Recently I did some work with a 9 year old boy, who had issue with biting his nails. Since he was only 9 my choice of wording needed to take this into account. What is most important with this age group is to listen to their language, they cannot understand the word stress or EFT. Having that in mind, I noticed that he is very nervous. I understood this was most likely because firstly he did not know what to expect from session, and secondly my Russian accent! So I made a joke about my accent and asked him to sit in my recliner, which he liked a lot.
I asked permission to hold on his hand and introduced him to tapping by showing him how it would feel when I tapped. Then I asked him about his favorite color and what he likes to do. When he answered that he likes drawing I understood that this boy is visually minded. I asked him to imagine a balloon in his favorite color blue flying away and gently started to tap on being nervous.
As he relaxed he told me that he and his father had been in a car accident. He got his leg trapped and he was afraid that he would die. He said that he started to bite his nails right after the accident and he was biting them when he was nervous, at home and at school. So we tapped on fear and feelings of being trapped and after he released those we got to the nails.
I brought him back to the flying away balloon and we started to tap on the pain in his hands as a result of him biting his nails. After that I asked him to imagine his hands healthy and we tapped on that. Finally we tapped on how he will be happy when he has healthy nails and how good everybody will feel, including him. He had a very strong connection to his mum and making her happy was very important to him.
As a result of this session he has stopped biting his nails almost completely. His mum reported that from biting them all day long, it diminished to 3-4 times a day. So I saw him once more to reinforce success, and the positive healthy feeling of no more nail biting. The last update was that he had stopped the habit completely. This was such fantastic news, and I found the whole processes fascinating to work with.
This article was featured in Energist magazine.
