After losing her baby Alice days after birth, Sarah Tobin was left broken. But now a practitioner, she’s helped thousands with the method that rewired her response to trauma
Sarah Tobin shares Tapping techniques for anxiety
Soothing music, twinkling fake candles and a birthing pool – everything was in place for a perfect delivery. Tapping herself discreetly, as she draws on emotional memories, Sarah Tobin, 43, recalls, softly: “I had a very normal, easy, uncomplicated pregnancy and everything went well.
“I went into labour on November 20 2014. I was under a midwife-led unit, I had a birthing pool, and it was great. There were little fake candles, I had my music playing, and everything was going well. Every now and again, they checked me to make sure everything was OK.”
Sarah, of Shoreham-by-Sea, and her husband Dave, 42, an energy consultant, had been overjoyed when she fell pregnant after two years of trying.
READ MORE: Late Queen ‘dismayed’ by Prince Harry’s actions right before and after marrying Meghan
Now, hopefully, a matter of hours away from meeting their daughter, they couldn’t wait. “Things started to change after there was a midwife shift around 6.30 am,” Sarah remembers. “Shortly after, they picked up some irregular rhythms on the Doppler, so the midwife requested that I be moved into a birthing room.
“It became clear there were quite a few decelerations in Alice’s heart rate. All I can remember is the alarm bell being pressed, a huge team arriving, and an emergency procedure was performed to deliver Alice immediately.
“She was pretty lifeless, she didn’t take her own breath, and so they brought an incubation table right beside me.I saw her for a minute while they got the tube in, so they could use a life support system and take her to the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.”
Shrouded in disbelief, the couple could barely take it in. “I naively thought everything was going to be fine as, at first, I really didn’t realise the severity of what had happened,” Sarah says.
“It was only when I was taken down to theatre myself, because of the effects of such a traumatic birth, that it started to come to me that I didn’t have my baby, I didn’t know how she was, and I hadn’t even given her a name. “I started to cry, the trauma was hitting my body, but I still held a lot of faith.”
But her surgery was followed by the gravest news.
“During the final stages of her birth, she somehow did not get the oxygen she needed. That evening at 6pm I was wheeled up to see my daughter in my bed to be beside her,” Sarah whispers. “She responded to my voice, and when I touched her feet, she responded again.
“That night I went to bed thinking, ‘I can learn sign language’. But the next day, we spoke to my uncle, who is the head of a children’s hospital in America. We told him what was happening, and he said, ‘You have a very sick baby and the outlook is not good’. “That’s when the reality of what was happening really landed.
“An hour later, the consultants came in to give the worst, unimaginable news, that she wasn’t going to make it. Dave and I wanted to do an MRI scan to confirm there truly was no hope for her. We had her christened in the hospital and hoped for a miracle.
“But when it happened, we were given devastating results, and so we decided that day, the fifth of her life, that we were going to turn off the life support as there was no hope.” Unsurprisingly, Sarah’s world collapsed.
Speaking during Mental Health Awareness Week, she continues:“It was the lowest moment of my life and I thought I’d never recover.”
But an extraordinary discovery provided a springboard from this dark chapter to a positive new way of living.
Her lifeline was an extraordinary healing method called EFT or Emotional Freedom Technique – more commonly called Tapping. Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, are both advocates of the technique.
Now, a gripping new Amazon Studios crime series called Better Sister, to be released on 29 May, starring Jessica Biel as Chloe Taylor, whose husband has been murdered, sees her dealing with stress using facial tapping.
For Sarah, EFT – which involves gently tapping on 14 key acupressure points of the body while voicing painful or buried emotions, thus sending calming signals to the brain and helping the body to release trauma and rewire its stress response – was a saviour.
She says, “When I had to say goodbye to Alice, my heart was broken. During my first session, I had a breakthrough, and I cried deeper than I had ever cried before. It was the beginning of healing, and the results were life-transforming.”
In the years since, EFT has inspired Sarah’s powerful mission to support others. Now a qualified practitioner, she has written a book – Tapping Into You – to share the process which helped her to find a new future, while honouring her past. I’m now sharing the techniques I have learned to help others to transform their lives,” she says.
But Sarah’s journey through overwhelming grief was no picnic. “I was in the darkest pit of despair, I had a constant, agonising pain in my heart. “The depth of the darkness terrified me,” she admits. “I wanted to be alone, I didn’t want people’s compassion or to see pity in their eyes.”
At the end of March 2015, Sarah and Dave conceived their second child, Casper, now nine. But she was suffering from undiagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
“Once I got past the first 12 weeks, I thought ‘Oh my god, I’ve got to give birth again,’ and I was getting flashbacks, pain, depression,” she explains. When counselling didn’t work, she turned to tapping.
“I was done talking, as it gets you to open the wound, marinate in all the feelings and then what?” she says. “There is no closure, and then your time is up, and you have to leave. I told my sister how I was feeling, and she told me she’d been to a tapping therapist following a car crash that caused her flashbacks.
“I hung up the phone, found a local lady and booked six tapping sessions. It changed my life.”
Describing it as “the ultimate brain hack,” she explains: “While tapping on the 14 points, you are sending electromagnetic pulses through your body.
“This signals to the amygdala (part of the brain) the message, ‘I’m safe’, which in turn switches off the body’s stress response. This rewires our stress response and supports deep, emotional healing.
“You are telling your body to feel safe in the current moment, whether you are navigating a difficult time or recalling a traumatic experience from the past.
“From my first session, I walked out knowing I had found something that was life-changing, and we all have that power within ourselves. My PTSD and flashbacks stopped straight away.
“As I worked through my next sessions, acceptance and compassion came in and the love I feel for Alice replaced the anger and darkness. I also felt incredibly anxious and scared about the upcoming birth of Caspar. Tapping prepared me.”
And when she had her second son, Josh, now seven, she used tapping again to help her. She says: “I decided to use myself as a guinea pig, and I used tapping to get through labour. I found it works with physical as well as emotional pain.”
So impressed was she by tapping that she quit her impressive head of marketing role to train in as a practitioner, so she could help others to overcome trauma, like she had.
She says, “I began posting on Instagram as lots of new mums were sharing how much they were struggling, and I knew I had a tool that could help them.” She also poignantly marks Alice’s birthday every year.
Sarah, who marks Alice’s birthday every year by going to the beach opposite their house with her family – with each of them taking a pebble,writing a message to her and throwing it into the sea, as now helped thousands of people across the world in online sessions.
And she has now authored a book, which she hopes will reach even more. “Through helping others, I am honouring Alice’s memory,” she says. “She is my driving force, and I think of her as my guide.
“I am a different person now. I decided early on I didn’t want to live in darkness. I made a conscious decision, realising I can wallow (and I did for a bit). But I then decided I don’t want to spend the rest of my life there.
“I find a lot of people hold on to their grief as a method of connecting to their loved one, but I prefer to connect to the energy of love. Tapping helped me to do that. Now I’m determined to honour Alice by helping others and living my life to the fullest.”
Tapping Into You: Transform Trauma & Rediscover Your Inner Power Through EFT is published by Godsfield Press.
READ MORE: Argos’ high-back garden chair is available for less than £15 with unique deal
