The paradox of EFT – Emotional Freedom Techniques – is that it can produce both subtle and complex therapy in the hands of a skilled and experienced therapist and yet it can be surprisingly successful as a self help tool, too.
Because it is a product of the Internet era, awareness of EFT’s existence and developments in its use have spread round the world at a quite unprecedented rate since former Stanford engineering graduate Gary Craig did a TFT training and then began to evolve his own energy therapy from it.
EFT, which has been described as emotional acupuncture without needles, easily lends itself to self help at a symptom control level. Stress, anxiety, phobic reactions, pain and many physical symptoms often respond quite quickly to tapping on points on the meridians while focussing on what it is that someone wants to deal with.
But it can also be used for clearing much deeper issues. And a brilliant way to do that is what is called The Personal Peace Plan. Its beauty is that it allows a person to clear out all the old “stuff” that may be causing the core issue without having to do the skilled detective work an experienced therapist would do to find the core issue.
One of EFT’s greatest strengths is the way it deals with memories. It helps us clear out of our systems the effects of experiences we have had and from which we made decisions about who we are and how safe the world is. Some of the things that happen to us might be obvious Traumas, like natural disasters, being in a war zone and so on. What is more subtle is how we are affected by the traumas with a small “t”, which may have been hugely influential to a vulnerable child and seem deceptively unimportant to an adult. Often they are experiences we rarely consciously think of but which are running the show in the background.
The personal peace plan
To do the personal peace plan you write down every negative memory you can think of and work on them one at a time. Even if you come up with 100, it would still take only about three months to work through them at the rate of one a day. Anything you remember as having been negative at the time, even if, when you think about it now, you do not feel any emotion about it, qualifies as a negative memory as defined here.
When I work with clients and I am doing detective work, trying to work out the experiences that have had a negative effect on them, they will often say: “I never think about that now. I am sure it does not still affect me.” Or sometimes they say: “ I have dealt with that.” But in my experience whether they consciously think about a memory or not if they remember it vividly when they do think about it, and if they have not worked with it with EFT, it is almost certainly still having some influence on them and the way they feel and react. It is still in the system.
Sometimes the negative memory no longer seems to have any emotion attached to it. That probably just means the emotion about it has been repressed. If you remember it as a negative experience it was. If you remember it when you do not remember anything that happened to you the same day or week or month, it is most likely to be an influential negative memory. Tapping will often lift the repression to allow the emotions to come up, and then disperse them again. Or, sometimes, the memory changes without ever having had conscious awareness of the emotions. It may be that you notice a memory looks or sounds different or seems further away or longer ago. All of these are indications that something has changed about the way the memory is stored.
The basic how to of EFT
If you do not know the basics of EFT and would like to try this, there is a link from my website www.judybyrne.co.uk to a U tube video which shows you clearly where the tapping points are and the basic protocol for using them. There is also a printable chart showing the points. Teach yourself on a single feeling first. It might be anger about something. Or a feeling of anxiety of something. Use whatever you can to familiarise yourself with the points. And don’t just focus on the word you use to describe it. Where you attention really needs to be is on how it makes you feel in your body.
The movie technique
Once you know how and where to tap, you can move on to the movie technique. This is a great way to deal with negative memories. It might be something like: One day I came home from school and told my mother I got 99 per cent in a test and all she said was: “What about the mark you missed?” That, and a repetition of similar incidents, would be a classic scenario for someone who could then grow up thinking that no matter how well or how much they did, it would never be enough and they would never be good enough. So either they try harder and harder, to a pathological degree. Or they do not try at all.
So think of an individual memory as if it was a movie you have stored on video. Give it a title. Run it, to see how high the emotion goes on a scale of 1 – 10 and note that down. Then tap on: “Even though I have this – let’s say Putdown in the Kitchen movie memory, I deeply and completely accept myself. “ Use the set-up three times while tapping on the karate chop point. Then do two rounds around the points with the reminder phrase “putdown in the kitchen movie memory.” After the end of the second round run the video again and check how high the emotion goes now. If it is not yet zero, run it again with an amended set-up such as “remaining Putdown in the kitchen movie memory.” Keep going until it is zero. That is a great way to work on every memory that was not a really big trauma.
Don’t start with a really big emotion memory. But when you are ready to go for something that you know would still bring up a lot of emotion if you ran it even how, then instead of the movie technique you can use what’s called The Tearless Trauma first.
The tearless trauma
The difference between the Tearless Trauma and the movie technique is that instead of running the movie to gauge the level of distress , you just guess how high it would be if you did. Then after one round you guess again. Only when you are guessing a medium number do you actually run it. It enables you to process trauma without the risk of being re-traumatized by re-experiencing the event again because you don’t until you have taken most of the sting out of it. Guessing just means you let your unconscious mind tell you.
One thing both the Movie Technique and the Tearless Trauma have in common is that a memory for this technique needs to be quite short – just minutes long, and have only one emotional peak. If it is a memory of an event that lasted for hours, then you need to pick out a short excerpt that lasted only a few minutes and has only one emotional peak. You may need to chop a long trauma into a number of short “movies.”
Sometimes people find the emotion goes down and then goes up again. There are two possibilities here. It may be that you have switched to a different memory, or a different bit of the same memory. If so, treat it as a separate movie and start again. Or it may be that you have accessed a different emotion from the original one. So if the feeling the first time went to seven and it was shame and it is now seven again, ask yourself what the emotion is now. Is it, for example, anger? Then keep tapping until the anger also goes down.
Real or imaginary?
Most of us have memories where we are just not sure whether we remember something or remember what we have been told about it as if we remember it. We have a movie, but we constructed rather than recorded it. It does not matter. What actually happened is not really relevant. What matters is what we have stored in our minds. Memory is always a construction anyway. Every time we retrieve a memory we edit it in some way before we store it again. Similarly, if you are not sure if you are remembering one event or a composite of a number the same thing goes. It doesn’t matter what is historically true. All that counts here is what is stored in your memory. And fortunately it is not necessary to do many similar memories. Usually doing a representative sample seems to take the sting out of the rest.
It is always a fine judgement whether it is really okay to work by yourself in this way and when you need professional help. Most of the time for most people it is safe to use EFT as D-I-Y therapy. But I think before you start you need to make a pact with yourself that if you find you are getting out of your depth, you will seek professional help.
I said earlier that one of EFT’s greatest strengths is the way it can deal with memories. A second is that it will often take you to where you need to go. I am amazed how often clients finish a round of tapping on something and start thinking about something neither they nor I would have suspected was relevant but which turns out to be key. If you recognize that where you realise you need to go is not a place you want to go alone, then seek professional help.