Aspects: The “Pieces Of The Puzzle.”

An “aspect” is one of the individual elements that make up an emotional issue.

Some Issues Are Simple

Some issues brought to an EFT practitioner are straightforward: e.g. a client unable to dance in her stage play. There were no aspects in this issue, it was an uncomplicated self-doubt and was easily resolved.

Some Issues Are Complex

Most issues are more considerably more complex: e.g. a client with a phobia of driving across a bridge. A few questions elicited the fact that years earlier, during a bitter divorce, she had been driving across a bridge and had been hit by another vehicle. The extreme emotional turmoil of the divorce became associated in her unconscious memory, with the accident itself. It was not possible to deal with the phobia as a simple issue, feelings surrounding the divorce had to be dealt with and they each constituted a separate issue, or “aspect.”

Problems Heal One Layer At A Time

Aspects are like different trees in a stand of wood that is obscuring a person’s view of a beautiful landscape. Chopping down one tree won’t improve the view much, but if several key trees are removed, the whole stand seems to collapse and the view is now completely unobstructed. This means that each aspect that makes up an issue must be “collapsed” or de-energized one by one. At some point, the whole problem disappears.

Each Aspect Heals In Turn

Clients need to know that if their issue is complex, each aspect of it needs to be eliminated. Each aspect may have five or six or more emotions associated with it, and each emotion may have to be eliminated to collapse that aspect. Along the way, as each aspect is collapsed, they will feel temporarily better after each session, until the next “aspect” surfaces to be healed.

Unconscious "Switching"

Some clients experience such total collapse of an aspect that they do not even notice, and they switch to another element of their problem. E.g. a client who was upset with her husband, switched from anger at one incident, to anger about an entirely different incident. She assumed she was still dealing with the original anger and asked why she was still feeling this emotion. Only when questioned did she realize she had switched aspects and no longer experienced any emotional reaction to the first incident.

All Pieces Must Be Processed

Some clients mistakenly assume that their problem has come back, when in fact the aspect that has been treated with EFT has not come back. It is always another aspect which is often closely related but not identical. E.g a client who had dealt with her outrage and helplessness around a childhood situation: many months later debilitating feelings of shame surfaced. She assumed that the problem had “come back,” when it hadn’t – she had needed to deal with the uppermost feelings of rage and helplessness before the shame could surface. When it did, it was collapsed quickly, in a single session, probably because it was the final “piece of the puzzle.”

A client who understands what an aspect is, and how it fits into an emotional issue, will be more able to measure her progress and the effectiveness of EFT than a client who doesn’t know about aspects.