't think about it.

For example, before we started, we had a little bit of difficulty setting up our microphones.

Now I might have been getting a bit of hot and bothered from that.

So my body was responding to some thoughts.

So that's how our mind body system works.

We respond in our body to whatever we're thinking.

If I'm late for a meeting, I might get what something might start to feel inside me.

If I have an exam, I might start churning in my stomach.

So our body responds to what we're thinking and when we're tapping, we're interrupting that whole system.

Yeah, that's what we're doing.

We're interrupting the mind, body.

So instead of, you know, we like to talk mind, body, but it's actually body, mind.

Because if we can change how the thoughts sits in our body and the body feels calmer, the thoughts change.

So that's really what we're doing.

Because we have a circumstance.

We have a circumstance and then we have a feeling about a circumstance.

Whatever's going on in our lives, we have thoughts and feelings about it.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap.

The way we feel about the circumstance starts to change.

And that is so empowering.

That is empowering.

So what I want to do is I want to give you this example.

I want to give you this example.

So I call a situation.

Imagine this block as a situation, and imagine this pen is you.

So the situation can either imprison you, push you down, grab you, and you can't move, or you can get on top of the situation.

So what am I thinking that tapping is doing for us?

It's giving us movements and freedom, and that's why we call it emotional freedom techniques.

Situation might still be there, and it might be hard like a block.

It might be really strong.

However, we can move around and the tapping kind of takes us from underneath to on top, and we can just start to feel better and we have a different perspective about the situation.

And that's the paradox.

That is the paradox that tapping.

And we do say negative words, then we tap.

We'll say, I'm angry, I'm angry, or whatever it is I'm feeling in a bad mood, I'm not coping very well.

We give ourselves permission to articulate how we feel.

And the paradox is that the energy changes the thought.

The tapping changes how that thought feels in our body.

So tap, tap, tap.

A few rounds of saying, I'm angry, or a few rounds saying, I can't resist cake, something changes.

And that's the fascination.

Yeah, it is amazing.

And I mean, I always feel it like a release when I do the tapping and we tap on the negative.

And it is, I'm angry, I'm frustrated, I'm annoyed, I'm hurt, I'm upset, whatever that is.

And we're tapping and we bring it all up and it kind of just feel like a bit of a purge.

And often that comes out with tears or yawning.

And we can.

We can sort of feel a bodily release, but it's also, like you said, if we're honing in, where we can feel that the tension in our shoulders or the tightness in our chest, we can feel it moving as well.

And that I think helps a lot of people understand that it is working.

This is static, stuck energy.

You know how you sort of said that the energy in our body, like we, we hold on to so much, don't we?

You don't even realize.

And I think with, with ADHD especially, we hold onto a lot in our body and there's a, there's a lot of chronic pain and inflammation with adhd.

A lot of people talk about they suffer with autoimmune issues, with back pain, jaw issues, you know, lock jaw.

And it's very much this sort of internalization of how they've been feeling for many years of not understanding why certain emotions, you know, come up, why they feel more sensitive or emotionally dysregulated or just where they've been holding on to a lot of stories and shame because they've not understood themselves.

So it contains in their body.

From very early on of understanding ADHD and eft, I've seen this connection that it's really effective because we've held onto so much without even understanding it.

The release actually is very powerful, especially old beliefs.

I know we've talked about this, you know, many times that EFT is fantastic for letting go of old stories, old beliefs, limiting beliefs about ourselves.

Can you tell us a little bit about some of the work that you do?

If someone comes to you and has this, this belief and it's a block and they're stuck and it could be about business, it could be about relationships, food.

How does tapping work for that?

Do you know, it's fascinating because I hold a lot of groups and one of the groups I do is for people to attract success and abundance in their life.

So what we do is, and it's so interesting to see is when we tap together as a group and they start thinking about what happens in my body when I think about being really successful or having a lot of money or putting my name out there physically, physically something, we feel that disruption.

If I say I make a lot of money or I'm successful, I'm good at what I do.

And then when we get together as a group, we tune into what is the sensation in the body when I say that, and then we tap on it together.

And very, very often, because we're tuning into our subconscious memories and thoughts, where this comes from starts to show up.

And then we use more tapping to clear it.

So that's how I would use it in a, in a limited belief situation, in a group, start to see that the story that we've made up about ourselves can start to change.

And we get such insights about ourselves.

Oh, I believe that because my mother said we're the kind of family who never do well or, oh, don't ever.

Don't ever put yourself out there.

Whatever it is.

