EFT: From Fragmentation to Wholeness
It is instructive to consider that the word ‘health’ in English is based on an Anglo-Saxon word ‘hale’ meaning ‘whole’: that is, to be healthy is to be whole…. Likewise, the English ‘holy’ is based on the same root as ‘whole’. All of this indicates that man has sensed always that wholeness or integrity is an absolute necessity to make life worth living. Yet, over the ages, he has generally lived in fragmentation.
– David Bohm, theoretical physicist
During the past few years, bodily autonomy has emerged as a proxy battleground for deeply held spiritual and moral principles. Many reading this have long awakened to some bracing aspects of a newly stark environment.
It all seemed to start when a horrendous plague of bubonic proportions was purported to have beset us, one so virulent that we were to forget the medical ethics of the Nuremberg code. We were told we must isolate ourselves because we were likely to be filthy spreaders of these bubonic-level pathogens. The only way to avoid being such a filthy spreader, we were next told, was to submit to a “perfectly safe” experimental gene therapy. “My body my choice” ceased to be the order of the day. But not to worry!–for the same authorities and experts who herded us toward their alleged vaccines and whatnot (the measures behind all the excess dying, frankly) are, after all, authorities and experts. Many of our loved ones and maybe even we ourselves marched along out of deference, at least for a time–and look what happened.
The “authorities” have assumed that our body is their choice. In our hearts we know that’s a really bad idea.
But there is an exciting part to this travesty, as I will demurely call it. It is exciting that our bodies should be so precious to us that we will stand up for our right to do what we please for their benefit. It is exciting to give a certain finger, though politely and through constitutionally lawful channels of course, to those who have callously disregarded our welfare. Perhaps there is even reason to be grateful that the season of operating on autopilot is over. Who knows where our ever-heightening awareness of the way our bodies do work will lead us?
Whether or not you are inclined to follow science (and I don’t mean Anthony Fauci!) for health guidance, it’s nice to know that there is plenty of compelling research beyond the grand illusions medical “science” has created. For example: for some time we have known that genes do not, as a matter of fact, control health destiny, and that stress features significantly in both physical and emotional unwellness. We know that emotions and physical health are inextricably related on a biochemical level, and that emotions have physical correlates in our bodies. Researchers have also legitimated energy healing in various ways. Intriguing research suggests that the fascia that interconnect all parts of the body literally form crystalline conduits (as in semiconduction) for lightning-fast, electrical communications, dwarfing those of neural channels in speed. Very sensitive instruments show points of low electrical resistance in the body–in the same places intuited by the earliest practitioners of acupuncture some 5000 years ago.
The list goes on! A wide-open door into a realm where mind, body, and indeed spirit are interconnected, beckons. Enter the thirty-year-old stress-reduction method called Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), whose street name is “tapping.” EFT is a preeminent member of a growing body of “energy psychology techniques,” which work with the body’s energetic system to foster and create emotional health. By now, EFT’s efficacy in the emotional realm is supported by rich bodies of both anecdotal and scientific evidence, concerning problems like anxiety, depression, PTSD, feelings of worthlessness, lethargy, unhealthy habits, chronic worrying, cravings, and phobias.
Certainly, EFT’s successes in the realm of emotional health are plenty exciting in and of themselves! After all, painful and persistent emotional problems often defy treatment. Counterintuitively, though, for anyone schooled in mind-body separation, EFT is healing of a variety of physical problems as well. The ways we are educated notwithstanding, this makes sense given that many—theoretically, virtually all–illnesses have stress as an underlying factor. It follows from this that by releasing stress from its storage sites in the body, it becomes possible to heal a physical symptom or condition.
The type of evidence sometimes disparagingly called “anecdotal” has been pouring into the various repositories of EFT information. Much of it has to do with physical illness and its healing. Unless we are to disbelieve thousands of people, EFT has led to the maintained loss of many pounds, healing of diabetes, toothaches, chronic fatigue, headaches, TMJ, addiction, cravings, burns, bee stings, pain, fibromyalgia, diabetes, traumatic brain injury, back problems, movement injuries, and more. There are also currently 100-plus peer-reviewed studies attesting that EFT is a versatile and efficacious tool for releasing stressors, and by extension the conditions those stressors activate.
