Tell me about your (grand) mother…

Tomorrow morning, I have the first of 5 sessions of Faster EFT with D.

Faster EFT is not a new razor from Gillette, nor a touring-class sports car. Faster EFT, or Tapping, as it’s more colloquially known, is the process of disrupting the messages between the brain and the body that trigger the fight or flight response that give rise to anxiety and panic – bedfellows of mine off and on for much of my adult life.

So far, so good. But why does D, in the pre-session questionnaire she sent me, want to know about my grandmother’s top 3 traumas (plus my parents’ and grandfathers’ too?)

A few headlines from my maternal grandparents’ lives:

• Emigrated from Mayo and Donegal in Ireland to Birmingham to dodge the draft (so the story goes…)
• Both were devoutly Catholic but whilst my nanny was tee-total my grandad drank Guinness in bed
• They ran boarding houses for Irish navvies who would often come home so squiffy they literally shit the bed
• One morning, my nanny woke up and all her hair had fallen out
• They had a terrifying picture of Jesus with his messed-up heart dripping over their bed (and their teas maid)

In my post, The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past, I wrote about generational trauma, the notion that traumatic experiences in the lives of our forebears, can be passed onto us via the mystical helix of our DNA.

Are my anxiety/panic attacks just the latest instalment of the troubles coursing down my bloodline?

I’ll find out tomorrow I suppose…