WHAT IS EFT?

EFT, or Emotional Freedom Techniques, is essentially an emotional version of acupuncture without the needles. It is a technique that combines Ancient Chinese acupressure and modern psychology to help you relieve emotional and physical pain. Often much faster and more effective than traditional talk therapy, EFT offers a powerful tool that you can easily learn and apply on your own.

According to founder Gary Craig, the philosophy behind EFT is that "the cause of all negative emotions is a disruption in the body's energy system." An EFT practitioner supports the client with instructions and feedback through usage of acupressure points along the body's energy meridian grids. The aim is to help bring the system back into balance by clearing these blockages that often cause painful mental-emotional patterns and behaviors. EFT stimulates the body's natural self-healing capabilities. Here are four amazing benefits of EFT, or “tapping”:

1. Tapping Connects You to Your Body

Many people find themselves talking about the same issues over and over, year after year in talk therapy sessions. Tapping often gets to the heart of an issue more quickly. You focus more on processing feelings and get less stuck in trying to ‘think’ your way out of a problem. EFT cultivates an awareness of bodily sensations, which helps you build a connection between your mind and your body. This makes it easier to release damaging, pent-up emotions in their body

Furthermore, in talk therapy, you don’t access trauma that’s stored within the body. In EFT, you tap on different points, or meridians, throughout your body, which restores the body’s energy balance. You get the unique experience of focusing on the emotional and the physical at the same time. So many of us spend so much time in our heads- either ruminating, or trying to fix this problem or that. EFT gives us a break away from our usual way of thinking and gives us access to a more subtle part of our mind.

2. Tapping Decreases Cortisol

EFT works wonders for anxiety. An evidence-based method that has been validated in over 100 clinical trials, EFT has been scientifically proven to decrease cortisol (the stress hormone). In numerous studies, people treated with even a single session of EFT showed statistically significant improvements in anxiety.

Tapping bypasses the frontal lobes (which are more active in talk therapy) and sends signals right to the stress centers of the brain. 

The act of tapping calms your entire system and has been proven to alleviate a variety of psychological distress symptoms. This reduction of stress can help you access your inner wisdom and therefore you are able to view your problems in a different light. This is why more and more therapists are incorporating EFT for anxiety into their practice.

3. Tapping Changes your PAST!

CHANGING THE PAST…

Have you ever wished there was a way to go back into the past and change things that happened to you? Painful childhood experiences can stay with us our entire lives. They subconsciously shape who we are in a way that can affect our body, our relationships, and how we see ourselves. Neuroscientist Karim Nader’s work suggests that old memories can be re-visited in such a way that allows us to “reconsolidate”, or remember and store them differently. 

 CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT MATRIX REIMPRINTING- One of my FAVORITE EFT TOOLS!!

4. Tapping Helps with Pain

Chronic pain can be exhausting, depressing, and terrifying. Many people with chronic pain feel isolated, misunderstood, and miserable. And along with the actual physical pain comes a gamut of emotions that further complicate the problem. EFT can help with the multitude of emotions that accompany physical pain: guilt, sadness, hopelessness, and anxiety. These emotions are not just extra baggage on top of your pain, they actually exacerbate the pain. A negative mindset or mood and make pain worse. So it would follow that reducing negative emotions will reduce your pain. Research shows Emotional Freedom Techniques can reduce the severity of your pain. Chronic pain that is not from an injury, or that persists despite medical attention, may have a deeper source. Many people with chronic pain-especially back pain- may benefit from exploring possible emotional causes of their pain.

What is TMS?

Studies show that stress and emotional pain (especially repressed anger) can actually cause physical pain.

Dr. John Sarno described this process as Tension Myositis Syndrome, or TMS. TMS is when the body produces a physical response to mask a psychological issue. The body does this because physical problems are often easier to accept and deal with than emotions. For example, it can be easier to talk about having a backache than it is to talk about resenting someone or something in your life. According to Dr. Sarno, the person in chronic pain needs to retrain their mind to pay attention to emotions they may have pushed aside or squashed down and process them.

In our EFT sessions, we can tap on your symptoms to help alleviate the sensations you are experiencing. There are many different strategies we can use to change the way you are experiencing pain and actually change how your body is perceiving these sensations. We can also work on identifying the true origin of your pain in order to see if we can begin to unravel the pain process.

You may want to ask yourself some of these questions in order to start to explore your own pain from another perspective:

  • What do I feel about this pain? (Guilt? Anger? Hopelessness?)

  • When did the pain start?

  • Was there anything stressful in my life at that time?

  • Did anything or anyone make me angry at that point? (even subtly?)

  • Was I comfortable expressing my feelings at that point?

  • Am I comfortable expressing my feelings now?

  • Am I comfortable accepting my anger now?

  • Who would I be without this pain? Does that feel scary?

  • Are there any benefits at all to having this pain? (Perhaps you can more easily say no to things you don't want to do?)

Try jotting down the answers to these questions, or better yet, journal about them.

The act of writing seems to access a different part of your brain than merely reflecting mentally. You may be surprised to see what comes out when you are writing!

“I deeply and completely love and accept myself.”

-Part of the set-up statement in EFT practice.