What happens during a Tolman Emotional Clearing session? This is something, as coaches, we’re asked quite often so I wanted to take the opportunity to share it with you all and hopefully provide some understanding around this incredibly powerful and important healing modality.
What is a Tolman Emotional Clearing Session?
The Tolman Emotional Clearing technique (EC for short) is a powerful process to release past, suppressed emotions. When we experience an event (usually as a small child) that we’re unable to completely process (aren’t allowed or don’t know how to complete the cry, the scream, the fear etc), we have leftover emotions stored in the body at a cellular level. This, like any form of stress, makes our muscles tight and stressed and put pressure on our organs – leading to physical ailments over time if not addressed. It’s essentially excess cortisol running around the body keeping us on high alert all the time, resulting in the body not getting enough (or in some cases any!) time to return to the parasympathetic nervous system (aka rest and repair) – the ONLY place in which the body can heal.
Every physical ailment you have – whether it’s a rash, acne, sore shoulder, bad back, digestive issues – right through to serious dis-ease in the body like cancer, diabetes, heart issues, autoimmune etc – has a level of emotional stress, trauma, hurt, pain, baggage (whatever word you want to use) contributing to it. There is a whole world of research around this, but we’ll leave that for another day…
Healing needs both physical and emotional support. We won’t heal if we eat Macca’s and sit on the couch all day but we also won’t heal to our full potential if we don’t address and relieve some of the emotional stress our body is holding. In fact, in my personal experience, releasing some of the emotional baggage makes doing the physical easier – it’s not a push or HAVE to but starts to become an intrinsic drive. A WANT rather than a burden.
So, what happens during a session?
The number one thing we do is to ensure you feel safe. We cannot heal (physically or emotionally) if we don’t feel safe within our body and with the facilitator. This can take time and may need a different approach for different people. But it’s absolutely vital. If we’re not feeling safe, we’re in a state of fear – which is a state of stress. And we can’t relieve stress if we feel stressed! And know that not every facilitator is right for every client and that’s ok. Find who works for you and who you feel safe with.
The second thing to understand is that tackling our emotional hurts and pains is scary! It’s why most people choose to ignore it and just do all the “things” instead (eat the right foods, go for a walk, drink the water etc) and ignore the emotional work. So, in understanding that it can be scary, it’s important to also understand that your body isn’t going to throw your entire history of hurt and stress at you in one hit. Its number one priority is keeping you alive and throwing the whole truck at you at once might achieve the opposite!
So, it simply won’t.
Your body is intelligent enough to only ever give you what you can handle in that moment on that day. You may believe that it’s too much, or sometimes believe you’re not doing enough, but it will be exactly as it needs to be. That’s why feeling safe with the facilitator is so important – so you can be reassured that everything is ok and you’re safe.
Once you’re relaxed and are feeling safe, we take you through a process (not hypnosis – you’re conscious the entire time, but you will go deep within) that allows the body to bring forth the stress / hurt / pain / trauma that needs to be addressed on that day, in that moment. In the same way that we don’t get to choose which physical ailment is healed first (we may want to resolve our rash but the body decides to heal the kidney as a priority for example), we don’t always get to choose which emotional hurt needs healing first. We may assume we need to heal from XYZ event, but in fact, a totally different one comes to the forefront. Often, ironically, the events are related – or the feelings and hurts associated within them are anyway.
We then take you through a process of releasing all the stuck stress, hurt, pain, anger, frustration, sadness or whatever it is from that event. And once it’s released, it’s gone forever.
It’s also important to understand that there’s no end goal when it comes to this work. It’s not like we reach a point of “I’m done – no more emotional work for me required!” We aren’t going to heal everything in one session, but it is where we need to start. There are always new layers and more depths to go through. And the deeper we go, the deeper our connection with ourselves becomes, the deeper our solidity in the KNOWING that we’re ok. The deeper our connections with our loved ones and the world around us becomes. The more we’re able to stay balanced through life without turning into the crazy wild woman who flies off the handle at the tiniest little thing (speaking from experience!! 🤣)
And, ultimately, our goal as EC Coaches, is to teach you how to truly FEEL. To support you in coming back into alignment within, to find true self-love and to feel your heart. To find true compassion for yourself rather than judgement. We can only heal from a place of love, never from a place of fear.
Healing isn’t about feeling better, it’s about getting better at feeling (a beautiful quote from the brilliant Gabor Maté). Life is always going to throw us stressors and curve balls – it’s not about removing all of those and living a flatline life. It’s about having the ability to respond to those moments rather than to react. To be able to put in appropriate boundaries from a place of love and understanding. And the less past hurts and pains we carry around, the easier dealing with day-to-day stressors becomes.
I hope this helps explain the process we as EC Tolman Coaches use to support you in your healing journey.
Love and healing always,
