Awakening to Your Inner Wisdom
with EFT and Imagery

“You want me to what?” I asked my friend, a fellow psychologist trying to help me with feelings of helplessness over a chronic illness.

“I want you to tap on specific acupuncture points on your body while thinking about your feelings of helplessness. It’s part of a new technique I’m learning called EFT. I’ll show you where to tap.” He sounded like he thought tapping on various body parts was the most rational, natural way to deal with feelings.

I, on the other hand was not so convinced, but to humor him, I complied. I felt silly tapping on my face and upper body, while repeating the phrase “my feelings of helplessness.” How could this weird procedure help me feel better? Looking back on the experience, I must admit that the tapping protocol he took me through actually did help to alleviate my feelings of helplessness. At the time, though, I attributed the improvement to a desire to help make my friend feel good about this new technique that had so excited him.

I thanked him for the demonstration and then promptly forgot about tapping.

A number of years later, I was speaking at a conference in Manhattan on spiritual responses to 9/11. The day of the conference I woke up feeling sick. Tempted to cancel the speaking engagement, I was surprised when I “heard” a voice inside telling me to go to the conference anyway. Over the years I had learned to trust the wisdom of that inner voice, so I dragged myself out of bed, unaware that I was moving toward what was going to be a life-changing experience.

Daniel Benor, a psychiatrist from New Jersey, was speaking at the conference before me. His topic? How energy psychology techniques could be used to help people heal from trauma. He gave an EFT demonstration, using the 200 people in the audience as subjects. We were instructed to each pick an issue that was bothering us—nothing very serious or particularly upsetting, we were cautioned, just for the purposes of the demonstration. We just had to find something that was troubling us. We were asked to rate the intensity of our distress over this issue on a scale from 0 to 10. Then we all tapped on our issues. After one round of tapping he asked how many people in the audience had been able to lower their level of distress. Almost everyone in the audience raised their hands—myself included. I was amazed. Almost 200 people experiencing relief in seconds just from tapping.

Now my curiosity was piqued. Sure tapping looked weird, but I could no longer ignore its power to heal. I went home and immediately went online. That is how I discovered Gary Craig’s website and began learning about EFT.

I read everything I could find on energy psychology, learning the EFT techniques and how to apply them from videos, CD’s and articles. First I tried the techniques on myself, then on friends and family. Finally, I began to introduce EFT into my clinical practice.

The results continue to amaze me. I have seen people overcome life-long phobias in a few sessions. Others have used the techniques to alleviate anxiety and stave off panic attacks. One man with whom I worked was able to heal from the effects of a traumatic event that he believed had shaped his life after only two EFT sessions. It’s not that he forgot about the event. It’s just that he was no longer plagued by obsessive thoughts and nightmares about it. EFT also works on physical symptoms. A friend of mine was able to stop a migraine in its tracks in seconds.

Lest I sound like I’m selling snake oil, let me point out that EFT is not a cure-all. As Gary Craig states, when done by a proficient practitioner it works over 80% of the time. Beginners can expect to get success at least 50% of the time. Nor do I believe EFT replaces all forms of psychotherapy. There are other ways of tapping into the body’s wisdom—many of which we will explore in future newsletters.

Having said that, I can tell you that learning (and applying) the EFT techniques have changed my clinical practice and my personal life profoundly.

In the next newsletter (soon to follow) I will go over the “basic recipe” for doing EFT, but for now here are some more examples from my work and my life.

• One of my clients was having a problem with anger management. She would go into rages that frightened her children, and the situation was so serious that her family was begging her to work on the problem in therapy. We decided to try an EFT session to see if that would help. First we made a list of every issue, thought, feeling, and memory she could think of related to the issue of anger. She identified at least 30 items, among them “memory of my mother screaming at me when I spilled the juice at age 5,” “frustration at not being heard,” and “feeling I’m a bad person for screaming at my children.” We began to work our way through the list, rating each item on a scale of 0-10, as a measure of the intensity of the emotion surrounding the thought or feeling. We tapped on an item until its intensity level was down to a 0, indicating that item no longer held an emotional charge. We tapped for about an hour on many, but not all the items. After an hour, however, she found that even some of the items we had not yet gotten to had lost their emotional charge. (There’s a kind of generalization effect with tapping.) When she was sure everything on the list was down to a zero rating, we ended. That was four months ago. Since that time she has had no problem with anger. She gets angry, of course, but the anger no longer sets her off into a rage.
• I got a call from security in my mother’s apartment building several weeks ago, informing me that my mother was being taken by ambulance to the emergency room of a local hospital. I became panicky as I hastily arranged to get to the hospital to be with her. All kinds of frightening thoughts were going through my head. All the way to the hospital, though, I tapped on my anxiety and fear, and by the time I got to the emergency room, I was calm. It turned out that she was not seriously ill, and when she was released an hour later, I was grateful that I had been able to be there for her.
• I have a problem with insulin resistance due to medication I must take. At certain times of the day, when the medication is at its highest in my blood, I have to avoid eating simple carbohydrates like sugar. One day a few months ago, I began craving the ice cream that was sitting in the freezer—one of my favorite flavors from one of my favorite ice cream parlors. The problem was my craving coincided with the time of the afternoon I had to avoid eating sugar. Thoughts of that ice cream continued to plague me. So I tapped. I tapped on my craving for that ice cream. I tapped on my feelings of deprivation and on my feelings of self-pity. Until I no longer had a craving and no longer felt sorry for myself because I couldn’t eat it. That was all I had to do. It did not take willpower to avoid eating the ice cream. I just didn’t want it anymore, knowing what it would do to my blood sugar, and ultimately my body. I went about the rest of my day with no more thoughts about the ice cream. When the evening rolled around, and I could tolerate the sugar in the ice cream with little deleterious effect, I thought again about eating it, but I still had no desire for it. As a footnote, I did eat the ice cream the next evening, enjoying it to the fullest.


In hope these examples gave you a “flavor” for EFT and what it can do. In the next issue, we will focus on some of the basics of doing EFT.