Healing Anxious OCD Thoughts with A Root Cause Roadmap
I was 6 when I went to grief therapy for the first time, and I was told:
“You are anxious
You have clinical OCD
It is genetic
Take this pill little girl.”
Anxious obsessive thoughts are not a life sentence.
They are a natural side effect of traumatic loss. In my case, the sudden and traumatic death of my big brother.
Numbing these symptoms would have robbed me of fully healing the root cause.
Somatic Therapies: Body based techniques that move unprocessed emotion (like grief, shock, anger, and fear) out of the body on a physiological level.
Before I found somatic therapies (lke EFT Tapping, EMDR, Inner Child and Parts Work), I would hear a list of two dozen issues and feel overwhelmed. I felt like 26 topics would take at least 26 sessions (or 26 separate practitioners):
Anxiety
Limiting beliefs
Chronic migraines
Gut issues
Public speaking phobia
Procrastination
Addictive behavior
Lack of boundaries
Trust issues
Fear of getting hopes up
Constant second guessing self
Acne
Anger
Financial blocks
Career stagnation
But every session I lead or teach reaffirms that 26 issues usually stems from one similar root.
Or more specifically, the unprocessed emotions from that one root.
As a little girl in the 90s, I didnt have the tools to fully release the extent of my grief and anger.
Instead of processing the emotions, my body stored them, and they would bubble up as emotional and physical outbursts for the next decade.
It wasnt until I started learning and teaching EFT Tapping that I saw how random symptoms are all connected by the unprocessed emotions at their root.
EFT Tapping: Emotional Freedom Technique, nicknamed tapping because you tap stress reducing pressure points that detox the body’s organs and related emotions.
The liver stores and detoxes anger.
The lungs store and detox grief.
The kidneys store fear.
The gallbladder stores and detoxes uncertainty and doubt.
These are emotional generalizations based in Chinese Medicine but they reveal how seemingly random issues are connected:
Acne, anxiety, caffeine sensitivity, anger, and insomnia: I had chronic cystic acne from age 12 to when I found tapping. I also had a short fuse with my family, and that fuse wasn’t helped by waking up around 3 am every night. If I had coffee I had the jitters immediately. Anxious every morning but better by dinner. Random symptoms right? No they are all connected to the liver.
The liver detoxes anger.
If you have a stagnant liver, it won’t be as efficient at processing big emotions or a big chemical load.
An overburdened liver can’t process alcohol or caffeine as easily. If you’re not detoxing impurities, those impurities come out in your skin.
Every organ has a 2 hour “wake window.” Guess when the liver’s wake window is? 1-3 am which is when I notoriously woke up spinning with ideas.
Guess Whose wake window comes right after? Lungs which store unprocessed grief 👋🏾
When I tapped on the grief and anger surrounding my brother’s death, I felt clear-headed, my anxiety changed, my skin cleared up, my sleep improved, I haven’t had a migraine in over ten years.
I could create a bullet point list of symptoms around every organ, which is why i made it into a bonus training inside my Practitioner cohort this fall but You dont need to know which organ relate to which symptoms to see them work.
To this day, clients and students apologize for a long list of issues… as if they will have to work for years unpacking each one by one.
But that is how the mind works: It spirals into thinking it has to figure out every problem one by one.
The body is wiser than the mind.
With EFT, we don’t psychoanalyze the surface issues.
With EFT, you tune into the somatic experience of the issue (soma = body).
Somatic Experience: The body sensations related to an issue, event, or belief.
The somatic experience (physical sensation connected to the issue) will give you more insight into the issue than analysis paralysis.
Ask yourself: When you think of your biggest block, what is going on inside the body? For me it would have been anxiety and inner critic. The somatic experience of that would be: Gripping in the gut, Clenching in the throat, Fuzzy behind the eyes.
Then ask something I teach all my practitioners to ask: Is this a brand new feeling? Or familiar?
Familiar!
How old is it? Where were you? What was happening?
Follow the thread to the first time you felt that way.
By feeling the feelings safely with EFT, you can potentially pull out the root in one session versus 26 sessions later.
Does it take finesse? Yes
Does it take an awareness of trauma to know if you or a client is ready to pull up the root safely?
Yes.
I’ll save the reason for that for my live training, but for now take a look at your current blocks.
List the physical, mental, emotional, and relational patterns that block you.
Don’t be overwhelmed by a long list.
These are just branches.
My Root Cause Roadmap
Tap the nervous-system regulating EFT pressure points as you journal the following:
1. What triggers the block? Tap on the recent and future triggers.
2. What beliefs make it worse? Tap on the beliefs.
3. Who or what taught you each belief? Tap on the past memories.
4. What’s worse: The pattern or the way you beat up for still struggling with this pattern? Tap on the inner critic. (Bonus: tap on whose voice that critic really is as I find it usually didn’t start with you.
5. What would you do if you were free from the block? Tap on the resistance to living as if you’re free now.
6. What loss might you face if you break free entirely? What relationships or comfort zones would change?
7. Who would be “off the hook” if you were free from their wounding? Tap and honor the pain. Tao to reconcile the fact that your freedom might be the retribution.
I’d have broken free much earlier if I had found ANY of my students.. who have tools like EFT Tapping, Somatic therapies, Energy psychology, Inner Child Work, EMDR breathwork… any of these tools would have given me my power back decades before I found it.
Wherever you are on your healing journey, you’re not alone. If you need help, I can connect you with one of my graduates who’s been trained to find the root. If you want to be the professional who digs up the root with others, explore first steps here.
With practitioner training kicking off in 2 weeks I am reminded of my roots… that little girl that motivates me to heal and to teach.
Thank you to her, and to yours,
Your tapping mentor and cheerleader,
Jackie Viramontez
