What do others think about me? Will that person be mad at me because of something I said? They will be so disappointed in me if I don’t excel in my work… and so on.
A highly sensitive disposition can keep you up at night and busy with thoughts like these every waking moment.
In general, care for your feelings and others’ opinions is not only normal, but good. It enables you to connect with people at a heart-to-heart level and express empathy. The problem arises when you are “too much” in touch with your emotions.
Having a highly emotional disposition can make life harder. It attracts labels and remarks such as “You’re so sensitive!,” “Now what did I say to upset you?,” “Talking to you is like walking on eggshells!,” “Why can’t you just snap out of it?,” “Can you not care so much about what that person said to you?” and so on.
Such remarks usually come from people who look like they don’t have a care in the world. They handle their feelings well; they look confident and happy. They just don’t understand why it is so hard for some to let go of their emotional baggage.
It doesn’t have to go to this extreme. If others’ opinions matter to you more than you would like, read on.
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Can you recommend any practitioners of Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) in the Greater Washington DC area? thanks!
It is hard to believe that Psych Central would publish such junk. There is no evidence for The emotional freedom technique. We insult the field of psychology and its reputation by putting such junk out there for public consumption. It’s like going back to the days of bloodletting, the floating uterus, or the need to balance the humors. Ridiculous.
While not as robust an evidence base as other psychotherapy techniques, Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) does have some research support. (You can’t just read a meta-analysis from a few years ago and assume that’s the last word on the matter, since new research is published every day.)
See, for example:
Karatzias, T., Power, K., Brown, K., McGoldrick, T., Begum, M., Young, J., Loughran, C., Adams, S. (2011). A controlled comparison of the effectiveness and efficiency of two psychological therapies for posttraumatic stress disorder: Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing vs. emotional freedom techniques. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 199, 372-378.
Stapleton, P., Sheldon, T., Porter, B., Whitty, J. (2011). A randomised clinical trial of a meridian-based intervention for food cravings with six-month follow-up. Behaviour Change, 28, 1-16.
Church, D. (2010). The treatment of combat trauma in veterans using EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques): A pilot protocol. Traumatology, 16, 55-65.