3B
Wednesday, Janurary 25th, 2017 // The Statement 

Golden State Worrier: Just Keep Tapping

B Y H A R R Y K R I N S K Y, DA I LY A R T S W R I T E R

COVER DESIGN BY CLAIRE ABDO AND KATIE SPAK

ILLUSTRATION BY CLAIRE ABDO

I

’ve been to two therapists in my 
life. The story behind the first 
guy isn’t that interesting. I was 

a nervous 11-year-old; like, a really 
nervous 11-year-old, and I was lucky 
enough to go to a therapist and even 
luckier to have therapy who actually 
helped.

My second therapist is a more 

interesting story. I found her by 
Googling “Ann Arbor Hypnotherapy” 
and choosing between the two options 
that came up. The deciding factors 
were some combination of the two 
websites’ aesthetic, their testimonials 
and the ease with which I could locate 
their email addresses. For some reason, 
technological wherewithal was a quality 
I valued in a hypnotherapist.

It was toward the end of my 

sophomore year of college. The anxiety I 
had worked so hard in my youth to keep 
at bay was creeping back into my life, in 
part because I had actual worry-worthy 
things to worry about. It was the type of 
nervous cocktail that created thoughts 
like “If I don’t get this internship, I’m 
going to contract a fatal respiratory 
infection and die.”

I don’t exactly know why I pursued 

hypnotherapy instead of other, more 

mainstream types of therapy. I know a 
guy who tried hypnotherapy and said 
it worked, and as a kid was obsessed 
with “Molly Moon’s Incredible Book of 
Hypnotism,” but other than that, I have 
no affiliation with hypnosis. Weird flex 
by me, but whatever.

I emailed my prospective therapist, 

the one with the better website. I 
will call her Molly for nostalgia and 
anonymity. She responded quickly and 
we set up a time to chat.

During our first meeting, she showed 

me her gold pocket watch, a family 
heirloom that had been passed down 
through generations and embedded 
with magical hypnotic powers. She told 
me to sit back in the chair, relax and 
follow the watch with my eyes. What 
felt like two minutes later, I woke up, 
with almost no recollection of the event. 

I’m kidding — there was no pocket 

watch, or magic, or loss of memory. 
Though I would be lying if, prior to my 
first meeting, some percentage of me 
legitimately thought something like 
that would happen.

It didn’t. At our first meeting Molly 

probably asked me 50 questions about 
my life, taking detailed notes and 
giving some feedback on my responses. 

The most notable piece of advice from 
this session was that if I drank more 
water, that would solve all my anxiety 
issues. I chuckled when she said this, 
before quickly realizing she wasn’t 
joking.

In truth, hypnosis only describes 

a fraction of what Molly does. She 
really is an oracle of all things related 
to spiritual and alternative healing. 
In addition to hydration tips, Molly’s 
repertoire 
of 
healing 
practices 

includes teaching me a set of yoga 
breathing 
techniques, 
facilitating 

guided meditations tailored to my 
specific anxieties, and assigning me 
homework assignments like “spend 
three hours this week doing something 
that exclusively benefits other people.”

Shoes 
are 
forbidden 
in 
her 

cramped office, so we’d make casual 
conversation as I removed my boots 
and placed them outside her door 
before entering. I’d sit on a tan 
reclining chair with a partially broken 
lever and she’d tell me about Chi, and 
natural energy, and traditions that pre-
date any ibuprofen by an uncountable 
number of lifetimes.

For most of my life, I was a staunch 

skeptic of all things related to the 
spiritual and alternative. That is, 
I would guess, pretty normal for 
being an American-born 21-year-old. 
Western medicine is built on the trust 
in empiricism and some alternative 
healing practices simply don’t have 
the data to back up their performance, 
or don’t have the data that the Western 
world trusts. It also might just be 
Western arrogance, it really might just 
be Western arrogance.

In any case, I was happy to 

indulge Molly’s conversations about 
Chi and natural energy flow, but 
I always thought of them as more 
interesting mental exercises, rather 
than anything actually altering an 
iota of my body. I’d think of them in 
terms of more mainstream mental 
health 
practices, 
reflecting 
my 

learned American exceptionalism. 
I’d commend Molly’s practices on 
reaching the same conclusion as 
the clearly more “correct” Western 
medicine therapies.

When she first brought up “tapping,” 

the skepticism remained. Tapping, 
or emotional freedom therapy, is a 
style of healing that involves tapping 

on certain points of the body that are 
believed to stimulate one’s life energy, 
or Chi. Molly told me that anxiety and 
depression can be caused by a stoppage 
of energy flow. She said there are more 
than 100 spots that could be touched 
on the body to stimulate the flow of 
energy; she gave me 11 of these spots 
to start with.

Even a year later I remember her 

final words on the technique: “The 
best part is, you don’t need to believe 
it’s working for it to work.”

So, in the tan chair with the broken 

lever, I hesitantly began tapping. She 
adjusted my form, because apparently 
I was missing the imaginary spot on 
my body that was going to stimulate 
the imaginary life energy going 
through my body.

I tapped and thought about what 

was overwhelming me. I thought 
about how certain I was about all the 
terrible stuff coming my way, and how 
uncertain I was about what my survival 
plan was. Then, rather quickly, some 
of those worries began to slip away. 
The muscles in my neck unclenched 
and the wave of impending things to 
do and things done wrong started to 
seem farther and farther away from 
me.

I let out something like a gasp when I 

was done, embarrassed at how pleased 
I must have looked, and how clearly 
not sold I was prior to the exercise.

“See?” she said, giving me a smile 

that was equal parts I-told-ya-so and 
glad-I-could-help.

To this day, I still tap. I tapped last 

week when I heard norovirus was 
back. I tapped on Jan. 20, for some 
reason. I tap before plane rides, tests 
and hard conversations.

Molly and her tapping therapeutic 

powers helped me in two ways. The 
first being the obvious one: giving me 
this new tool to combat anxiety. The 
second gift was a lesson in humility. 
When I tap, it reminds me of how little 
I know about how my body works. 
It reminds me that maybe there is 
Chi in my body that gets clogged up 
sometimes, or maybe some of the 
“certainties” in my life are things I’m 
not so certain about at all.

I often get caught up in anxiety 

about what my future holds. Tapping 
is a much-needed reminder that more 
often than not, I don’t actually know.

