EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Techniques and falls under the heading of

Energy Psychology. Simply put it is a tapping treatment, used on specific meridian

points that were first mapped out in Ancient Chinese Medicine 5000 years ago. It

is like an emotional version of acupuncture, without the needles and sometimes

referred to as an acupressure treatment. It came about in the 1990’s when a

Stanford trained Engineer, called Gary Craig, attended a Thought Field Therapy

(TFT) workshop put on by its inventor, Roger Callaghan. Gary, being a pragmatic

kind of character, could see the huge benefits of TFT, but didn’t see why it needed

to be so complicated.

Thus came about the birth of EFT - a very simple and easily learned technique that

can be used within minutes by anyone - even tiny children can pick it up in

seconds. In fact children take to it like ducks to water, maybe it is something to do

with their great ability to accept things on face value - no need for them to have

scientific proof or to understand the where’s or why for’s!

The premise behind EFT is that negative emotion is caused by a disruption in the

body’s energy system. Picture a flickering light in your house - the light flickers, it

clearly hasn’t fused, but there is definitely some kind of interference going on.

This interference is like the disruption that we experience in our energy system

when we feel anxious or scared. Tapping, whilst focusing on the issue that

concerns you, releases the interference or blockage and rebalances the body to

achieve its natural state.

EFT is now more commonly credited, amongst the psychotherapy community, as

combining elements of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Brief Exposure Therapy and

somatic intervention (the physical tapping element). It has not been fully

understood why the addition of tapping to the rather better known talk therapies

should speed up the process of eliminating phobias and wider anxieties,

nonetheless it appears to do so.

“THE QUICK GUIDE TO THE TAPPING TREATMENT”

WWW.THETAPPINGTREATMENT.COM Copyright Sian McDermott 2010

So what does emotional freedom really mean? Clearly, it would not benefit us to

lose the ability to feel all emotion, but how about if you could get rid of those

negative thoughts and feelings? Now we’re talking...

“THE QUICK GUIDE TO THE TAPPING TREATMENT”

WWW.THETAPPINGTREATMENT.COM Copyright Sian McDermott 2010

Like most things in life there is the negative and the positive, the plus and the

minus, the good and the bad - it is what balances our lives.

Is there any point to negative emotions? Well, perhaps surprisingly, the answer is

‘Yes’.

It is the negative emotions that let us know that we are going off track. They are

indicators, if you like, that we are out of balance. Perhaps we are straying from our

goals, compromising our values or beliefs, stepping out of our comfort zones and

so forth. And clearly, for this reason, they have a value.

Then, of course, fear is there to protect us, to alert us to danger so that we can

react proactively and appropriately. In the normal course of things we feel the fear,

we react, we remove ourselves from the danger.

So if our negative emotions are there to serve us why would we want a technique

such as EFT to get rid of them?

It is all a question of degree - if you feel a negative emotion and it alerts you to a

state of mind that is less than perfect or a danger that needs to be avoided, then

you have the ability to make corrections and get back on course. However, the

problems start when we are overly emotional or when the negative emotion starts

to govern our lives.

For example we may begin to feel fear when there is no real danger, the feeling is

intense and we never know what will bring it on - a classic example of a panic

attack. A phobia is an irrational fear response to something. In other words the

level of fear is out of proportion to the experience.

It is this kind of negative emotion, irrational and of no gain to us, that the tapping

treatment can be aimed at. There are websites such as http://eqi.org that can list

as many as 600 negatively descriptive words if you want to delve into it! However,

most of us will recognize the negative emotions listed below and we have probably

experienced most of them to some degree in our lives.

“THE QUICK GUIDE TO THE TAPPING TREATMENT”

WWW.THETAPPINGTREATMENT.COM Copyright Sian McDermott 2010