So what exactly is EFT or Tapping?
Emotional Freedom Techniques, or EFT, is the technical term for tapping therapy. Perhaps you have a friend who as told you about this strange technique of tapping parts of the body when feeling stressed. Maybe you have seen athletes doing it on TV or heard about it in some obscure blog post or podcast. You might even have some experience with it yourself or have worked with a practitioner in the past who practiced it.
EFT has been around for about three decades but is just now becoming more known in the public awareness. Emotional Freedom Techniques is at its essence a blending of Eastern and Western medicine. It is founded on an ancient Chinese medicine which understands and works with the Meridian System in the human body. The meridian system is an internal highway of subtle energies that connect and facilitate communication between the body's various systems. The energies that flow through these networks have many different names, some you may or may not have heard of. Prana, Chi, Qi, Ka, Etheric or Biophotons, to name a few. The points on these meridians that rise to the surface of the skin are called Acupoints, and this is where Acupuncturist place the needles. This is also where an EFT Therapist can help you access and create self-healing.
EFT is essentially tapping on nine different acupoints in a particular sequence, resulting in an energetic reset of the body.
Ok, so I am still confused. How will this help me?
Emotional Freedom Techniques is an exposure therapy, meaning that it is designed to tap on our pain. There are essentially two components to EFT. The first and most simple is learning to use tapping for acute or present moment anxiety. Tapping therapy has been shown to immediately downregulate the nervous system, pull cortisol (a primary stress hormone) out of the blood stream and induce a shift in the nervous system from the sympathetic (fight or flight) to the parasympathetic (calm relaxed). The second use for EFT is learning to use tapping on past traumatic memories. Tapping therapy can actually reconfigure how memory is stored! Working with a skilled EFT therapist can help someone remove the energetic charge from a past traumatic memory, and place it back into the memory system without the emotional disruption.
Why Work with a trained Tapping Therapist?
If you were to Google or YouTube EFT or Tapping you would likely see dozens if not hundreds of websites and videos describing the therapy. Some of them are good and some of them are not so good. To truly harness the healing potential of tapping for anxiety and trauma, it requires a therapist who is knowledgeable about how the nervous system and body stores memory. Using EFT we can identify tabletop issues or recurring patterns in a clients life. For example, a tabletop issue for someone might be “a habit of sabotaging relationships due to feeling undeserving of being loved”. The EFT therapist would then help the client identify specific memories or “table legs” that support the table top issue. These typically occurred in childhood. By using specific language patterns, EFT practitioners then help their client “tap out” the emotional or somatic intensity of the specific memory. Once the disruption is energetically removed the memory can be reconsolidated and placed back into long term storage, minus the emotional intensity.
The process can actually work quite quickly and is beautiful to witness when done correctly.
What else can EFT treat?
Tapping therapy has been shown to be effective in treating
Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
Chronic Pain
Chronic Anxiety
Performance issues or reaching Peak Performance
Emotional Eating
Addiction Cravings
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder