In this episode of Spark & Ignite Your Marketing, I’m joined by Liz Fisher, the founder of Tap Into Health, an EFT Practitioner and soon-to-be Clinical Hypnotherapist. Liz shares her personal journey from struggling with trichotillomania, panic disorder, and emetophobia to finding freedom through Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) and hypnosis. Liz’s powerful transformation led her to dedicate her life to helping others break free from emotional and physical blocks, like chronic pain, anxiety, and phobias. Listen in as we dive into her approach and how her personal story has become her most powerful marketing tool.
Three Key Topics Discussed:
- Liz’s Personal Healing Journey with EFT: Liz opens up about her experience with trichotillomania and how EFT was the only method that helped her break free. She shares her journey of overcoming not just hair-pulling but also panic disorder and emetophobia, and how these personal battles shaped her career.
- How EFT Works to Heal Emotional and Physical Blocks: Liz explains how EFT (tapping) can address a wide range of issues, from minor trauma to severe phobias. She walks us through the process of tapping on specific acupressure points to clear blocked energy and rewire subconscious beliefs.
- The Role of Hypnotherapy in Enhancing EFT: Liz talks about the synergy between tapping and hypnosis, and how combining these modalities offers deeper healing for her clients. She discusses how hypnosis helps her clients access their subconscious to clear trauma more effectively and long-lasting.
Check out last week’s episode here!
Follow Liz:
Liz Fisher | LinkedIn
Tap Into Health | Website
Tap Into Health | Instagram
Tap Into Health | Facebook
Tap Into Health | Podcast
Transcript:
Beverly:
Did you know that over 2 million people in the US struggle with trichotillomania, a compulsive hair pulling disorder, and yet many go untreated for years not knowing that healing is actually possible. I’m your host, Beverly Cornell, founder and fairy godmother of brand Clarity at Wickedly Branded. I’ve spent over 25 years helping hundreds of purpose-driven entrepreneurs awaken their brand magic and boldly bring it to life so that they can magnify their impact on the world. And joining us today is Liz Fisher, founder of Tap Into Health and an EFT practitioner, Liz specializes in helping people break free from emotional and physical blocks. Like trichotillomania, anxiety, chronic pain through the modalities of tapping and hypnosis. Liz not only overcame these challenges herself, but now helps others do the same. Welcome, Liz, to the show.
Liz:
Hi Beverly. Thank you so much for having me. I’m thrilled to be here.
Beverly:
Okay, I feel like in your field, there’s lots of long words.
Liz:
The things that I specialize in happen to be very niche kind of things.
Beverly:
You have a really great story. Tell me what led you into this particular field with these particular conditions.
Liz:
So I had compulsive hair pulling disorder, otherwise known as trichotillomania since I was eight years old. And I tried everything under the sun. All kinds of therapies medications, everything you can think of I’ve tried and I noticed that it was getting particularly bad when I had kids. The hair pulling was exacerbated. I had already had all kinds of other things going on too. I had panic disorder. I had emetophobia, which is the fear of throwing up and then taking care of two small kids on top of that just really did me in. I was on no sleep and it was just a big challenge. So I was nursing my second son. This is back in 2014, and I was pulling my hair out while I was sitting in the nursing chair’cause I felt so trapped there I thought. I am exhausted. I never get any sleep, this is just getting out of control. So I googled drug free ways to cure trichotillomania, and I stumbled on EFT, which at that time I didn’t know anything about it. I watched a couple of YouTube videos and I started doing tapping and it worked like nothing I’ve ever used in my life. Drugs therapy, anything. So I didn’t pull my hair for three whole months, which was unheard of. And then around Thanksgiving time, I was stressed out. My parents are divorced and it’s always a hard time for me around the holidays. And I started pulling my hair again and I thought. I must be doing this wrong. So I reached out to someone local here in Cleveland. Her name is Betsy Moeller, and she ended up being my trainer. But I went to her house and I said, help me. I must not be doing this right, because I have this disorder and it was working and now it’s not. And she didn’t help me in that moment with. My addiction to pulling. But she was a trainer and she was doing these classes and I was very intrigued because it can be used for anything. Tapping is just, you don’t have to go sit in front of someone to do it. You do it on your own any time. It’s literally at your fingertips, no pun intended. And I got interested. After that I spent a year kind of thinking maybe I wanna switch careers. This is wild. I was a marketing graphic designer, web designer for 20 years and big corporate jobs and stuff. And I had quit working full time after I had my kids and was just doing freelance. But this was something really out of the blue and out of the ordinary for me. But I was so intrigued and it helped me so much. I thought I gotta do this and help other people. So that was. What transpired. I got certified, it took about a year. I’m certified through EFT International which is the gold standard method of tapping that’s been around since the nineties. And I also am a certified clinical hypnotherapist, which is a really cool thing to add in addition to tapping. And that is my story. I was able to clear my pulling during my certification while working with another EFT practitioner that also had hair pulling disorder. So she knew what to help me with and how to get through that. But there are usually traumas associated with it. There’s shame associated with it. There’s all kinds of stuff that you work through with tapping. So it’s a lot.
