qondio.com/GYej

What is EFT - Emotional Freedom Technique?

By Dirk Bansch

Caveat: This intel is for informational purposes only.

Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) is a very interesting form of brief therapy.

Originally developed by Dr. Roger Callahan and named TFT for Thought Field Therapy, EFT is a simplified process of TFT.

Roger Callahan was a psychologist and as the story goes, he once treated a female patient who was incredibly phobic about water.
Nothing Callahan did made a big difference in the woman's phobic reaction.

One day he tried to have the lady move closer to his swimming pool, but she immediately had a phobic reaction and said that she had horrible stomach cramps.

Callahan had a background in accupuncture and in that system, the point directly under the eyes (both sides) is related to stomach problems. In a flash of insight, he tapped that point under his client's eye with his finger. Nearly immediately, the lady felt better and even stopped feeling bad about water.

Afterwards, he tried the same technique with other patients and sometimes got good results, while sometimes he didn't.

After a long process of trial and error, he developed a complicated system of algorithms for dealing with all kinds of different mental and physical problems.

Gary Craig learned the technique from him and (maybe because his background was in engineering) made some changes to the algorithms and simplified the whole system into what is nowadays known as EFT. The nice thing is that he made EFT available to the public for free.

Here is the basic technique:

You think about what you want to change about yourself and put it in a sentence. Let's say you have a headache and you want to get rid of it.
You would say something like "Even though I have a headache, I really like myself!"
What this does is telling your body/mind that you want to deal with the headache. While you are making that statement, you either rub a spot on your left chest (this is called the sore spot and is usually the most sensitive spot on that side of your chest). Do that about three times.
Alternatively, you can tap the "karate chop" point (the part of your hand you would use to hit someone with a chop in karate) on your hand while making the statement.

Then you softly tap several points on your body with one or two fingers. Depending on the system (yes, there are now dozens of subsystems of EFT out there. This is the one I tend to use.), you tap 7 or 8 points while saying out loud the most emotionally charged word of your earlier statement, in this case maybe "headache".

Say it about 7 times or so while tapping
- the inside of your eyebrow
- the outside of your eyebrow
- the bone under your eye
- the spot under your nose
- the spot under your mouth
- your clavicle
- the ribcage under your arm
- the top of your head

That would be one round of tapping. I normally use three rounds, as each round only takes a minute or so and most of the time, people feel much better afterwards.

It helps if you gauge the intensity of the headache/negative experience before the tapping, maybe on a scale from 0-10, then you can easily notice any change afterwards.

It does not really matter if you do the taps on your left or your right side.

If you wish to work on animals, you could use something called surrogate EFT, where you basically imagine that you are the animal and then do the whole process as if you were the animal. Example: if you have a phobic dog, you would say something like "Even though I am afraid of thunderstorms, I am a great dog." while imagining that you are the dog.

Good luck, there is lots of free information about EFT available on the net.

PLEASE VISIT THE CONTRIBUTOR'S WEBSITE

Scott Watson Home Page
Home Page of Scott Watson
www.scottwatson.co.uk

This sheds a lot more light on the subject than the YouTube or other things I've read. Thank you, Dirk. I did try it on myself and it felt wonderful. I am sort of skeptical about the dog being benifited by my using EFT on myself though. How could this work?

Laraine May 8, 2010 00:44

I knew about this technique, but I didn't know it could be used on animals. I'll experiment on my cat.

eris771 May 8, 2010 08:00

This is the most amazing thing I have read in a long time. In the book I'm reading 'As You Think by James Allen http://amzn.to/d6IUIq it talks about how you can use your mind to fix anything.

Bill Coughlin May 8, 2010 10:24

Thank you for sharing this fasinating intel, Dirk.
Keep up the good work.
Best wishes.
Frederick

frederick May 8, 2010 10:31

This blog Intel deals with an amazing therapy to heal emotional disorders without conventional medical drugs. I wonder if it might positively influence a normal treatment of my damaged heart muscle. I will keep you posted, as too little time as elapsed so far to see proper results.

tozcal2008 May 10, 2010 10:45

I have seen a couple of fabulous videos on EFT and 1 great TV program - I wonder if it will ever take off?

Andrew Goulding Jul 24, 2010 05:33

Thanks for this synopsis of the EFT technique.

EFT is pretty amazing. I purchased the complete set of training videos and, since Gary Craig so generously allows us to share them, I am giving a copy of the set to my nephew. He will soon be going into the army and EFT has been hugely effective for relieving the symptoms of PTSD. I'm hoping he can use this to help his buddies.

Great idea to teach EFT to soldiers! I had a few clients with PTSD and sometimes EFT helped, sometimes NLP, sometimes Hypnosis, but the main thing is that there are techniques that work and more people should know about them!

The copyright for this content entitled "What is EFT - Emotional Freedom Technique?" has been specified by the contributor as:

This content may be copied and distributed (but not modified), as long as the original author is acknowledged with a link back to the content page. If you use this content according to the license specified, you must link to the following URL: