China Impressions: EFT in Shanghai

Entry for 12 August 2018:

Six days’ EFT training in Shanghai.  I’ve flown from Glasgow to San Francisco, spending 3 days in Pleasanton and getting in a brief visit with Kenneth before flying on to China.  California is hot and dry, and on fire in many places.

First time in mainland China (previous trip to Hong Kong, but somehow feels like that doesn’t count).  Airport is full of construction; we land out in far reaches of airport; it takes bus what seems like ages to get to terminal & pick up suitcase.  Foreigners have to do self-service finger-printing before they can go through immigration.  Joyce has sent her helper Celia to wait for me and escort me to hotel.  When I finally emerge from international arrivals; she is surprised at how long it’s taken me.

Uber car to city:  Huge city: 25 million & counting. Radio is playing American pop music.  It takes us over an hour to go from airport to hotel, which is apparently toward the western end of the city.  It’s 30C but feels closer to 40, and very humid. It gets dark early, around 7.  My room on the 12^th floor has a great view of the nearby Shangfeng Park and the cityscape beyond, although it turns out that we are many miles from downtown.  Joyce & Morley meet me for dinner in the hotel a bit later.  There is no one else in the restaurant, although it’s Saturday night.  I’m so jet-lagged I can’t later remember what we talked about, except to make plans for Sunday. I take a melatonin and go to bed about 9pm.

I get up early the next day and go for a run on one of the treadmills in the empty gym facility in the hotel.  After showering and breakfast, Joyce & Morley pick me up in an Uber car (they don’t own a car in Shanghai).  They take me to the International Church in Shanghai, a nondenominational evangelical church in the ballroom of a large hotel. We have to show our passports to get in, proving that we are foreign nationals.  The first 45 min is prayers followed by contemporary praise music, nice enough, but after a while a bit repetitive for someone used to complicated Anglican hymns.

After church we grab sandwiches at the Starbucks and get picked up to be driven west of Shanghai to a “water town”: an old town built along a set of canals, with markets of little shops on the lanes that parallel the canals. We spend the afternoon there wandering around in the heat amidst throngs of Chinese people (almost no Westerners), looking in shops, while Morley talks to the shopkeepers, and we shop. We visit a Taoist temple, a rustic hotel, and an old tea-house where we eat fruit prepared by the owner, who is also a painter.  We take a canal ride, on a boat whose boatman propels it forward with a kind of rear mounted rudder/oar.  It’s very peaceful, and a great way to people-watch on a hot August Sunday afternoon.  Then it’s back into town for dinner, but on the way we have a fascinating and far-ranging theological discussion/sharing.  Dinner is at one of their favourite Shanghainese restaurants, whose ceilings are strikingly decorated with 20^th century figurist paintings of colonial Shanghai.  At every Chinese restaurant we go to, Morley orders for everyone, curating our dining experience with an expert touch.  He is particularly good at selecting a wide range of vegetarian dishes, which I greatly appreciate.  At this dinner, I meet Jennifer, who is going to translate for me for most of the week.

The Great Firewall of China stymies me repeatedly, even though I’ve prepared by investing in a highly-rated VPN service: they’ve blocked all Google services, including Gmail, as well as BBC news (but for some reason not NPR); Dropbox is blocked as is YouTube and Facebook.  It also turns out that they’ve recently blocked my VPN service, even though there are still web ads everywhere claiming that it works. Fortunately, Skype & Zoom still work, so I can talk to Diane & Kenneth most days, working around the 15 hr time difference.  Also, my Strathclyde email still works so I locate and install a recent version of Outlook, and have Diane scan my Gmail account and forward critical email to me.

Monday morning: Celia picks me up in taxi and takes me to Shanghai Care Corner Counselling Center, the clinic and training center that Joyce and Morley run with the help of Mary and Celia.  They have 6 counselling rooms, which they also use for skill practice break-out rooms, plus a relatively large training room that can squeeze in up to 45.  Morley embarrasses me with a totally over-the-top introduction in which he dramatically describes me in almost magical terms, with laser-like empathy coming out of my eyes. 

This presages 6 days of the most intense EFT training I’ve ever had the opportunity to deliver: 1 day EFT for Social Anxiety; 2-days Advanced Empathic Attunement; 3 days Module 2 (Focusing, Reprocessing Work, Two Chair work).  First, there are lots of participants in these trainings, ranging in number from 38 to 42. Second, they are eager to learn, to do skill practice, to volunteer for live demonstrations, and to ask questions on a wide variety of topics.  It’s invigorating, challenging, and ultimately exhausting.  It pushes my thinking forward in numerous places.  They interact in an uninhibited manner with each other, sometimes arguing and challenging one another.  Not all, but most fearlessly dive into their pain: rejecting mothers; overly strict, even abusive fathers; huge expectations placed on only children (an effect of China’s one-child policy).  Underlying much of the personal pain, is the legacy of the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s and 70’s, directly experienced or transmitted cross-generationally.  This comes out sometimes as roughness or abrasiveness, sometimes as a kind of frozenness, which can break with a large release of emotion. There are many heart-wrenching stories that emerge during the week.