Beverly:
So it’s interesting around the same exact time. That you were stumbling upon tapping, I was going to therapy regarding, we had a lot of infertility. We had some chemical pregnancies. We also had some foster kids. We lost a lot in that amount of time. There was a lot of loss and there was some adjacent trauma too, for the trauma that the kids had gone through in foster care that I feel like I took on in that process. And so not only was their grief, there was this like, adjacent trauma that I was trying to process. And the therapist happened to be certified in tapping and introduced me to this thing, which feels very odd, at first. Yeah. However, it’s just so different than anything else I’ve ever tried for any of the work that I’ve done. I believe you should always have a coach and a therapist. If you wanna be a high performer in this world, you have to work through the stuff, otherwise it’s gonna hold you back from living the best life you can lead. And these are all amazing tools to work through some of that. So I did it for about a year, but there are still times occasionally where I will just tap, just a couple spots or whatever, just to refocus, reground myself. It still works. Especially, I do this a lot, like on my chest a lot, but it’s a very cool modality for sure. Very curious about the hypnosis and the tapping together. How do you use those two together?
Liz:
So I had someone come to me, it’s been almost two years ago, and she had a phobia where she couldn’t lie down because every time she would lay down, she felt like she was choking, like she couldn’t breathe. And she went to a hypnotherapist and during a session she had this kind of past life experience where she was a man and she was in World War ii and she was run over by a big heavy machinery thing of some sort and crushed from the neck. She figured that is why she had this phobia that she couldn’t lie down. She couldn’t lie down in bed. She couldn’t lie down at the dentist’s office. She was needing some cataract surgery. She couldn’t get, because she couldn’t lie down on the table. So it was really interfering with her life and she wanted to tap about that. So we did, we were able to clear all that stuff. But I was so intrigued oh my gosh, hypnosis like this could really be layered really well together. Yeah. So I did get certified this past December and it helps so much, especially with my trichotillomania clients. I layer it meaning. We can tap part of a session and then do hypnosis for part of a session. And things that come up in tapping we can go deeper with in hypnosis and vice versa. And it’s a way to access your subconscious for a longer period of time than you can with tapping. And you can introduce suggestions during hypnosis that your brain, doesn’t process them the same way that your brain does when you’re in a deep meditative state. So it’s a really cool way to use them together.
Beverly:
Oh, I love that so much. It sounds so interesting and intriguing and I can see how it would work. Sometimes our conscious isn’t able to process everything that we had to go through, in our lives. So that makes sense. So tell me about a client who was struggling with something, but conventional therapy just couldn’t touch it. What changed for them through this EFT and hypnosis? What was the transformation that you saw in them? I’d love to hear a story of somebody who was really transformed by this experience.
Liz:
EFT is like talk therapy, but an additional layer added to that I don’t know if you’ve ever done acupuncture or, no, but we are actually accessing acupressure points. There are thousands of them on our body when we tap. So picture yourself going to the therapist and just talking, which it helps to get that stuff off your chest when you go in and talk to someone. Yeah. But this is an additional way to break up the stuck energy around a little T trauma, which would be, back in grade school someone called me a name and that stuck with me ever since and I feel like I haven’t been successful because someone called me a loser. To major traumas, big T traumas. Like I was abused as a child. My parents were divorced, I was in a terrible car accident that someone died when I was young. All that. It matters because we tap into those layers and everyone has layers that build up over time. I love to work with children’cause they have hardly any trauma. Trauma that builds up creates beliefs that you are stuck in this belief system and there are ways in tapping to remove that stuck energy that you’re holding onto. Your subconscious is really smart. Okay? So like 10% of your brain is working and your conscious brain is working. And 90% of the time your subconscious is making most of the decisions and pushing you in specific directions because there’s beliefs there that have been formed since you were a child. So it’s really a cool way to. Go deeper and remove the suck energy, remove the trauma, not remove the memory, but to clear the intensity that you feel when you talk about something specific, like a trauma that happened to you. And we can really get rid of any of that negative association that you have, that charge that you have when you think about something that was a really big trauma in your life. And that’s where it’s different than just going and talking to someone. So this is like a added bonus. It’s talk therapy with the tapping and it’s really removing layers of traumas that have happened over the years.
