The Emotional Scale
Have you ever experienced a difficult situation that still makes you cringe when you think about it, even if years have passed since it happened? That’s a traumatic experience. Now these traumatic experiences may have a financial side to it, and that can turn into a financial trauma, that may linger in your system for years, even decades.
At the moment, you may not even realize that what just happened will turn into a financial trauma for you, but when the experience stays in your body for years, we call it a financial trauma. We will store away complicated experiences and we will try not to think about what happened because it’s so emotionally draining that we don’t even want to go there.
Working with clients, I sometimes use EFT tapping to help remove those trapped emotions from their system, so they can finally move forward in life. And the best way to help clients see and understand their progress and realize that the trauma dissipates, is by measuring the intensity of their emotions before we start (so we have a starting point) using the SUDS scale by Joseph Wolpe.
The best way to deal with a situation like this is to talk it out loud while Tapping, either alone or while you’re talking about what happened with a friend. In EFT tapping you use your fingers to gently tap on meridian points on your face and your upper body. This is a clinically proven way to release the emotional sting to a memory or a thought lingering in your body even years after it happened. Your thoughts are memories stored in your brain. Your emotions are memories stored in your body, and by gently tapping on specific meridian points on your body, you give your body the possibility to let the emotions leave your body.
Often, it’s hard to pinpoint precisely how intense their emotions are. That’s when I use the SUDS scale. The SUDS (short for Subjective Units of Distress Scale) was invented in 1969 by Joseph Wolpe to help identify the intensity of the discomfort or distress a client was dealing with to better help in his practice in behavioral therapy.
The SUDS scale gives an easy way to measure the intensity of an emotion. It’s a scale from 1-10. A ten is “this is so uncomfortable that it’s unbearable!” . A zero is when you can say; “I don’t feel anything at all around this topic.”
The SUDS scale combined with EFT Tapping is the perfect match; By measuring the intensity of the emotion before you start tapping you have an easy reference to how strong the emotion is. When you then measure the emotion again after the tapping, you know it has lessened.
Then we measure the emotions once again after the tapping. It helps us realize if the trauma they felt is still there.