Here is a quick list of studies that concern the efficacy of EFT for physical and emotional conditions.
– Three randomized controlled trials showed significant results with phobias in just one session. Subjects recovered from their phobias and follow-up showed recovery to be long-lasting.
– In one study 86% of veterans suffering from PTSD showed dramatic improvement after six sessions. Follow up showed that results had been maintained.
– A randomized controlled trial of veterans receiving EFT for PTSD noted physical pain levels dropping by 41%, even though they were not being treated specifically for pain.
– A randomized controlled trial studied effects on fibromyalgia using an 8-week online course. Significant improvements in pain, depression, and anxiety were noted.
– A study of 216 healthcare workers including nurses, psychotherapists, doctors, and chiropractors found a reduction in physical pain by a startling 68% after 30 minutes of EFT.
– In one study of EFT being used for psoriasis, researchers found that after EFT, the psychological health of study participants improved by 50%. On follow-up, psoriasis symptoms themselves had improved by 75%.
– Brain scans performed during EFT show significant reorganization of neural patterns in the brain.
– Studies comparing cortisol levels before and after EFT sessions show significant drops. Cortisol is considered one of the signature hormones of stress.
How EFT Works
EFT couples a physical component with a cognitive/emotional one. The physical part involves tapping on a very small subset (just 8) of the traditional Chinese acupuncture points. While soothing your nervous system through tapping, you simultaneously recite (expose) an unpleasant feature of your emotional and embodied life. You pair that exposure clause with a self-affirming one. The combination works to confound and even permanently shut down whatever warning reflex your body has learned, currently being triggered by your exposure statement. That reflex is a habituated response to, “Danger, danger! Warning, warning! Fight, flight, or freeze!” because of your perception of something dangerous in your current situation based on your history. On a rational level, this state of overdrive is completely unnecessary–yet your body holds memories of danger that cause it to react in big ways, ways that are frankly making life difficult.
As your body clears the biochemical detritus of (mis)-perception through EFT, and replaces it with more wholesome perception, you find yourself feeling calm, peaceful, secure in your own body. As you experience and re-experience this kind of high, you learn to trust the process. You grow in your ability to invest that guarded energy into something that actually benefits you.
How to do it: the “basic recipe”
You can start using basic EFT for yourself right away, for whatever may be troubling you right now. To help you with that, I will describe the three basic elements—tapping, exposure statement, affirmation–in turn. These are combined in a particular way to form the “basic recipe.” Afterwards, I will tell you how this basic combination can be put to highest use, in some cases for complete and permanent uprooting of the problem.
The Points
There are just eight tapping points in the basic EFT tapping routine or “round.” For those that know a few basics about acupuncture, these particular points are known as “meridian endpoints,” but it’s not important to the success of the technique that you understand this detail.
With most of these points, you can tap on one or both sides of the body (i.e., using both hands). On the two that sit on the midline of the body (under nose, chin) you will tap on the point with one hand or the other. Tap with one or two fingers, seven times or so on each point, without stressing about the exact number. Tap at a rate and with a degree of pressure that feels nice to you.
Creating a “Setup Statement”
The so-called setup statement contains two parts. First, the exposure part.
Zero in on something that is troubling you right now (anything at all!). Put it into words. Here are a few examples:
Even though I feel nervous about tomorrow’s presentation
Even though I can’t seem to shed these extra pounds, and I’ve tried everything!
Even though I feel angry about being pulled over yesterday, and it made me feel helpless and afraid
How triggering is your chosen statement, on a scale from 0 to 10 where 10 is as triggered as you could possibly be? Feel out, intuit a number, and write it down. (If no number comes to you it’s fine to take a guess.) Such intuitive self-ratings are known as “subjective units of discomfort” of SUDs. SUDs help a person track progress, inviting confidence in the process. You will refer back to this first SUD after a round or two (more if you should feel so inclined) of tapping.
The negatively charged statement you created is intended to expose the part of your nervous system that is bound up in the problem. Ouch!—but, unlike in classical exposure therapy, you are not left to struggle with an object of terror or discomfort until you can manage to make peace with it. Quite to the contrary. Beyond the “basic recipe” you are learning right now, EFT (“Techniques” plural) has a variety of ways to quickly calm the nervous system so that you can safely release the stressor. I include a reference video demonstrating some of the “gentle techniques” at the end of this article.
