Sarah Getoff Would you like to have more successful relationships in your life? What if there was a technique you could learn and use yourself to help you do just that? In this episode, SLSP host Tatiana Berindei and licensed therapist and EFT practitioner Sarah Getoff discuss the benefits of EFT and how to use it to truly transform your unhealthy relationship patterns – both in and outside the bedroom. Sarah shares numerous success stories with our listeners, as well as some of the keys required to get the most out of this incredibly powerful technique. Parents – you can even use it with your kids! Tune in to hear how you, too, can use EFT to release once and for all the stuck energies that have been holding you back.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Sex, Love, and SuperPowers podcast show. I’m your host, Tatiana Berindei. And today, I have with me the lovely Ms. Sarah Getoff, and we are going to be discussing, unraveling, revealing to you the key to successful relationships. This is going to be a good one. Let me tell you a little bit about Sarah before we get started. Sarah Getoff with lots of lovely letters after her name loves being a psychotherapist and a parenting expert columnist. She chose this work for the same reason that she became a gardener. She is inspired by every living being’s desire to grow. I love that.

With over 20 years of experience, Sarah offers in-person sessions at her office in Northampton, Massachusetts and works remotely with people all over the world. Whether providing parenting consultations, couples, individual counseling, parenting support groups or get unstuck with EFT tapping groups, Sarah offers a profoundly transformative and nonjudgmental environment for her clients. Welcome to the show today, Sarah.

Thank you, Tatiana. Thank you for having me.

Absolutely. Fun to have you here, full circle. So before we dive into the topic today, will you please tell our listeners what your super powers are?

I’m practically doing magic with my clients because it’s such a simple tool, but it’s also so powerful, and people who are a good fit for it get results very, very quickly and very profoundly.

Yes. One of my super powers is that I have found this wonderful technique that I use both on myself because it’s a self-help tool and also with my clients because I teach it to them and use it in session, and it is just incredibly powerful for helping people to release long-held emotional pain, self-limiting beliefs, and emotional triggers. And it really feels like a super power in the sense that it feels like I’m practically doing magic with my clients because it’s such a simple tool, but it’s also so powerful, and people who are a good fit for it get results very, very quickly and very profoundly. And so I just feel so blessed to have learned it and to be able to use it. And I have completely transformed my own life with it. So that’s number one.

And I was thinking about this question in terms of super powers, and really, the other one that I think about the most in terms of what I’m the proudest of that I have been able to do is raise a daughter who is now 15. And I’ve raised her without punishment, without threats, without rewards, with really using the relationship to help her become a wonderful person. And she is. She’s kind, and she’s strong, and she’s academically motivated, and she chooses wonderful friends, and she’s loving, and she’s doing exciting and interesting things.

And so the other part of the work that I do is with parents. I work with couples and individuals and also parents. And I help them to raise their children without the need for threats or bribes or punishments and to still raise children who are behaving well and to feel good about themselves and who are good citizens in the world. So those feel like my two super powers, and I’m so blessed in the sense that I get to do them both all day. I get to make a living using them.

Yeah, that’s the best, right?

It’s wonderful.

So we are going to circle back around to parenting because we are talking about the key to successful relationships here. And while I do want to talk about your first superpower, I’m assuming you are talking about EFT as the little magic trick that you have that you use with your clients.

Yes, EFT, which stands for emotional freedom technique. And I can tell you and your listeners more about what that is and how it works whenever you like.

Yeah, why don’t you give us a brief download, a little overview for people listening in who aren’t familiar with EFT and don’t know what it is? And then we’ll go to a quick break, and we have a lot to talk about after the break. But yeah, tell us about EFT. What is it? Where does it come from?

Yes, I would be glad to. This is the description that I give to new clients when they’re coming into my office, and I’m going to help them understand what I’m going to be doing with them. So in more traditional psychology and psychotherapy, we understand that the things that have happened to us in the past affect our thoughts and our feelings, right? If we’re raised by parents who tell us that we’re stupid all the time, we’re going to question our intellectual abilities. We’re going to have a difficult time succeeding in school and in life.

And EFT understands that too. But we add one component, which is that those things that have happened to us, or have been said to us, the emotional residue of them, or the triggers as I like to call them, are also stored in our bodies as a disruption in our energy systems. And EFT recognizes the same energy system that acupuncture does, the meridian system, but we don’t use needles as acupuncture does. We use gentle tapping or just gentle pressure with one’s own fingers on one’s own body. So I’m not touching any of my clients. They do it on themselves. And we use those pressure points while accessing some of the emotions to release them out of the system, so they’re not affecting us anymore.