Beverly:
So you work with some specific disorders like trichotillomania say that 10 times fast. What other disorders are like a specialty of yours?
Liz:
I work with people that have phobias, specifically emetophobia, which I also had, which is the fear of throwing up. That happened when I was about 10, and there was a trauma associated with that. Like my sister got sick in the bedroom that we shared as children, and it looked like something from The Exorcist, and I thought, I’m afraid of that now. And so I work with people that have emetophobia and other phobias, fears because they’re based on something usually that. Happens and we clear out those traumas and then we’re not as afraid. So I was able to overcome the fear of throwing up personally and having kids that get sick. Oh my gosh. It’s better when they get older, but you’re like, I’m still never gonna love throw up. But it’s not like it doesn’t send me into a spiral where I have to, lock myself in the bathroom or leave the house for a week until everyone’s better. But these phobias cause huge disruption in people’s lives. And I also work with people that have panic disorder, severe anxiety with panic disorder. That’s something that I also suffered from. I had massive panic attacks starting when I was 25. They progressively got worse as my job changed and I had more. Responsibility. I was an art director at a big wig private jet company. And I would have panic attacks during closed door meetings that I felt like my body was detached. It was a horrible, so I was able to overcome those. I don’t know, the last time I had a panic attack. So these kind of oddball things are things that I’m really familiar with. So that’s why that’s what I specialize in. But I have helped people with chronic pain. I’ve had migraines since I was 30. I help people with any type of pain. I help people overcome. Things that have to do with, what am I thinking? Performance, anxiety. I work with a lot of younger girls, they jump horses for fun or, it’s like a big deal for them. They get performance anxiety from that. And we work through that. I’ve worked with people that have allergies to specific things. I’ve worked with people that have, oh my gosh, you name it. People will come to me for any and everything and you can use tapping for any and everything.
Beverly:
I don’t think I had the thing of fear of throwing up, but I definitely, as a mom was not a fan of the throwing up phase. I remember two very clear instances. One time we were traveling through the mountains of West Virginia. There was not a rust area for miles and my. 7-year-old, oldest son threw up in the car. And I was like, I’m going to throw up. Like I’m going to throw up when they throw up. And I had the windows down and I was on the phone with my husband and I was like, just talk to me. So I did not throw up. Like I have to get this to the rust area. I was like trying to keep myself together.’cause if I started throwing up, it was gonna be done, right? So there was that moment. And then when my youngest son, I remember holding him, he was extra cuddly. He was little baby, like maybe six, seven months old. Sure enough, threw up out of the blue, right into my bra. And I knew if I stood up, it was going to run right down my body, right? And I was like paralyzed. I could not move. And my husband’s outside and he hears me going, oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God. I was like, paralyzed in the moment. And he comes in and he is okay, hand me the baby. Just go get in the shower. He got me a towel. Then I could stand up and just go to the shower. For my listeners, this is a lot of information. And I don’t think I have a phobia of it, but it can be very debilitating, even in the moment, as a mom who loves their baby with all their heart and understands this is a normal part of life. I can’t imagine having something on top of that, like to be able to like function as a mom. Yeah. So I can have a lot of empathy around that for sure. You also said something too that kind of resonated like you said, when you’re young, something happens to you. I definitely have a phobia of this, I was bit by a snake when I was like five years old. It was put down my short and it was trapped in my dress shirt. I had a belt and they, it couldn’t get out and it bit me. Now, it wasn’t poisonous, but it was completely traumatizing for me.
Liz:
Yeah.
Beverly:
And up until that point, I would’ve picked up a snake, picked up a frog. Not even thought twice about it. From that point forward, even talking about the snake right now makes my heart race. I might even have a nightmare about it tonight because we’ve been talking about it. Like it is definitely something that has lived with me and I’ve tried, like my son loves snakes. Of course he does. And I don’t wanna put my phobia on him, so I’m like yeah, that’s a great snake. We’ll go to a zoo and he’ll wanna pet the snake boa constrictor that pulled out of the container or whatever, and I’m like peeled up against the back of the room. He’s yeah, mom, come touch the snake. And I’ve tried. It’s just not happening at this point in my life. But I was just talking to my therapist about it. I was like, maybe we need to talk about that, because I don’t know why it’s so scary for me, but it is very scary for me. Like you said, the physicalness of it, like the sweaty palms, the heart racing the just complete panic in the moment of what could happen.