We're holding on to these thoughts and these stories that have been taken on, and when we tap, they start to come to the surface and we can release them.

That's the beauty of it.

And the beauty of it also is how quickly it works, how quickly we get to those hidden memories.

Yeah, that's it.

When you talk about the effectiveness, the efficiency.

And again, I think it's so aligned for the ADHD community because we're impatient, we want things done.

We don't want to have to sit.

We may have gone through years of therapy already, and because the therapist hasn't picked up on the neurodivergence, we've gone round and round and round in circles.

And then what happens is with tapping, it feels quick.

It feels like, okay, we've addressed the root cause and we're able to kind of rewire and rewrite a new story.

And I think what you're saying about, you know, the group work as well, do you find that when you're tapping in a group, do you find that things move faster because of what's called in eft, the borrowing benefits?

Like how.

How do you sort of see things moving in a group?

I run lots of groups.

I run a group almost every day.

I have noticed that 10 minutes of group tapping will release things.

You could take an hour on a private session and in a group, you can release things within.

Within 10 minutes of group tapping because there's a connection of the energy, it multiplies.

We're working through different planes here.

When we talk about tapping, we're communicating on some in an area that's beyond verbal.

What's fascinating is you can even use other people's words and you start to feel better.

Because sometimes I've done groups where one person has got a pain in her leg, another person is angry with her sister, and another person is just talking about her daughter's messy bedroom.

And they all get relief, even tapping together.

Yeah.

So something's going on.

It's just.

It's fascinating.

And the more we do it, the more we like it.

There was something else I wanted to say before.

I'm also a kind of person who can't be still.

And I find when you're tapping, I like it because you're doing something doing of it that's really, really Good.

I think, especially for aviation, I think I've got some elements of that myself.

And I know that the fact that we're doing something, it's not meditation.

It's not let's sit still, let's breathe.

It's the doing.

It's the doing that appeals to us, and we're doing it, and it's calming the system down.

When I do my groups, I can sometimes just do even three minutes.

And I ask people to rate beforehand, 0 to 10, how anxious are they feeling, and they can come round from a 9 to a 4, 5 minutes, 10 minutes in a group.

That's what's incredible.

And I mean, what.

Going back to what you said then, I mean, I am a firm believer in sort of like a collective consciousness of being able to use our energy, and especially in this time in the world where there's just so much hostility and awful trauma going on.

And I really believe that when we can direct consciously our energy.

And I think tapping is really, really good for that.

And I think that's why.

One of the reasons, again, it's not scientific, but if we're tapping in a group and we are all kind of like focusing on positivity or focusing on healing, I think it can be really effective.

Yes.

And listen, we always believe what we tell ourselves.

So talking to our subconscious, our subconscious is listening to what we're saying.

And tapping is getting it in.

Tapping is getting it in.

I wanted to speak a little bit about trauma because you brought up the subject, but I think it might be interesting also to understand how tapping does help trauma.

Yeah, let's do that.

Because if we think about elements, what happens when somebody gets traumatized?

There's always going to be a shock, something when we think what does.

What goes on.

When there's trauma, there's something unexpected happens.

And very often somebody feels powerless and isolated.

That's usually what's happening.

Now, when we're tapping, we're actually doing the antidotes to that.

We're offering the opposite.

Because if we think about the three things about when somebody's shocked, what's most important is to talk about it.

So we're tapping and we're doing the talking part.

We're doing the talking part.

The tapping is helping us connect.

So when we're working with somebody who's been traumatized and we tap with them, we're connecting with them on such a deep level.

This is what's also fascinating.

When you tap with somebody else, we connect so much more than just talking, we're connecting really, really on a deep, subconscious way so that person feels not so isolated anymore.

They don't feel so alone.

That's what the tapping can do.

And the other thing is it empowers.

It gives us the ability to see there is another way I can respond, respond.

It sets us free.

So it empowers the client so they don't feel that helpless feeling.

So tapping for trauma is, I would say, the best method to use, and it's so empowering.

So, yeah.

So, I mean, what I'm hearing as well is that it can help build resilience because we can't control the outside world.

But what we can control is how we react to them and how we can hopefully lessen some of the anxiety and boost a bit of our resilience and hopefully, like, feel empowered that we can get through that day.

And I know that tapping is incredibly effective at calming and stabilizing our nervous system, regulating.

And also, when we.

I think with ADHD especially, we're very prone to overthinking, ruminating, getting really stuck in our heads.

And like you said at the beginning, we are able to gain more perspective.