And for EFT purposes, I think of an emotional issue or a theme as like a tree. A lot of people come to me with anxiety problems, and so I use anxiety as an example. And we can tap on or release on the things that are happening currently that are anxiety provoking. But that’s like trying to get a tree out by going at it from the leaves and the uppermost branches, right? We want to get it from the early roots, which are those early experiences that created the anxiety in the first place. And once we start to release those early triggers out of the body, then people become anxious in direct proportion to what’s actually happening at the moment without all of the residues of the old anxiety that’s been stored in the body, right?

We actually realized that we’re getting angry in a way that’s out of proportion.

And we’ve all had the experience of, say we’re in a fight with our partner, and we get really angry at our partner for something that they did. And we actually realized that we’re getting angry in a way that’s out of proportion. And it’s sort of like, oh, that’s just like what my father used to do, or you’re just like my mother or whatever. And that’s why we get so much angrier than we would otherwise because all that other stuff is stored in there.

Sure, and we’re responding to the original trigger, not actually what’s happening directly in front of us at the moment.

Right. It’s both, but maybe it’s 20% what’s happening in the moment and 80% the original trigger, right? And so we’re over-responding, overreacting. And most of us have also had the experience of a half an hour later, we think, oh, darn, I wish I hadn’t said that, right? I would have done so much better if I had said this instead. So in most cases, it’s not that we didn’t know what the better thing to say would have been. It’s that we can’t use those better skills when we are so triggered.

And so what EFT does is it helps release out of the body the emotional pain created by the thing that Mom used to do or the thing that Dad used to do so that then we can respond in proportion to what’s happening at the moment, and that changes everything.

And how does it work? How does that happen? How does it release stuff from the body?

Yes. So there are energy meridians in the body, energy pathways that get blocked, and by using the gentle pressure, the tapping on the endpoints of the pathways, the energy pathways, the endpoints are called the meridians. And by using gentle tapping, just like acupuncturists use a needle, right, we use gentle tapping. We’re really just stimulating the energy pathway to move more freely so that the blockages that have been stored in the system can be released. It’s really quite simple and elegant.

You mentioned at the beginning that there are some people for whom it’s a good fit, and how do you tell if it’s a good fit for you or not?

Well, I know within a couple of sessions at the most because I make things very measurable with my clients. So when they come into me for a first session, we make a list of what would they like to have changed in their lives. And they might say, “Well, I’d like to be more patient with my kids. I’d like to feel more sexy with my partner. I’d like to fight less with my partner, and I’d like to feel more creative and energized at work,” right? And so then we measure those things. How creative and energized are you currently feeling, right? How sexy are you currently feeling? How patient are you feeling on a scale of zero to 10? And they rate for themselves how they’re feeling and for me.

And then we do some EFT. And usually within one or two sessions, for the vast majority of people, they start to feel a shift. We don’t necessarily resolve everything in one or two sessions, right? These are often lifelong issues that have been developing over a lifetime. Depending on how long the person has been troubled by it and how traumatic it is or whether it’s just a little disturbing, it takes a different amount of time but much, much faster than talk therapy alone. And because they make it very measurable, we know if it’s working or not. We know very quickly.

And I have so much success with my clients because the method is so powerful that I offer a money back guarantee. I’m actually the only therapist that I’ve ever heard of who offers a money back guarantee because that is how effective this method is. People don’t tend to ask for the money back because it works.

I’ve been doing this for many years, and so I have begun to see the people for whom it does not seem to be a good fit. And they tend to be the people who are so profoundly out of touch with their emotions that they don’t even know what they’re feeling, and they can’t talk about what they’re feeling. And those folks don’t come through my office very often. So the vast majority of people who come through my office are a good fit for EFT.

So cool. Well, we do have to go to a quick break, and we are going to talk about having a better sex life with EFT when we come back and also better relationships because we like to talk about these things on this show. But before we go to break, will you please tell our listeners where they can go to find out more about you and your work?

Yes, my website is sarahgetoff.com. You can also call me directly at (413) 586-3653. And if you go to my website, you can sign up on the homepage, subscribe to my newsletter, and get free tips for parenting, successful relationships, romantic relationships, and also for using EFT at home. And if you call me, you can receive a free 20-minute phone consult about what’s happening for you and how I might be able to be of support to you.

Awesome. Thank you so much. We are talking with Sarah Getoff about the key to successful relationships. More when we get back. Stay tuned.