They refer to me as a “master” and “teacher”.  There are endless photographs during breaks and at the end of each day. Towards the end, Morley starts running interference for me so that I can have recovery time during my breaks. They soak up what I’ve got to say, even with the sequential translation.  At the best moments, the translators and I get into a kind of rhythm, as I condense what I have to say into a series of short sentences that build dramatically to climaxes. A couple of times during the week, to illustrate a key point, I find myself sharing a highly dramatic personal story, and am startled (and pleased) when they spontaneously applaud at the end. I share my mantra: Love, courage & wisdom.  Love and courage they have in abundance; for them as for me, the wisdom part is a work in progress.

To cope with the intensity, I have a power nap each day, and take melatonin most of the week, to avoid the episodes of severe insomnia I had last time I dealt with double jet lag. As we finish on the 6^th day, I write in my Pukka Pad, “tired, drained, relieved”. I have the feeling of being filled with ideas for how to move EFT theory, practice & training forward, too many to write down so that I am left hoping that they will come back when I need them. Here are a few that I was left with at the end of this running of Module 2: (1) The Focusing input needs a major update (reduce coverage of Clearing a Space, re-do task model to reflect flexible emotion-scheme based questioning strategy, which can also be used for skill practice, emphasize use within Chairwork).  (2) Due to popular demand, I’ve written part of a new input on emotion regulation (needs to be finished, lead with emotion regulation principles; figure out good place for it in later modules, probably with first chairwork).  (3) Better integration of Reprocessing Work with Chairwork is needed, to highlight its role both as stand-alone and within Chair Work. (4) Better integration of Empty Chair Work and Two Chair work is needed, underlining the role of self-interruption conflict splits in Empty Chair Work and more importantly the integrated task of Conflict Splits about an Important Other, in which it’s useful to alternate between Two Chair Work and Empty Chair Work, as each task supports work on the other.

Last day: Up early, I think maybe I’ll attempt a run in Shangfeng Park near the hotel, but it’s disgusting outside,  like a steam bath: 30C already, near 100% humidity, and the rain has already started; it’s been clear and dry all week but now a typhoon is coming in.  Run on the treadmill again; shower, pack, breakfast.  Mary meets me at 10am, checks me out of hotel.  Uber car to airport, heavy rain part of way; reminds me of Ohio summer.  Long conversation with Mary about her experiences growing up. She waits with me in the queue at check-in in case of problems (they’ve taken such good care of me here!); after taking selfie with me, she leaves me at immigration & security.  The flight is two hours late leaving, but I’m pleased with the first EFT training I’ve run in China.

When I visit a new country, I make a practice of learning about and collecting some of its folk and popular music.  Hearing of my interest, Mary has kindly assembled a diverse collection of Chinese music of various kinds and ethnicities. (I think she said there were 17 different ethnic groups represented.)  Also, the other night, Joyce & Morley took me to a record/DVD store after dinner and bought me a couple of collections of interesting Chinese music.  It is going to take me quite a whole work my way through all of this richness. 

One more thing: I’ve also picked up a bit of Chinese, simple words for “thank you” (“Xièxiè”, pronounced “she-she” with a falling tone on each syllable), “OK”   (“Hǎo”), and “Right” (“Duì”). Chinese characters fascinate me, and as I return home I’m taken with the idea that the standard written Chinese for “San Francisco” is not a transliteration but is instead the native Chinese name for San Francisco from the 19^th century:

旧金山 , in Mandarin transliterated back into the roman alphabet as “Jiù Jīn Shān”

This is not a transliteration but instead means Old (“旧”) + Gold (“金”) + Mountain (“山”), a reference to the California gold rush, which started in 1849. (I think of the archeological remains of the old Chinese dam below my brother Conal's place in Murray Creek up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, imagine Chinese workers trying to extract the last of the gold from the valley.  I hope they found some...)

As the plane crosses the wide Pacific Ocean, I review all this richness in my mind.  A word from last Sunday’s sermon surfaces: It is the Greek perissos, meaning “abundance or plenty” (from 2 Corinthians 9:8).  Earlier in the week I asked Kenneth about the etymology of the word, puzzling to me because of its similarity to per- cognate with English fear.  He laughed, reminding me that that is Latin, not Greek.  Instead, per- is a prefix that means “around or at the edge of” (cf. “peripheral”).  Issos, he said is the Greek verb “to be”; hence, “overflowing being”: perissos, abundance.  That pretty much describes my week in Shanghai.