And that is a really hard thing to gain when we believe the thoughts are going on in our head.

So to have a way of creating some distance and some space for me was probably one of the most powerful things.

Like, I've used tapping in so many different circumstances.

Sometimes if I've had a really crazy day and the kids have been driving me mad, work's been hectic, rushing around, I feel like I can't have and can't breathe.

I'll get in the shower and under the hot water, and I'll just tap and I'll tap and something will shift.

I'll get out the shower five minutes later, and I'll be like, I feel totally different about the whole day.

There'll be maybe more gratitude, like, thank God I've got my kids, thank God I'm working, and thank God I'm able to have a busy life.

And I'll get in the shower thinking, I'm so stressed, I'm so overwhelmed.

And for me, that perspective shifts has been probably the most powerful because I know that I'm prone to the negative thinking and the anxiety.

And I don't know what other modality would have helped me.

Maybe medication, I don't know.

But for me, it's always.

And you know what's really interesting?

Sometimes I forget about tapping and I'll forget and I think maybe it's an ADHD thing, and I forget that I even know it.

I've not done it for about a week and I'm feeling so overwhelmed and frazzled and stressed and exhausted and all these things.

And then something will just pop in my head and go, try the tapping.

And I'll be like, oh, okay.

So it's always there?

Yes, yes, it's always there.

Some people like to do it first thing in the morning and don't always wait till you're feeling, you know, till your number's gone up.

Just do it anytime.

I also wanted to mention about surrogate tapping a little bit if that's okay, because I think it's fascinating to know that not only can you help yourself, you can also to help a loved one by tuning into them and thinking about them.

Okay, so let's break this down.

Let's just, you know, for someone that's literally listening to this right now and tapping is new to them, explain sort of very simplistically what, what would happen.

Can you do surrogate tapping on your own or does it have to be in a session?

Okay, so yes to all of this.

First of all, let's, let's define self help and therapy.

Now.

If I've, if I want to just do something small for day to day, I can do it myself.

If I need to do something much deeper, if it's a deeper issue than I myself would go and speak to somebody, that's for sure.

So as regards helping a loved one or a child, I give, let me just give you some examples.

In the past couple of weeks.

Babies.

That cry, less children, karma at school.

So it's wonderful when the headmaster rings the parents up and say, I've noticed that Your son, your 11 year old son is much calmer at school.

Now the, in the session with me and the child has no idea this is happening.

The mother tunes into her child and has this imaginary dialogue.

Now, as if in the same way that you'd work as your own clients, we're talking to the child and the child becomes the client in our mind and we have a conversation with the child and the child feels the energy change.

Yeah, but they won't know it.

They won't know this.

Never know it.

They never know.

They could be in a different country.

You know, you can work for your adult child, you can work for your spouse, your partner.

If you want to do it for yourself.

This would be my suggestion.

You just tune into your child, you bring up a picture of them in your mind and then just tap on yourself and acknowledging what you see without any Judgment without any judgment.

So, you know, I'm looking at you, and I can see that you're looking angry today.

And you just do a few rounds of saying that to your child in your mind as you're tapping.

You know, when I say in your mind, they're in your mind, but you can say the words aloud.

I'm looking at you, and I'm noticing that you're really, really angry today.

And I'm noticing that you're really, really angry.

And even though I'm seeing you really, really angry, I acknowledge how you feel and I send you love.

And you would say that very repetitively for about two or three minutes.

You will notice a difference.

Yeah, one of my groups, the she said.

I said, bring up a picture of your daughter.

She said, she's 17 and she's all over the place.

ADHD, all over the place.

She's just running around the room.

That's what I can see.

I'm looking at you, and I can see you're running around the room, and I can see you're running around the room.

And I acknowledge your need to do that.

I acknowledge you're running around the room and I'm sending you love, and I acknowledge your need to do that round and around and around for about three minutes, just very repetitively.

And then I said, and how is she looking now?

She goes, oh, she's stopped.

She's not running around the room anymore.

And then she reported back to me the next day to say that the daughter was much karma.

Now, you want me to explain that?

I cannot.

Again, my work is anecdotal, and I could talk about this over and over again of different examples, and that's.

That's what surrogates happen means.

You tune into a loved one, you talk about them, you tap on yourself.

Sometimes one needs to release trauma from a loved one because they can't do it themselves.

It's too painful.

And a mother and a spouse can do that.

So I know this works really well with things like nail biting, bed wetting, junk food eating messy bedrooms.

