What Are You Noticing?

During the tapping process, the obvious question to ask your client is “What are you feeling?”, or “How are you feeling?”. Practitioners from a counselling background often default to this kind of question.

While this is an obvious question to ask because our clients are often feeling unhappy in some way (that is why they are clients), it may not be as helpful as you imagine.

The problem with the question is that we don’t just have feelings.

If you check in with your inner experience for a few moments you will probably find an ever-changing mix of feelings, emotions, mental images, physical sensations, mental talk (thoughts), memories and imaginings.

Of course feelings are important, they inform our actions and how we understand the world.

Naturally, clients who feel bad want to tell us about all the difficult, or ‘bad’, feelings they have that they would like to change, but feelings don’t come from nowhere.

Just as events in our outer world provoke feelings, ’events’ in our inner world can also provoke feelings. Your clients may have ‘bad’ feelings in the session which have been triggered by something they remember or imagine. The interplay between internal states, mental images, thoughts, sensations etc are the cause of many problems.

As a simple example, let us imagine that we have a client who feels very criticised in her daily life.

You could just tap on the feeling criticised, which may help by itself.

However, if we dig a little deeper we may find that the client sees her mother’s angry face in her mind’s eye and hears her saying “You are so stupid!” in a cruel tone of voice, which leads her to feel criticised. The feeling of being criticised is the last part of a three-step process that goes on in her mind almost unconsciously.

The danger of just asking “What are you feeling?” is that you miss out the important driving steps of the process that is causing the feeling in the first place.

You might be thinking, wouldn’t clients tell you this anyway?

They could, and sometimes they will, but you are the practitioner, the ’expert’, so they might assume that feelings are the most important thing (especially if they have been to counselling).

What is a question?

A question, any question, is a way of directing someone’s attention to get some information.

To answer a question, you have to narrow your focus and exclude all the irrelevant information to search for the answer.

For example: what is your favourite colour?

Answering that question requires you to exclude all the parts of your experience that is not related to colours. You probably don’t let your attention rest on the ache in your shoulder, or what your boss said to you yesterday, or what you want for dinner.

A question works by focusing on what is wanted and excluding everything else.

By asking our client how she is feeling, we may (inadvertently) exclude other aspects of her experience. She might not tell you about her mental image of her angry mother’s face, or what her mother said because you just asked about the feeling.

The solution is to ask a question that is narrow enough to focus on your client’s internal experience, but broad enough to encompass all their internal experience that is going on at the moment.

What are you noticing?

Asking your client “What are you noticing?” during the tapping has several benefits.

The question can include all their internal experiences: feelings, sensations, thoughts, images, memories, imaginings etc, it is not restricted to one element of their experience.

The question filters their experience for what is most noticeable, which will be those elements that have the greatest intensity: the more painful something is, the more noticeable it becomes. If you have ever had a stone in your shoe, you will remember just how noticeable that was.

If I were to ask our imaginary client “What are you noticing?” after a round of tapping, she might say: I can see my mother’s angry face glaring at me.

If I was using standard tapping / EFT, I might say “Let your attention rest on her angry glaring face and keep tapping”, continuing until the intensity of that image drops.

Or if I was using IEP / Intention Tapping, I might tell my client to say “I release all my emotional attachment to that image of her glaring angry face” and continue tapping.

Then I could ask them “What are you noticing now?” which will elicit the next most charged element of the issue.

By using this simple process, we could work through each part of that sequence of the ’engine’ that generated that feeling of being criticised. Now that the process that created the feeling has been dismantled, a much deeper resolution will have been achieved than if you just tapped on the feeling.

One other benefit is that this approach requires much less detective work, you just ask one question and pay attention to the results.

Tip

If your client is mystified by the question (some clients don’t pay much attention to their inner world), you can give some examples of what they might be noticing.

You could say, “What are you noticing? It could be images, thoughts, feelings, sensations, memories or imaginings, whatever it is just fine.”

By giving some examples, clients who are not sure what is going on inside, or do not think it is important, can be encouraged to unpack their difficulties into their components.

After being asked a few times clients usually get the hang of it and will volunteer useful information without needing hints.