Monthly Archives: August 2011

When You Think God Doesn’t Want You To Be Happy

People who do EFT rarely talk about the problems caused by religion because it seems insensitive and incorrect but I want to discuss anyway. Religion can play with people’s minds in a deep way that interferes with the results they can get with tapping.

I have no ax to grind about religion. I wasn’t abused by nuns, priests, rabbis, shamans or evangelists. Most of the time, religion doesn’t even come up when tapping. But sometimes when it does, it’s a miserable obstacle. Religion locks minds to absolutes and fixed ways of thinking that subvert critical and logical thinking in ways that may interfere with mental and emotional healing. In order to heal, you have to change and tapping can lead to the necessary changes but those can’t happen when religious indoctrination stands in the way.

I had a client who was a devout Christian. He was troubled because he didn’t want to go to heaven. We talked a lot about his beliefs about God and heaven. He sincerely believed heaven was a place in the clouds where you sat around playing harps and praying all the time. He feared eternal boredom. Bored in heaven. In heaven there is no beer. Heaven is boring. God doesn't want me to be happy By the way, this concept of Heaven is not mentioned anywhere in the Bible. He picked up this concept of heaven through pop culture. He also believed none of his good friends were going to make it to heaven because they were all such sinners. He didn’t want to spend eternity without them. He could be good and go to heaven and be bored and lonely forever. Or he could sin and achieve eternal damnation and spend eternity with his friends. This was an enormously pressing and vexing dilemma for him.

I asked him to describe God for me. He told me God is a loving father and creator. We tapped on “Even though I have this fear my loving God will sentence me to eternal boredom…” That didn’t produce much change.

We reframed the problem and reworded the setup phrase a number of times but he wasn’t feeling much better.

After a number of tapping sessions, (not rounds but hour long sessions.) he finally budged a little. Very little. We found some relief with the setup phrase “Even though I can’t trust an infinitely creative and loving God to do what’s best for me, I deeply and completely love and accept myself.” This created a bit of constructive cognitive dissonance. He realized the absurdity of the phrase by tapping on it. As he tapped, he began to trust God more although he still had his concerns about eternity and the boredom he was sure he faced. But at least he was able to change a little bit.

Very occasionally religious beliefs impede progress in a session but EFT should never be used as a way to subvert anybody’s religious beliefs. I have yet to work with anybody whose religion worshiped a God who doesn’t want people to be happy and healthy so if you think God wants you to be miserable and doesn’t want you to be healed of your problems, tap on it.

For more information about EFT, buy my ebook, Transform Your Life With EFT from Amazon.

It is also available in other formats for other ereaders from Smashwords.

My latest book, Manifesting From The Heart: Using Heart Energy to Achieve Reality Transformation is now out. If you have wondered why the Law of Attraction doesn’t seem to work for you, this book could have the answers you are looking for.

Manifesting From The Heart is also available in other formats from Smashwords.