09/20/2026
EFT Diaries: Learning From the Inside
Josh and I came to Las Vegas this weekend for an advanced EFT workshop on working with extreme protection with Cindy Goodness Zane and James Hawkins, and somewhere during the first day, I wrote in the margin of my notes:
Things got experiential.
And they really did.
There was a lot to learn clinically. We spent two days looking closely at what happens when protection gets big in the room—intense anger, reactivity, mistrust, cognitive withdrawal, and those moments when vulnerability is offered and the other person can’t quite receive it. We watched sessions, practiced, worked in role plays, and looked at some of the places therapists can get lost.
But we were also being asked to look at ourselves.
Again and again, the questions came back toward us. What’s happening in you right now? What do you struggle with? What happens when the intensity in the room rises? What messages start showing up about yourself as a therapist? What do you do when you don’t know what to do?
There wasn’t much room to hide behind knowing EFT.
At one point we were asked to consider our own leading edges of learning. But James also talked about something I don’t think therapists pay nearly enough attention to: our strengths.
What do we already bring into the room because of who we are? What have other people experienced from us that has helped them? And once we know those things about ourselves, how might we use them more intentionally?
Josh had an experience of this during one of his role plays. He was practicing something difficult and received feedback afterward that reminded him of qualities in himself he had almost forgotten were there.
Later he said something that stayed with me. Sometimes we enter a role play thinking we’re there to learn some new skill, when we’re also discovering things that were already within us.
I loved that, because learning can so easily become an inventory of everything we still don’t know. And there was plenty I didn’t know.
There was also a lot of honesty in that room. People talked about places where they struggle, about the isolation that can sometimes come with this work, and about those moments when what is happening in front of us seems to exceed the capacity we feel like we have available.
That opened up something else that felt important: How do we find our capacity again?
Who or what helps us come back when the work becomes difficult? Where do we turn when we feel overwhelmed, isolated, unsure of ourselves, or simply depleted? Maybe that’s another therapist, a supervisor, someone we love, an attachment figure, or even an internalized sense of someone who helps us feel steadier.
We don’t have to somehow manufacture endless capacity on our own.
That landed with me because one of my own leading edges is working with intense anger in the room. I want to get better at staying close to it. I want to be able to meet that amount of energy without becoming overly careful or pulling away from the experience underneath it. I want to understand that protection not only intellectually, but experientially.
So when there was an opportunity to role-play that kind of protection in front of the group, I felt two very different things happening inside me.
I wanted to disappear.
And I wanted to be seen.
The wish to be invisible is familiar to me. It feels safe. But there is another part of me that wants to participate, to bring forward what I see and know, and to allow myself to take up some space. I knew I had something to bring to the exercise, just as every therapist in that room had something to bring.
And I knew this was something I wanted to try.
So I volunteered.
It was hard. I had to find an amount of energy that isn’t particularly natural for me and try to embody this kind of protection rather than simply think about it from the therapist’s chair.
And that is one of the things I value about role-play when we really allow ourselves to enter it. For a moment, we get to move to the other chair. We get a glimpse of what an experience might feel like from the position of the person we’re usually trying to help.
As I let myself move into the anger, I noticed something I wasn’t expecting.
I could feel the anger.
But I could also feel the shame.
There was this sense of being out of control and knowing that all of this intensity was affecting the people around me.
People don’t like this. This scares people. They disapprove of me.
For a few minutes, I wasn’t trying to understand that protection from the therapist’s chair. I had to find something of it in myself.
Anger isn’t foreign to me. It’s just not where my protection usually goes. And letting myself really touch it gave me a different kind of compassion for what can be underneath all that intensity.
I also noticed what Cindy did with me. She didn’t back away from the intensity. She moved toward me.
There was a steadiness and firmness in her that didn’t waver, but it didn’t feel harsh. She kept saying my name. She kept calling my eyes back toward her. And somehow that firmness felt containing.
I felt shaky afterward, and also really glad that I had done it.
There was something powerful about getting to experience, even briefly and imperfectly, the very thing we’re asking our clients to do all the time: let somebody come closer to a place that has needed protection.
And it brought something home for me that ran through the entire weekend.
We can’t ask our clients to take us into their emotional worlds while we remain safely outside of them.
Working experientially asks something of us too. It asks us to notice our own nervous systems, our own protection, the places where we want to move away, fix, get cognitive, become overly careful, or simply know what to do.
It asks us to notice what happens when we don’t know.
At some point I wrote another question in my notes:
Can we embrace not knowing?
I’m still sitting with that one.
Because there was also something powerful about watching James and Cindy work. They are different from one another, and I found myself learning from the differences rather than wanting to decide which way was the “right” way to do EFT.
One of the things Josh and I appreciate about James is the specificity of his language. He can go directly toward the heart of something and be remarkably explicit about where he wants to go. Watching him this weekend challenged some of my own ideas about what it means to be directive in EFT.
Compassion and clarity aren’t opposites. Sometimes we can know where we want to go and still remain deeply respectful of the person we’re trying to accompany there.
Cindy has a different presence. There is something almost meditative about her. Grounded and inviting, but also firm. She has a way of listening underneath what someone is saying—for the longing, the dilemma, the attachment significance—and staying there.
Watching the two of them together reminded me that there isn’t one personality we have to acquire to become good EFT therapists.
And I think I needed that reminder too.
We have leading edges.
And we have gifts.
Maybe part of learning this work is becoming honest enough to know both.
There is something strangely vulnerable about continuing to learn a model you care deeply about. The more you understand, the more you can see what you still don’t understand. Advanced training doesn’t necessarily make that feeling go away.
Sometimes it brings you right up against it.
But maybe that’s not a problem to solve.
Maybe our leading edge isn’t the place where we’re supposed to finally prove that we know enough. Maybe it’s the place where we find out what happens when we don’t know—and whether we can stay there long enough to learn.
For me, this weekend also meant allowing myself to be seen doing exactly that.
A little shaky.
Not entirely comfortable.
Still learning.
But there.
And we are so grateful of that.
