EFT Into Schools

Exam Stress
by Mel Trudgett

‘A’ is an 11 year old girl in Dorset that is regularly achieving a grade 5, which is above average, in both Maths & English. She is in the top few % of her year 6 class for her coursework in both subjects and is generally very happy and settled at school. However, during year 6 leading up to the SATs, her teachers became very concerned that she was seriously under achieving in ALL of her tests in these subjects – she was struggling to even get a grade 4 which is below average. They believed it was just a problem with nerves, but had tried talking to her about this and it had made no difference.

During tests she would panic, spend a long time answering a question that would give just one mark and then run out of time when it came to the 3 or 5 mark questions which made her panic even more. She also felt like she ‘didn’t know the answers’ which she clearly did because her coursework throughout the year was way above average.

After a simple 10 minute chat with ‘A’ about how she felt about her tests, I was able to put together a basic EFT script based around her feelings. We tapped a few rounds on her nerves, but also on her fear of failure, of hating getting low results which meant she comes last, of worrying that she might not know the answers in the test (she did!) and generally worrying that her teachers/parents/friends wouldn’t like her as much if she did badly. After each round of tapping we talked again about the emotions she was feeling and her insecurities about tests and then tapped down the intensity on each emotion that came up. All of the intensity had gone by the end of the short session. She said she felt a definite release of the worry that had been bothering her.

However, I wanted to be sure that she had a tool to use if any of these feelings came back so I advised her on a secret tapping process* that she could use during a test if the feelings of stress came back. It could be used to calm her worries and also to give herself some positive affirmations.

‘The tapping worked!’

The first day that she had a test after the tapping, she simply said that ‘the tapping worked – I was fine’. She used the discreet tapping process during the test, not to take away her stress because she didn’t have any – she said she wanted to use the tapping to improve her score!

She answered every question on the test which is something that she hasn’t managed to do for over a year and she no longer has any worries about taking the tests, including her SATs, in the future.

Mel Trudgett
EFT & Reiki Practioner, Dorset UK
www.eftforme.com