CASE STUDIES
This case study records theway I worked with a young woman who came to me for her fear of public speaking. We did two sessions which was enough to resolve this issue for her and I used IEMT exclusively. I have my client’s permission to write up this case study. I will call her Susan – not her real name.
Susan wanted to be a university lecturer but was afraid of giving talks and presentations. She was about to complete her PhD and had to do a viva in order to pass. She said that her fear of public speaking affected her confidence and led to not taking opportunities. The problem was exacerbated by criticism, large numbers of people in the audience and the presence of those in authority.
Session 1
Susan had identified four memories she thought had contributed to her fear and so we started here. I had shown her the eye movement protocol and we had practised with a memory unrelated to the problem which on a scale of 1 to 10, she rated at a ‘5’ in terms of the level of emotional disturbance on recalling it. After the eye movements were completed, the emotional level dropped to a ‘1’. For more information on how eye movements reduce the emotion in a memory, go here.
The first related memory we started with we labelled ‘secondary school’. After 2 rounds of eye movements, the memory had lost all its effect on Susan. When thinking of the other 3 memories, Susan said they weren’t bothering her at this point and so we did not work on them as there was no emotional level to neutralise.
I then asked Susan to think about giving a talk and to rate the level of negative emotion she felt out of 10. She said ‘8’. I then used a protocol called the integrative kinaesthetic pattern and asked her to recall the first time she remembered feeling this level of this emotion. A memory came up and using the eye movement protocol, the memory faded and stopped bothering her. When I asked her about the negative emotion she felt associated with public speaking she had previously rated as ‘8’, she said it was now a ‘6’. I asked her to remember the first time she remembered this ‘6’ level of disturbance and she found another memory which after a single round of eye movements ceased having any kind of emotional charge for her. It is important to know that you do not have to disclose the content of the memory.
I asked her to think now about delivering a talk or presentation which she had started out rating at ‘8’ then dropped to ‘6’. It was now a ‘5’. We worked on 2 more memories in the same way as before at the end of which the level of emotion when thinking of delivering a talk remained at ‘5’.
As we worked, Susan gained more clarity about the issue stating that, as part of her fear of speaking in front of others, she was afraid of going blank.
When working with IEMT, we look at what we call identity issues – beliefs we might hold about ourselves that are tied up with the problem. The work we had already done had cleared the way for Susan to gain more clarity about the issue and she came up with the identity statement “I am a fraud” and also recognised that she felt concerned about her ability to recall and that she might speak in a confusing way.
It was now the end of the first session. I checked back over the memories we had worked on. The eye movement work continues impacting the client even after it is finished. Consequently, all the memories we had worked on were now without any measurable disturbance for Susan.
Second Session
Susan had sent me an email saying that she was feeling more confident about her upcoming viva and felt that the fear had definitely receded. She was though anxious about being able to answer questions, going blank and not know what she is talking about.
Identity work was indicated here. I explained to Susan that we are different in various parts of our lives; different as an employee, as a parent, as a daughter and so on. We took her anxiety around answering questions for which I elicited several identity states namely, ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘self’, ‘you’. We locate these different parts in space along with the age of that part and what is going on around that part as we think about it. As a result of what Susan said in answer to these questions, I worked with ‘I’, ‘me’ and ‘you’. Part of what we do is to endeavour to bring each of the parts to the client’s current age. This is because we all have parts that have got a bit stuck at a younger age when there are identity issues, usually because of something that happened at that time the client couldn’t fully deal with. In Susan’s case, the ages didn’t come to her present age but the emotion around giving a talk was now ‘4’ instead of an ‘8’, so something had shifted.
Since Susan had identified the notion that she was uncomfortable with authority figures being present when she spoke, I decided to work on the identity of the authority figure and asked her to get an internal representation of that. After we had worked on this with eye movements, her emotion around giving a talk dropped to ‘3’.
I then worked with what we call physiological state accessing cues to further bed down the changes and to embody a more resourceful state answering questions. I did this by getting her to identify a resource state she thought would be useful when doing so. She then put her body in the negative state she previously experienced, moving from one to the other whilst really feeling the positive state in her body when in that particular state. She continued practising this at home.
This is part of the email Susan sent me following this second session:
“In the week after our session, I have felt really positive and confident in situations I have previously been anxious with. I think the work in particular on the “authority figure” has shifted something for me and has also affected how I feel about relating to people in general. I feel more open to listening and also sharing more of myself rather than being guarded or fearful that I will respond badly and be judged negatively. I feel fine about my viva and am even looking forward to it.”