Love Hero

Today I share a poem by Certified EFT Therapist and Supevisor-In-Training Jennifer Olden about learning Emotionally Focused Therapy.

LOVE HERO by Jennifer Olden

To the discouraged EFT therapist

You will fail. Utterly. Profoundly. You will fail. There will be a failed enactment, a failed session and a failed couple. And more than one. Just settle in and accept it.

You will fail. Regularly.

You will go home and wonder if you can do this EFT thing. If maybe you have some secret disability that prevents you from helping a couple. You will wonder if maybe you are too wounded, too old, or too dumb to ever really get it.

You will think about throwing in the towel and going back to working exclusively with individuals.

Then you will get in a fight with your husband or your mom or your best friend and you will behave terribly. Crazy. And all of this will confirm your suspicion that your original enthusiasm for EFT was misguided.

You will be on the precipice. Looking over the edge. Almost about to go back to cognitive behavioral therapy.

Maybe that’s where you are now. Ready to jump. In this moment…

And then you will remember. You remember something deep down: The only thing that has ever been healing in your whole entire life was feeling loved and vulnerable in the exact same moment. And how that lit everything up inside of you.

In that moment you were changed and you can’t not know that love heals. It’s the only thing that heals.

And so then you will get back on that horse and ride straight back to your office, ready to go again.

Taping, and bravely watching your tapes, and sharing them with a supervisor, and reading and doing workshops. And getting it right once in a while and then more often and then even more often, until you realize that you are literally saving lives. That the toddler children are no longer growing up in a home of tension and insecurity and that the trajectory of their entire life is changed. Because you got back on that horse and tried again, believed again. Remembered.

You will know that if you are called to EFT you must see through the failures to this other side.

Because you are a hero.

Remember that.