EFT - Emotional Freedom Technique

EFT is a method of tapping on acupuncture points on the face, hands, and torso, which erases negative emotions and limiting beliefs. It's described as: The surprising natural healing aid you can use for almost everything. It's drug-free, hypnosis free, side-effect free, and often works where nothing else will.

How EFT came to be discovered

The story of how EFT came to be, and how such a wonderful tool became available for us all, is a fascinating one:

In 1980 something amazing happened. A psychiatrist named Dr. Roger Callahan was working with a client to try to cure her water phobia. He had been using traditional methods for a couple of years with no success.

One day she complained of feeling nauseous whenever she thought of water. Dr. Callahan knew a little bit about acupuncture and he knew the acupuncture spot which governed the stomach.

So he asked her to tap on that spot to see if it could ease the nausea.

She did this and said, amazed, ‘It’s gone!’.

Dr. Callahan said, pleased, ‘The nausea’s gone?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘but so is the water phobia!’
As simply as that her life-time water phobia was gone!!

She was able to prove it by running out of the office and down to the edge of Dr. Callahan’s swimming pool where she trailed her hands in the water. This mightn't sound much - but it was a huge achievement for her.

This was a woman who couldn’t take a bath, who couldn’t go out if it was raining (just as well she lived in California and not Ireland!), and here she was, now feeling totally comfortable about water.

Dr. Callahan immediately knew that he was onto something exciting here, and over time he explored this further and developed TFT (Thought Field Therapy).

This involved tapping different acupuncture points in a specific order depending on what the issue was. It worked very well; he was getting great results with all sorts of problems. However TFT was very complicated to use, and needed accurate diagnosis of the problem. People couldn't use it for themselves - they needed a trained practitioner.

Some time later a Stanford-trained engineer and personal-performance expert named Gary Craig trained in TFT.

He then thought of a way to make it simpler for people to use. His genius was to use an engineering process called Total Redundancy which, in this case, meant that you tapped every acupuncture point regardless what the issue was.

Yes, this meant that you tapped some points which weren’t necessary - but it took so little time to do that that it wasn’t a problem. And the advantage was that there was only one easy process to learn, regardless what your issue was, and so people could use it themselves.

He named his refinement EFT - Emotional Freedom Technique.

EFT proved outstanding at doing two things, and doing them quickly and painlessly:

• Removing ‘bad’ emotions such as fear, anger and so on. Literally, those feelings were gone, to be replaced by peace and calm.
  
• Removing mental blocks or limiting beliefs and replacing them with more empowering beliefs. In other words, literally re-programming our subconscious so that it works for us, and not against us.

These two attributes turned out to have hundreds, if not thousands, of uses.

EFT quickly became the technique of choice to solve all sorts of problems from phobias to traumas to addictions to headaches to allergies and many others.

I encountered EFT about five years ago, and immediately became a fan. I originally was just going to use it for my own benefit but realised that it was too good to keep to myself, and I trained as a practitioner, and have worked with hundreds of clients, helping them eradicate issues such as phobias, traumas, self-esteem issues and many more.