Liz:
Your body is triggered by even the sight of one. The cortisol level shoots and your amygdala is totally detached from your prefrontal cortex. And a lot of people are afraid of the symptoms that it causes them, the physical symptoms, like the sweaty palms, the racing heart, the feeling of lightheadedness that you get that’s what I would get around the throw up thing. Oh. And you’d be physically shaking to the point where I couldn’t even stand up and it wasn’t even happening to me. It was happening to someone else. Your body tries to protect you. I had a friend that was afraid of snakes and we did some work on that and there’s. Very trained. EFT practitioners like myself, know other ways of tapping to get around this. There’s something called the tell the story technique where you relive, we tap together as you talk about this little movie. We would tap through that from the neutral point before anything bad happened and we tap each little section of that until we cleared all the trauma, all the physical upsetness, everything that happened till we get to the end. And you can review that little movie in your mind, and it doesn’t give you any intensity. It doesn’t spark any intensity. It’s just, oh, that happened. That was unfortunate. But we cleared that all out with a special technique in tapping, and it works really well.
Beverly:
Gosh, it’s so fascinating to me, Liz, how the brain works and our amygdala and all that, how you’re talking about all the things and there’s even like our reptilian brain, right? That’s detached from all those other things. And I’m sure we haven’t even learned like 10% of what is possible. It’s very fascinating. I can see how you would have like a curiosity based on yourself trying to fix yourself to go do more and help other people. Yeah. That to me seems like a very natural progression. What has been the hardest part about building your business and how did you overcome it?
Liz:
What I do is so specific that I get clients just because people will randomly Google me and I have people all over the world. Yeah. In all kinds of countries. And I think the hardest part of building my business is the social media. I hate it. I don’t like to do it at all. And I feel like I can manifest clients. I could just put the energy out there that I’m gonna manifest this amount of clients and it always works, but I feel really guilty when I’m not doing something on social media. And so I hate the social media.
Beverly:
I’m going to give you permission. You don’t have to do social media, Liz.
Liz:
I hate it. It’s not hard to, but I wanna help so many people that can’t afford to see me, don’t have the money or the time or the energy, or they don’t believe in it just yet. And, I’m always in the process of coming up with something special that’s not a lot of money that I can put for sale on my store and my website. And just having the energy to get all that together is really overwhelming for me. I have a highly sensitive personality. I don’t know if you’re familiar with people with that are HSPs, but. I feel overwhelmed a lot by that. I don’t know. I trust my intuition and the fact that I can manifest clients when I need them, and then when I don’t want new clients, I can stop that energy. So that’s what I struggle with is oh, do I have to do this social media?
Beverly:
So it’s interesting, Liz, because so many of our clients are the opposite. And I would love to dig a little deeper about this, because they’re willing to throw up something on, no pun intended, on social media, but they’re so scared to niche. We really encourage you to niche us far down to get your one inch, really deep of that one inch square so that you can speak. Your message is so incredibly clear to the people who need you the most because that is who you serve completely. And it excites me to hear you talk about nicheing because it’s exactly what you should be doing and what’s great. And what I hear you say, and correct me if I’m wrong, but I’m hearing is because of your niche, you are sought after.
Liz:
That’s true..