The basic set-up statement has a second part. To help your nervous system assign a different meaning to the content of the exposure statement, EFT has you affirm yourself as deeply as feels truthful. The classic EFT affirmation is
I deeply and completely love and accept myself.
However, for a person for whom that doesn’t feel true (likely most of us at first), toned-down versions like “maybe I can accept myself someday” or “I choose to accept that this is how I feel” serve the purpose perfectly.
To review, a “round” of EFT starts with a “setup statement” made up of two parts, each with a particular job. Let’s add an affirmation to each of the exposure statements above:
Even though I feel nervous about that presentation, I choose to accept myself, deeply and completely.
Even though I can’t seem to shed these extra pounds, and I’ve tried everything, I am committed to learning to love myself.
Even though I feel angry about being pulled over yesterday, and it made me feel helpless and afraid, I completely accept everything I am feeling right now.
I like to vary my affirmations, but don’t worry about doing that at the beginning. There is no need to be fancy: just pick the most affirming thing you can think of that feels truthful, and repeat it. In general, EFT bears a lot of repeating, and your nervous system won’t find it boring.
Write your set-up statement down if you like.
Now that you have that set-up statement with a SUD for the exposure part; and you have located the points–you are almost ready to start! I say “almost” because there’s one point I haven’t mentioned yet. This is the very first one you will tap on, prior to “tapping around the points,” and is called the “karate chop point.” Understanding the function of this point is not important for the success of your EFT, but I’ve described it in the inset for anyone who is interested.
Energy medicine recognizes a phenomenon known as “psychological reversal,” which happens when energy is running along a particular channel in the wrong direction. Psychological reversal correlates with the notion of “secondary gain” found in modern psychology. With secondary gain, a person harbors an ulterior (likely unconscious) reason for maintaining the problem at hand. That hidden reason makes shedding the problem difficult to impossible, with no obvious explanation. For example, a person may become ill before a family dinner, without recognizing that the illness gets her out of dealing with a toxic family member.
By tapping on the karate chop point, energy flow is pointed in the proper direction and problem solving becomes more possible.
Putting the ingredients together
Start the “basic recipe” by tapping firmly but kindly on the karate chop point. Locating your index finger of the opposite hand right where the pinky meets the hand, tap with all four fingers. While tapping, say your set-up statement three times. Feel into the emotion of the affirmative part as much as you can. Should you not feel affirming of yourself, you could choose to speak your words with inflections of deep caring anyway, as some practitioners encourage. As you continue practicing EFT you will soon find that won’t be necessary.
Next, tap 7 times or so—the exact number isn’t important–on each of the 8 points from the diagram. The order in which you tap these points isn’t significant, though most people “tap around” to be sure not to miss any. For each of these points, it is only necessary to use a brief reminder of what is bothering you. For instance, for our third example the “reminder phrases” can be as succinct as “got pulled over,” “this anger,” “this helplessness.” As you tap around the points, additional aspects of the event may come up: emotions, memories of visceral sensations, things you heard or saw, said, smelled, or tasted when the troublesome thing happened. Any of these can turn out to be amazingly relevant to healing, as I will shortly discuss. Feel free to generate new reminder phrases, and feel free to be creative! Anything that comes up as related to the trigger you are working on will work for “reminder phrases.”
When you’ve tapped on the side of the hand as just described, and followed that with one or more round(s) of tapping from the top of head to the under-arm point–you have finished one iteration of the “basic recipe.” You can do several continuous rounds using the same setup statement, but at some point you will want to check in with the initial trigger and get a new SUD. Is it lower or higher than the first one? Or is it the same? SUDs provide a useful frame of reference for progress being made. Many people experience a rapid drop in intensity, which tells you that something has shifted and that EFT is working. People who have struggled forever with particular difficult feelings frequently notice quick shifts using EFT, accounting for its popularity with millions of users.
Again, here are the essential steps of EFT”s “basic recipe:”
– Familiarize yourself with the points: the karate chop point, and the eight points of the tapping round.
– Create a “setup statement.” This statement includes a reference to what you are exposing to the healing process of EFT, and a reframing affirmation. You may find it helpful to write the setup down.
