Tethering The Goat

If you desire to dig a well to reach water, your efforts are more fruitful if you dig one 100-foot-deep hole than if you dig ten holes each 10 feet deep.
– Dan Millman

Have you ever had a client that doesn’t seem to be able to stick to the tapping task at hand?

Some clients are diligent and stay focused on the issue they are working with, other clients like to wander, tapping on one issue will lead to the next, and to the next, and to the next …

People are association machines, our minds love to link one thing to another, and to another, and another … this can be useful in many contexts. When it comes to a practitioner and client trying to work on just one issue, a client’s tendency for free association can be a problem

Gary Craig, creator of EFT, noticed that clients would start tapping on one thing and then end up on a thought, memory or feeling that was far away from the thing they started tapping on (he called these phenomena ‘daisy-chaining’).

Regular tapping seems to bring unconscious connections to the surface and make it easy for a client to follow those connections. More recent versions of tapping such as Steve Wells’ Intention Tapping (IEP) make use of this tendency to follow unconscious connections help the client unpack complex issues.

Traversing these unconscious networks of feelings, thoughts, meanings and memories is useful, but it can mean that a client can start with an issue that is important to them, but end up miles away from where they started in a short space of time.

If someone wants a result on one specific issue, but as soon as they start tapping they wander here, there and everywhere, how can they get the result they want?

How do we as practitioners respectfully, and elegantly, keep them on track?

Imagine you have a goat.

You probably wouldn’t just set it free to wander and feed where it wished. Goats like to wander and to eat, if they get free they would happily eat your neighbours’ vegetables, devastate your flower beds, even eat the clothes off a washing line!

To make sure that doesn’t happen, you could tether your goat to a post. When they are tethered, they can graze within the circle allowed by the tether, but wouldn’t be able to roam far and wide: your washing and your neighbour’s vegetables would be safe!

To help ‘wandering’ clients stay with a specific issue, ’tethering’ them to that issue can help them get the results they want.

There are five steps in the ’tethering’ process.

1. Deciding where to put the post

The first thing you need to do is to find out what is the issue they want to work on.

‘Wandering’ clients often have many things they would like to work on. Unfortunately, you can’t work on all of them all at once, so you need to choose just one issue to focus on. This issue will be the post they are tethered to.

What your client chooses to work on could either be based on what is most important to them, or, if the client is vulnerable and the issues are intense, what is the safest thing to work on (see my article The Safety Ladder for more on this).

Choosing the most important, or safest issue, gives you the focus for the tapping session.

2. Securing them to the post

Now you have the post (issue), how are you going to ’tether’ them to that post?

The ’tether’ in this case is an explicit agreement from the client to focus their attention on just this issue.

This agreement is important because people (in general) want to honour their agreements, and that gives you a powerful way of encouraging them back to the issue if they stray too far.

For example:

Let’s imagine that your client wants to work on the way they feel intimidated when they speak to their boss.

You could say something like: “So we agree that the issue we are going to focus on for the moment is the way you feel intimidated by your boss, is that right?”

They can either agree, or choose something else to agree on.

Getting the agreement is securing the tether, don’t move forward until they have agreed on something: no commitment means no tether. If they can’t agree on what to work on, this may be an issue that is worth exploring in its own right.

Let them know that you will bring them back to this issue if they seem to be wandering off course.

Note: The ’length’ of the tether is up to you, if your client has a strong tendency to wander, keeping the tether short may help, if they need a bit more room to explore the issue, then they may need a longer tether. You need to experiment to find the optimum balance of freedom and constraint for your client on this issue. Different clients may need different levels of constraint, and the same client may need different levels of constraint on different issues.

3. Tapping and tracking

Start working on the chosen issue.

As you are tapping and the client is processing things, you may notice that they seem to be straying from the original issue.

It may be obvious from what they are telling you that the things they are focusing on at that moment are directly related to the issue they started with.

For example: if the person who feels like they are intimidated by their boss finds themselves working on a memory where they were punished by a school teacher, it’s not unreasonable to think this may have some relation to their feelings about their boss. It’s not the same, but it is probably related.

If you are not certain if it is related, you could say: “Ah, that is interesting, and how is that related to [the agreed issue]?”

This sentence acknowledges the importance of what they are tapping on and asks the client to assess how it fits in with their issue.

4 Gently pulling on the tether to bring them back to the issue

If the client seems to have wandered too far from where they started, you need to be able to bring them back to the issue they agreed on.

You can say something like: “Let’s go back to the original problem … What’s that like now?”

This brings the original issue to mind for the client, gives them a moment to tune into it, so they can assess what has changed and what still needs to change.

There are three possible responses to this question:

• The most likely result is that there has been a change, but there is still some work to do. Use the new information to guide more tapping.
• If the issue has been fully resolved, you can to move on to the next issue for the client.
• If the issue is still the same, you will need to change your approach.

5 Rinse and repeat

This process can be repeated several (many) times during the session, bringing the client back to the issue when they wander, while you work to address it.

The client may resolve the issue in one session, in which case you can move on to the next issue.

If the issue is difficult or tangled, you may only have made some progress in resolving it, in which case you can agree with the client to revisit it in your next session.

Tips

• If the client wants to change their issue because something more important has come up, that’s OK. Acknowledge it and set up a new agreement.
• If the client seems to have bitten off more than they can chew, you can soften your approach, let the tether grow longer or work on a different safer issue.
• If they can’t keep to the agreement and keep wandering off, perhaps that needs some investigation.