Make The Abstract Concrete

Abstract (adjective): – existing as an idea, feeling, or quality, not as a material object.

When our clients come to us, they describe their problems so that we can try to help them, but some descriptions are more useful than others

For example, here are three common problems described in two ways:

“I have claustrophobia”
“When I step into a small room, my heart beats faster and my palms sweat”

“I am a people-pleaser”
“I say yes even when I want to say no to things my friends suggest”

“I procrastinate”
“The closer I get to finishing the project, the more I avoid doing the work.”

Which of these statements would give you a better place to start tapping?

You could, in theory, start tapping on “I am a people-pleaser” or “I have claustrophobia”, I think this is a hard way to start because you would be tapping on abstractions.

A concrete way of describing our problems is to say that they are thoughts, feelings and behaviours that do not work for us in particular circumstances.

Tapping works by changing feelings, thoughts and behaviours so that the client changes the way they are in the world.

Unfortunately, our capacity to think gives us ways to create abstractions and theories about why we are suffering. These theories, concepts, names, abstractions about our experience take us away from our sensory experience.

In one way, it may be less distressing to spend our time thinking about the problem, in another way it can get in the way of resolving the problem.

We talk about low self-esteem, co-dependency, procrastination, ‘borderline personality disorder’ and all the other conditions and syndromes that can appear on social media or in our Google searches.

While it might be useful to discuss diagnoses among ourselves or with professionals, such abstractions are not directly amenable to tapping.

Your client can’t show you low self-esteem, co-dependency etc because they are abstractions. They are labels for experience, not the experience themselves.

The further away from sensory experience we get, the more vague and untappable the problem gets.

Some things are just so vague that it is like wrestling with (or tapping on) fog.

So, how exactly do you tap on low self-esteem, procrastination, indecisiveness or all those other abstractions? These problems are very real to the people experiencing them, but they are difficult to tap on directly.

Tapping on sensory experience rather than abstractions.

Our experience is what we see, hear, feel, smell, taste, think, imagine, remember and do (thinking, imagining and remembering are seeing and hearing in our inner world).

When we tap, we are tapping on our internal sensory experience and how that makes us feel.

If you know about EFT, you will know one of the foundations of successful EFT / Tapping is to be specific about what you are tapping on.

When we talk about being specific, we are focusing on the sensory parts of our experience. The unpleasant feelings, the scary images, critical voices and painful memories that distress us, all happen at the level of sensory experience. (In ‘EFT speak’, these are sometimes called ‘aspects’).

If we spent all our time in our sensory experience our tapping would be simple, but because we can think and imagine, we can take ourselves out of our sensory world into the realm of abstraction.

As tappers, we aim to bring our attention to the realm of concrete experience so we can tap on things or the feeling of things.

How can you get from abstractions to something specific enough to tap on?

To make the intangible tap-able, we need to bring the problem out of the realm of the conceptual into the world of concrete experience.

From The Abstract To The Concrete

Step 1. State the problem.

Have the client state the [abstract] problem in a sentence.

For example: “I have low self-esteem”, “I am procrastinating”, “There is something wrong with me”, “My relationships are dysfunctional”, etc, etc.

Step 2. Go from the abstract to the concrete

One way of getting from the abstract to the concrete is to ask the ‘client’: “How do you know you have [problem]?”

For example: “How do you know you have low self-esteem?”

The answer to this question should bring you into, or at least closer to, the concrete world.

For example: “I feel worthless when I’m with other people”. This kind of answer is a description of concrete experience, if there is an experience there will be feelings, thoughts and behaviours, and they can give you something real to tap on.

If they say something like: “My interactions with people are strained” this is still somewhat distanced from concrete experience. What kind of interactions are we talking about, with which people, in what way are they strained?

If that is the case, ask the same question again, substituting the new description: “How do you know your interactions with people are strained”? Sooner or later, this question will bring you out of abstractions into sensory experience.

Another way is to ask them to remember a time when they encountered this problem, and have them describe what happens when the problem arises.

Step 3. Get sensory specific information

When they give you a description of a concrete experience, you can help them get more specific by asking some, or all, of the following questions.

“When you are in this situation:”
- “what are you seeing (in the world (externally) or in your mind (internally))?”
- “what are you hearing (in the world or in your mind)?”
- “what are you thinking?”
- “what are you feeling?”
- “what are you doing?”

Asking these questions forces the person to give you sensory-specific details of their experience.

For example:

“When I feel worthless when I am with other people”:

“I see other people looking at me in a critical way”.
“I hear my heart hammering in my chest”
“I think they think I’m boring”
“I feel worthless”
“I retreat into myself”.

These questions may give a lot of information, so it is useful to assess what is most worthy of tapping.

Step 4. Start where it hurts.

Releasing the most charged aspect is most likely to make the most significant difference in the problem.

The simplest way is to ask the client: “What is most noticeable?”

The most charged ‘aspect’ of the situation will be the one that is most noticeable (we are good at noticing distress. See How You Know What To Tap On? )

For example: the person with low self-esteem may report that the most noticeable part of the experience is the critical way people look at him.

Use the most noticeable aspect to start the tapping.

For example:

If you are an ‘EFTer’ you could start with: “Even though they are looking critically at me, I accept myself and how I feel”, etc.

If you use Intention Tapping you could start with: “I release all my emotional attachments to them looking critically at me”

Step 5. Work through the list of sensory specific aspects.

From time to time, return to the list of concrete aspects and ask the client what is most noticeable now.

Repeat the tapping process on each aspect of experience as necessary.

It may be that resolving just one or two of the most noticeable aspects will relieve the others automatically.

Return to the list and find out what is now most noticeable.

Referring to the list of ‘aspects’ has the added advantage of giving you a way to test your work as you are going along and for the client to have a sense of making progress.

Step 6. Test your work

All good tappers test their work.

Invite the client to go back to the original concrete experience, in our example, “I feel worthless when I’m with other people”. As they imagine being with other people, what do they notice now?

Is there anything left of the concrete that needs to be processed?

If not, go back to the client’s original ‘abstract’ problem.

What is that problem like now?

It may have changed a little, a lot or not at all.

For complex problems, there are probably a lot of intertwined parts to the whole problem, so you will likely need to return to “How do you know?” to uncover more aspects to work with.

The Hidden Bonus

In addition to helping make the untappable more tappable, this process has another benefit.

One of the reasons some clients focus on abstractions is that losing yourself in abstractions and theories can be less painful than having to deal with the sensory experiences that underlie the abstraction.

By encouraging clients down into sensory experience, you are helping them get in touch with their life as an experience rather than a concept. By being able to connect and soothe the pain of the experiences, they can live in their mind and body, not just their mind.

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