– Assign a value to the exposure part of the setup statement: on a scale from zero to ten, how triggering is it, at this moment? Some people like to write this down.
– Say the set-up statement three times while tapping on the karate chop point.
– Starting with the top of the head (though where you start is perhaps just a matter of housekeeping), say a reminder phrase with each point. Feel free to keep these phrases really simple.
– When you feel finished for the time being (i.e., you’ve tapped at least one round), assign a new number to the exposure part of the statement and compare with the initial SUD.
Feel free to use a few more iterations of the basic recipe to get the SUD down lower, or to tap on anything that came up during the previous iteration.
Onward from the Basic Recipe!
The basic recipe is ubiquitous to EFT and there are many directions you could possibly take it. In this respect, gaining skill with EFT is rather like learning to play blues. The basics of blues are very simple: you have twelve measures of music, each one represented by a particular chord. You can play those twelve measures in a round. You start your life as a blues player by learning a few stock things blues players all know, that make those chords sound like blues as opposed to, say, Mozart. When you learn these simple basics, it quickly becomes possible to play music whose style people immediately recognize. While this can feel satisfying or amusing at first, the basic communication “this is blues” quickly ceases to have value. You feel motivated to move beyond the stock approach, and you start reaching for fresh material.
I have described to you the stock materials of EFT. The basic recipe itself can work to take the edge off of difficult feelings quickly, and sometimes shockingly well. Often, beginners will get an awe-inspiring sense that EFT, as silly and weird as it feels at first, actually does work! However, for deep-seated problems–the kind that somehow surface over and over in a person’s life–it is necessary to somehow pull underlying memories and beliefs up by their roots. Illnesses of various kinds, anxiety, depression, PTSD or cPTSD, problems with weight, unhelpful habits, difficult emotions of various kinds, boundary issues: such problems don’t tend to budge when tapping remains in the hazy realm of generalities. Tapping on “not sleeping well,” “feeling anxious,” “needing a cigarette,” etc.—is too general and surface-y to provide the hoped-for relief.
As EFT educator and champion of its scientific research, Dawson Church, says, “the problem is never the problem.” Locating the specific events at the root of the entrenched problem is of the essence in the more stunning uses of EFT. At the time those pertinent, specific events took place, your body—so as to protect you from further harms like the one you had just experienced–learned to be on the lookout for similar danger signals in the environment. Even though you may not consciously remember the specific harmful event, your body does. In the present moment you find your body subconsciously reacting to the danger signals it primed itself to notice, once upon a time. Its reaction takes the form of cascades of biochemical stress responses that you may also feel emotionally. The upshot of all this is, find an early memory connected to the current problem, process it thoroughly and appropriately, and marvelous shifts are possible!
But wait, there’s a fly in this ointment. Nobody really wants to contemplate painful events from their past, even ones responsible for the most maladaptive survival mechanisms. In fact, we absolutely abhor accessing these concealed parts of the psyche. The ever-accommodating body (otherwise known as the subconscious mind) is great at making it so that we never have to feel what we felt in those terrible moments, ever again. To this end, it stores unpleasant memories in fragments, concealing their timeline or point of origin. Sights, sounds, sensations, tastes, smells, emotions—the different “aspects” of a single event, as EFT calls them–are stored as if unrelated. This can be the case with either capital ‘T’ (obviously a trauma from any perspective) or lower-case ‘t’ trauma (stored in the body as a trauma because the event appeared to pose an overwhelming threat at the time of storage—as frequently happens in childhood).
Here’s an example of how EFT can work with fragmented aspects of a memory, drawn from an EFT workshop presented by Dawson Church. He was working with a woman in her late thirties who had neck pain and limited range of motion since an automobile accident six years before. She could turn her head to the right most of the way but had only a few degrees of movement to the left. The accident had been a minor one, and why she still suffered 6 years later was something of a mystery to her.
