Nick Ortner
He had been in this position before, but that didn’t make it any less frustrating.
A traditionally trained psychologist, he was working with his client, Mary, who had struggled with a severe water phobia since she was a child. Mary wasn’t just afraid of swimming, she was afraid of water in all forms—from bathtubs to rain to oceans to swimming pools. Her level of fear was so extreme that she couldn’t even bathe her two children and was plagued by nightmares about water. This had been going on as long as she could remember. Now in her 40s, she had sought Dr. Callahan’s help.
Dr. Callahan was doing his best, but it just wasn’t working. He had been treating Mary for the past year, using all the traditional psychotherapy techniques in his tool belt: cognitive therapy, hypnosis, relaxation therapy, rational-emotive therapy, systematic desensitization, biofeedback and more. They were all he knew, and they were the techniques that were accepted by psychologists, psychiatrists, and the public at large.
This wasn’t the first time those techniques had failed. Dr. Callahan had been disappointed with the lack of concrete results and the length of time it took for change to happen for many clients. He and Mary had made only minimal progress in the year they had worked together. She was able to sit on the edge of Dr. Callahan’s swimming pool and put her feet in the water, but she was full of anxiety when she did. After sessions near the pool, she left with a pounding headache from the stress of the treatment!
Dr. Callahan, ever curious about the functioning of the body and mind, had around that time been studying the body’s meridian points. Meridians, the basis of the ancient Chinese medical system of acupuncture, are defined as energy channels that carry the vital life force, or qi, to the organs and others systems of the body. Running up and down either side of the body, each meridian is associated with a different organ—stomach, gallbladder, kidney, etc. Each meridian also has what’s called an “endpoint,” a specific location where you can access the energy channel on the surface of the body. This point can be manipulated using acupuncture needles or simple touch (acupressure) to balance or unblock the energy flow through that particular meridian.
In one therapy session, Mary revealed that thinking about water caused a terrible feeling in the pit of her stomach. In a flash of insight, it came to Dr. Callahan that tapping on the stomach meridian endpoint—just below the eye—might alleviate Mary’s pit-of-the-stomach sensation. So he asked her to tap that spot with her fingertips.
Mary did as she was asked. To their mutual surprise, after just a few minutes of tapping, she soon exclaimed, “It’s gone! That horrible feeling I get in the pit of my stomach when I think about water is completely gone!” She went to the edge of the swimming pool to see if her fear had changed as well, and discovered that she felt no anxiety at being close to the water.
From that day forward, her water phobia and her nightmares about water were gone. That was 30 years ago, and Mary is still free of her fear today.
Imagine Dr. Callahan’s astonishment at this turn of events. After working so hard with Mary, trying the range of conventional psychotherapy techniques and even some alternative techniques, he happens on the solution—tapping below the eye! And, perhaps more important, the phobia remains cured for 30 years, never to affect Mary again. How did this happen?
The following is an excerpt from The Tapping Solution (Hay House 2013), by Nick Ortner. To learn more about Ortner and other inspirational authors, such as Dr. Wayne Dyer, Doreen Virtue, Congressman Tim Ryan, Kris Carr and more, attend the Hay House I Can Do It! event, in New York City, Sept. 20 and 21. For more information, visit HayHouse.com or call 800-654-5126. See ad on page 11.