Beverly:
I’ve said if you have a hundred ideal clients who exactly fit, you can have a very successful company. You don’t need millions of people and you don’t need millions of followers, you don’t need millions of pieces of content, you don’t need any of that.’cause when you are really clear, you don’t need to do all the other things. You do what you do well, you do what you need to do to reach those people. And that’s it. You’re like the perfect case study for me because we always say you are the guide. Your experience, your exact life has informed who you are today as a business person, and that is the exact person that people are waiting to show up to help them solve their problems. And you are literally sharing your journey of trauma and anxiety and all of your experiences and how it has informed you in a way that helps other people who have the same exact disorders and phobias and issues, and you’re like, Hey, I’ve been there. I know how to do that. I’ve done it. Here’s the path. I can guide you on this journey so you can get away from this controlling your life or be debilitating and not living a full, purposeful life. If I could just shake my listeners for a second, like literally shake you, this is exactly what you need to do in every element of your marketing. Go deep. This is the authenticity part. This is the vulnerability part. This is exactly who you are part. This is exactly who you’re meant to be part. Go into your past and look at all the things that have helped define you. Those big moments, those little moments. Write them down, journal about them. Get really clear, and then look at why you started your business and who your very favorite customers are. And that is what you should talk about. That’s the messaging. That’s who you talk to. That’s the transformation you can offer people. So Liz. A plus on so many levels. So if you don’t do social media, it’s okay. I can give you permission. You can give yourself permission. You don’t need to do all the things. What you need to do is the things that work for your people. If I could just teach all of my clients to really lean into that part of them I joke that I’m a marketing therapist because of this exact thing. You gotta go deep into who you are, where you come from, your purpose, all the things that have informed who you are as the guide. And then once you do that, you can create your messaging and really connect with people because then they’ll see themselves in you and say, oh, she’s exactly who I need to help me solve this problem. I have to work with her. I
Liz:
love that.
Beverly:
And it’s just exciting for me to hear someone talk, the talk of what we try to get them to walk every day. So for my listeners, it’s such a powerful thing. If this resonates with you, if this is connecting with you, if you’re like learning, oh my gosh, maybe I need to go deeper. Maybe I do need to lean into my whole life experience to show up as the person that my customers really need, my clients really need. If that resonates with you, leave us a review, share this episode because that’s how it’s gonna reach more people and help them live more in their zone of genius and in their purpose in this life. To hear Liz’s story is so incredibly powerful of how you can do it and be super successful doing that. So I asked the question, Liz, what is the one thing that you think has changed or evolved the most in your approach to business? This entrepreneurial journey you’ve had in this particular space? Like obviously you have the marketing background, but in this particular space, what do you think has evolved the most? We get a lot of wisdom along our journey. What do you think has evolved the most in that process?
Liz:
I guess that, my podcast came from this and I remember saying to my husband a few years ago, I think I wanna tell my story. And he said is this gonna make you any money? How much is it gonna cost? What do you have to do? And, I did hire a producer to help me get started, but I was with her for one day. I paid her a bunch of money and we recorded some stuff, my intro, my outro, stuff like that for one day. But I said to my husband, I don’t wanna care about making money from this. I just feel like I have a story to tell. And I just wanna put my story out there. And yes, I’ve gotten clients from it and that’s wonderful, but I just feel like I want people to know what energy medicine is about. I want them to know about tapping. I never would’ve guessed that this is where I would’ve ended up after being in, the design field and having this art background and all of this. This is a different way of using my creative expertise. Yeah. And, helping people. I cleared my trichotillomania when I was getting certified. Even if I wouldn’t have cleared it, I remember thinking, it wouldn’t be authentic for me to help people get over this if I didn’t really get over it myself. But you know what? I’ve had relapses during, after and it’s just a part of the process. And I can teach my clients that, I can speak from experience and even if you don’t stop pulling your hair after working with me, you have these tools that you can use for anything in your life you can use tapping for. So I feel like I wanted to share this with people. And that podcast came from, I’m finally not ashamed of this disorder that I had for so many years of my life. And I wanna teach people that they don’t have to be either. So I would never have thought and that I would be putting myself out there like that. So it’s very humbling and I get so much positive feedback and specifically from my clients. That’s the best part of my work is my clients. They’re just the best.
Beverly:
I think the correlation between healing and business is nothing is linear. Nothing. This is a perfect road of how it’s gonna happen. It’s not linear. It goes up, goes down, goes back. You might make a massive step in your business, but then the next minute you have to pull back because of something or whatever. Exactly. The same thing happens with healing. I feel like you could have a massive step forward, but then something could trigger you. And I know I did a lot of work before I got married and had children. Once I had married and had children. Those triggers are very different now. Because I see something in them, or my son does something that triggers me in a different way. You could do work, but something can happen in your life. It’s very natural. That could trigger something in you that you didn’t even know you still had to work through in some way. We are complex human beings we have to work through. So yeah. I think it’s so good. Okay, so this season’s big question is how did you awaken your brand magic? Was there a moment that everything aligned and you saw this unique magic that you had to bring to the table? Hey there, you’ve just finished part one of the Spark Ignite episode. How are you feeling? Excited, inspired, but we’re just getting started. Next Tuesday we’re dropping part two, and you won’t wanna miss it. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter, so you’ll be the first to know when it goes live. Until then, take a breather, let those ideas simmer, and we’ll see you next week.
