The memory is what we call an implicit memory and like the Roots of the TREE it is buried and not apparent from the surface.Įnergy is the life force of the TREE. Whatever happened back then, Becky doesn't consciously remember that now but her mind-body system does. It could be that she was surprised by one as a child or saw a rat-infested horror film when she was too young, or even that her mother was afraid of rats and she learned by imitation. Somehow, long ago, Becky learned to be afraid of rats. In that moment Becky is not conscious of memories of previous experiences with rats but below the level of her awareness a little bit of her brain called the amygdala will be matching that trigger to the roots of past emotional experiences. When Becky hears the word 'rat' she does not stop and think about why rats are scary or what they remind her of she just gets scared instantly and automatically. The Roots of a tree are underground from the surface you can't see them. It is enough for her to hear the word and imagine a rat in the room. Our emotional systems can't tell the difference between what we imagine, what we remember and what is coming in through our senses.įor Becky the trigger, the Trunk of her TREE, is the word 'rat' as Gary says 'what would you do if someone put a rat in this room?' Becky does not need to see a rat. It could be something we see, hear, touch, smell or taste or it could equally be something that we imagine or remember seeing, hearing, touching, smelling or tasting. Every emotional arousal has something out there that sets it off, a trigger.

The Trunk of the tree is the bit above the ground that you can see. I'd like to share the TREE model with you and to take you through it with the illustration of Becky and her encounter with the Rat from Gary's excellent EFT Course DVD.

We can use EFT to clear these unwanted trees so that our emotional forests can flourish.ĮFT Newcomers often ask 'How do I find the right words to use?' Well, the beauty of this TREE model is that it helps you to craft the words of the set up phrases. Our emotional forests are filled with healthy trees of joy, compassion, love and resourcefulness and yet there are also weed-like trees of fear, shame and anger that, though they may have been helpful once, have now become a problem.

In my teaching I like to extend this metaphor of the trees and the forest to offer my trainees a useful model that can act as a guide to help navigate through an EFT session. In his excellent article in the tutorial series,, Gary compares an emotional problem to a forest of trees.

Tapping tree form for eft