SUDs, IE Scale, Gauge (Is EMO a way forward for me?)

Daimon Sweeney wrote:
>
>
> As a mostly EFT user, I do appreciate your exploring and writing
> up/recording and sharing using EFT to develop the positive dimension of
> experience. I fully agree it's a very valuable insight.
>
> Here's a big "duh" to share. I've done this creating of positives and even
> named it, as one option among others, but it never really clicked to use it
> systematically and consistently to create positive experiences. I let the
> EFT frame of getting to zero and using it to remove negatives blind me.
>
> I called the approach "backing in" to the positive after reaching zero
> distress, because tapping directly on positives doesn't seem to work as
> well, except as it identifies negative "tail enders" which can then be
> tapped on.
>
> The model I used was removing blocks to positive experience, which may be
> potentially unlimited. So the view I take is that the positive is already
> there in potential, but we limit it, and the limitation can be removed with
> EFT.
>
> If it's true that EFT removes limitations, that includes limitations on how
> much you can enjoy or experience something. Negating a negation moves one in
> a positive direction, but why stop at zero? That's what you're pointing out.
>
> If we imagine a new scale which includes enjoyment or other positive
> reactions, rather than just distress, it could run from -10 through 0 to
> +10. We could ask a client, what's your experience of (this) on a scale from
> negative to positive 10, with neutral being zero?
>
> Of course, you wouldn't ask it that way for a traumatic experience,
> suggesting they might have enjoyed it or even ought to enjoy it. But for
> other matters where interpretation is the crux it does set the potential for
> a positive experience into play simply by asking, implicitly suggesting it
> could exist by the very existence of that positive 10.
>
> This scale considers the whole experience and builds in the assumption and
> view that full expansiveness is a natural and achievable state.
>
> I'll be building out the positive from now on. Thanks mucho for the
> expansion of vision, and good on you for sharing it.
>
> Daimon

Hi Daimon,

This "duh!" effect is something I'm very familiar with; and it stems right at the baseline from the fact that all old psychology was "trauma" based, and that the energy psychologies inherited this unknowingly and directly from there.

Indeed, the SUDs scale is an old psychology tool to measure "subjective units of distress" which I renamed to at least "disturbance" when I was writing up EFT procedures but I soon got extremely unhappy with it and offered an alternative in the EI scale - a scale of Emotional Intensity.

http://theamt.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=56

Note the date - 2001.

In that scale, we're not only dealing with distress, but only with intensity and as this was the old days pre-EmoTrance, I was using this scale to firstly map the existence of high energy *states* (which would often conflict!) relating to a single subject.

Someone working with Christine Sutherland at the time made a more popular version of the EI scale, known as "gauge work" (a rather unfortunate term as I always thought!).

Hereby, and on a single issue, a state of 100% success is at the top of the gauge, and you tap UP towards that, "gauging" your advancement by feedback from the client.

There is a problem with that approach however, and that is that a client is usually entirely WRONG about what 100% of anything may entail. That's the old story about a child from a refugee camp licking a discarded Mars bar wrapper and thinking that this is the best experience there could ever be in all the times spent.

However, this was certainly a move towards the positive, only we didn't know back then what a positive actually felt like!

We didn't find this out until the energised end state from EmoTrance - and anyone at all who has EVER either experienced this themselves, or helped another experience this, will know what a breakthrough into totally new realms that represents.

It wasn't until then that we got an inkling of just how much there is on the other side of Zero Joy!

It was also then we really got it just how wrong our internal scales of measuring such things as happiness and aliveness and so forth actually were, and what we held to be Zero was more like -900 at best.

It's a fascinating thing and I wanted to add a little history to the conversation.

SFX

           
Received on Mon Jul 31 2006 - 20:32:54 BST