How to Improve Your Self-Esteem with EFT

Self-esteem plays a role in almost everything you do. People with a healthy self-esteem generally have better relationships and do better in life.Having healthy self-esteem allows you to accept yourself and live life to the fullest. Almost everybody suffers from periods of low self-esteem. Fortunately, there are ways to raise your self-esteem to a higher level.

How do self-esteem problems develop?
Before going into how to improve your self-esteem it’s important to know how self-esteem problems develop.

1. Criticism from our parents, family members and friends can have a serious impact on our self-esteem. If your parents make you think that you don’t live up to their expectations, this will have an impact on your sense of self-worth.
2. Criticism can also come from inside you and is just as harmful. This one is harder to notice. After a while you can get so used to this negative self-talk that you don’t even notice that you’re putting yourself down.
3. Unrealistic expectations can also have an impact on a person’s self-esteem. People who see themselves as having the qualities they admire usually have high self-esteem. People who don’t see themselves as having the qualities they admire may develop low self-esteem. It’s not that they don’t have these qualities, they just can’t see that they do because their self-image is trained that way.

EFT
There are several ways to build self-esteem with EFT. I will mention three of them below.
I’m assuming that you already know how to apply EFT. If this is not the case, you can first read the article How to Get Started with EFT.

The Personal Peace Procedure
The best known way to improve your self-esteem with EFT is mentioned by Gary Craig in his EFT manual. It’s called the Personal Peace Procedure. He compares it with removing trees in your negative forest. Every specific (negative) event is a tree and all trees combined make it a forest. So, how do you this?

1. Make a list of every bothersome specific event you can remember. Don’t stop until you have found at least a hundred events. Many people will find much more than a hundred. Make them as specific as possible. For example, don’t use “Dad abused me”, but use specific events like “Dad hit me in the kitchen when I was five years old”. Don’t bother about the intensity of the events yet. These events automatically qualify for the list if you remembered them.
2. Give each specific event a title as though it was a movie. Examples: Dad hit me in the kitchen; my teacher told me I was stupid.
3. When the list is complete, pick out the biggest trees in your negative forest and apply EFT to each of them. If any other aspects come up, consider them separate trees in your negative forest and apply EFT to them accordingly. Be sure to work on each event with all the different aspects until the intensity level of the event is down to a minimum.
4. After removing the biggest trees, go to the next biggest trees. Try to do 1 to 3 specific events per day for 3 months. After a while you will notice that the forest becomes less dense. Sunlight begins to appear. You probably won’t have to remove every single tree. After removing a certain amount of trees, similar trees can come down as well.

Notice how you feel after a couple of days. It happens quite often that the improvement will seem so subtle that you may not notice it. You might even dismiss it by saying “It was never much of a problem anyway”. If you got the intensity of a certain event down to 0, you sometimes even have trouble remembering the specific event. Be sure though that the people around you will notice the difference.

Obstacles and Beliefs
Robert Elias Najemy in his book Free To Be Happy with Energy Psychology by Tapping on Acupuncture Points suggests you approach the goal of raising your self-esteem by dealing with the obstacles that are in the way of achieving your goal. He mentions two types of situations where you can lose your sense of self-love, self-worth, self-esteem or self-acceptance.

1. Social programming. You have been falsely programmed by society to believe that our self-worth is dependent on many external factors. For example, you believe your are worthy and will be loved only when others accept you and love you or only when you succeed.
2. Matter of conscience. For example, you believe you are not a good person and not worthy of love when you do anything which is not in harmony with your conscience.

After making a list of the obstacles that you face right now in your life, you can now apply EFT to every single one of them (and their aspects).

You can find more information in the book or at this website.

Tapping the Positive
Patricia Carrington at MasteringEFT.com suggests another way to use EFT on improving your self-esteem. She emphasizes the human need for appreciation. Everyone wants to be appreciated for the things they do. By thanking yourself for small little things you do by making or eating breakfast, you build your self-esteem. What role can EFT play in this?

Without bothering to use any negative (“Even though…”) statement at the beginning of your sentence, simply tap on each EFT point in turn while repeating: “I’m grateful to myself for doing this.”, tapping in this phrase at each point.

Then sit back and notice what happens. You start noticing more and more occasions when you can thank yourself for little things, and when you tap these in, the habit of recognizing and thanking yourself for very small things you do becomes even stronger and you appreciate yourself more and more frequently. You finally feel that someone recognizes and appreciates the things you do.

Try It Now
Try one of the ways mentioned above or try all of them and see what works for you.

Share your experience in the comments below.

Gerber