I'm just thinking of lots of different things that I've seen it work really well for and what the underlying tone I always love about EFT is this sort of acceptance.

And, you know, that when we tap on the, you know, we do the beginning statements.

It's, you know, traditionally it's, you know, I love and accept myself and that love and accept myself, and I send myself.

Love is always about.

We're just recognizing where you are right now, and we're just accepting it.

And, you know, kids just need that, don't they?

It's.

It's not easy for us as parents in the moment.

Like, we can be as reactive, active.

And if we're neurodivergent ourselves and we're parenting other kids who are neurodivergent, it can be really hard like this often, you know, a butt of heads and lots of emotion, lots of dysregulation.

And it's only when we get a bit of distance and a bit of space in saying a session, like a surrogate session with you where we can say, you know, I can see that you're biting your nails and I can see that it's really hard for you to stop.

And I'm sending you love.

And I've seen.

I did it with my daughter actually, a few years ago, and I noticed a couple of weeks later, I didn't say anything, and I noticed that her cuticles and her nails were much better.

And I said to her, I said, I look at your beautiful nails and look at your cuticles.

She goes, oh, yeah.

I've tried really hard to not be picking them.

So it can be little things, can't it?

Just little shifts.

Yeah.

You know how you say you can't explain it?

I do believe there's this.

This quantum energy.

This, you know, it can sort of be explained with quantum physics.

I'm not scientifically minded, but we know that energy is everywhere.

And if we're able to direct as a force of good and help and send love and acceptance to a child or a loved one, hopefully, you know, there's always going to be some positive shift.

Sure.

It's the idea also that when we're feeling a lack of something, something.

So if we're feeling angry or fearful or whatever emotion we're feeling, it means there's a lack of something in that space.

So what are we doing?

We're filling it with love.

So when we say I send part, I send love to the part of me that's hurting, or I love and accept myself anyway.

The body is receiving love in that space.

And then it doesn't need to have that anger anymore and it doesn't need to have the pain anymore anymore.

So when we do it for ourselves, or whether we do it surrogately for a loved one, it's telling them, you know, I'm looking at you and I love you anyway.

That's what a child needs to hear more than anything else.

And because we're tapping on ourselves at the same time, if it's a mother, for example, the mother's calming herself down as she's tuning into her child because she's, she's still going to start feel better about it and she's taking the moment with me to step into that space to acknowledge the child and just get the connection with her.

And quite often the relationships really have a massive shift because she starts to see the child.

The child's only doing the best they, they can and they have that ability to see that.

But I love, love the idea that sending love to the parts of us that hurt is the healing.

And just by saying it, even if we don't believe it, say, and you know, I would encourage everyone to say I love and accept myself anyway.

Even if we don't believe it, our body needs to hear those words.

So that's the important thing.

Let the body hear those words.

They may never have heard them before.

Like if you've had a parent that was not emotionally connected or dysfunctional, there may have been, you know, neurodivergence going on that we didn't even know about and we've never heard those words then like you say, we need to hear it.

And I wanted to sort of move that on to inner child work as well because I know that EFT is really helpful in healing the younger version of us.

And you know, you've taught me beautifully and I've used it a lot and I've seen how healing it can be for the version of us to go back to the eight year old version of us who didn't get the care or the love or there's something happened in that situation and we go back and heal and how that then comes back to the present version of us and impacts, you know, us for the rest of our life.

It's, it's just beautiful because sometimes we need to go, for example, say to the seven year old child within us that's hurting and we go and help that child understand herself even so much more.

Especially you know, when children are being told, sit still, be still, you know, and we can't, we're giving back all of that to them in that memory and filling that space so that then they feel better, they feel connected and we're connecting to our own inner child.

So again, we're giving love to our inner child, we're connecting to our inner child where sometimes we've got to take away the shock of something that happened.

And once the inner child inside of us feels better, then we can live much more in the moment.

I mean, that's what we want to do is whatever's going on in our lives, we want to feel in the moment and have healthy responses and accept ourselves because none of us are perfect.

So we want to accept all parts of us.

And I always think like, guilt, shame, self judgment, a route to nowhere.

And I would banish them.

We banish, we banish any guilt, we banish any self judgment.

We banish shame because there's no, there's no plus side to having.

It doesn't serve us in any way.

And we're able to do that with the tapping.

So I'm going to leave it there, go to my website, all the details are there.

And yeah, let's bring some more tapping.

Let's bring some more calm to our day and feel a bit more empowered with our adhd.

Take care and I will see you for the next episode.

I.