I asked her to feel where in her body she felt the most intensity when recalling the accident, and she said it was in her upper chest. I then asked her about the first time she’d ever felt that way, and she said it was when she’d been involved in another auto accident at the age of 8. Her sister had been driving the car. We worked on each aspect of the early accident. The two girls had hit another car head on at low speed while driving around a bend on a country road. One emotionally triggering aspect was the moment she realized that a collision was unavoidable, and we tapped till that lost its force. We tapped on the sound of the crash, another aspect. She had been taken to a neighbor’s house, bleeding from a cut on her head, and we tapped on that. We tapped on aspect after aspect. Still, her pain level didn’t go down much, and her range of motion didn’t improve. Then she gasped and said, “I just remembered. My sister was only 15 years old. She was underage. That day, I dared her to drive the family car, and we totaled it.” Her guilt turned out to be the aspect that held the most emotional charge, and after we tapped on that, her pain disappeared, and she regained full range of motion in her neck. If we’d tapped on the later accident, or failed to uncover all the aspects, we might have thought, “EFT doesn’t work.”
The example illustrates how a single memory fragment can hold most or even all of the destructiveness. With such aspects stored as broken shards in the subconscious, it is no wonder that people shrink themselves to make quadruply sure not to make contact, sometimes for decades. Yet, through this constriction we avoid living fully, and the awareness that we aren’t can be painful in and of itself. The constriction will even show up as a physical symptom, such as neck pain and immobility in the example.
What can happen when these shards are gently brought under the surveillance of the conscious mind? This is where some help from an experienced practitioner can make a huge difference. That person is available to support you in your scuffle with those pointy shards. In her practice of unconditional positive regard and nonjudgment, she is partner and witness in the delicate, spiritual/mental/physical work, which is also the work of integration. You might think of the EFT practitioner as a doula for your psyche—the non-medical person who is your peer, and who stands by you in the birthing process of the increasingly whole self.
Through a suite of “gentle techniques” (particular arrangements of the basic recipe) the experienced practitioner makes it possible to approach those memories that you can’t approach yourself. When the buried problem–the one that underlies the current one—is gently coaxed to the surface and resolved, the result is peace, amazement, a reframing of the toxic memory, and often the release of physical and emotional symptoms of various kinds. When you can’t seem to get EFT to work for yourself, it can be extremely helpful to consult a sensitive practitioner who understands how to tease out pertinent specific events and their “aspects”, gently.
Many of us have bad memories that we can remember fairly easily. To release the toxic aftereffects of these, it is still important to use the basic recipe to “tap on aspects” or individual details of the event, as Dawson does in the example. Though not clear from what he wrote, Dawson would have probed for different aspects to tap on, with the presenting issue in mind. He intentionally splits the memory into such aspects—visual, auditory, emotional, kinesthetic, somatic, related to taste and smell, etc.–because he doesn’t know how her body stored the memory related to the current physical problem.
The woman in the example seems to remember her childhood event quite well. Interestingly, she doesn’t recall the aspect of guilt until all other possibilities were exhausted. Her trauma was stored in a separate, well buried shard. In many cases the most relevant aspect can reveal itself much more quickly—but in this case persistence was key. Note that Dawson doggedly tapped with this woman on aspects until he finally located the one necessary for release of her physical symptom. As you might imagine, persevering was well worth it: an ongoing, tedious physical issue evaporated after a single session! With your own particular problem, you might possibly be able to locate such an aspect yourself with some experience. But even very experienced practitioners seek the help of other practitioners (Dawson does!), based on first-hand knowledge of how avoidant we can be of such memory shards.
In this article I have outlined EFT in its most basic form (the basic recipe). I have also told you about the essential thrust of EFT, toward the specific events entombed in your body’s early warning system. To provide this brief summary of what EFT is about, I used examples all involving a particular kind of goal people often have. That goal is to release negativity, whether physical or emotional. The goal behind this type of goal is to live the life of a person who feels well and is in love with life. This is probably how EFT is most commonly used.
But let me throw one last thing in. It is also possible to use EFT in a more directly positive way, which is to achieve personally significant goals–often ones mulled over for some time. To provide a by-no-means exhaustive list, people use EFT for business and athletic performance goals, financial goals, public speaking goals, health goals, goals to attract compatible friends or romantic partners, to attract particular spiritual experiences. What tends to happen when people work with goals is that their psyches bring up a variety of reasons why the goal could never be achieved. Poke beneath the surface, and you find deeply seated beliefs picked up somewhere along the way. As with the first type of goal, these too can be encouraged to budge when you get in touch with the memory at their foundation. Working with foundational limiting beliefs turns out to be very much like working with stuck emotions and physical pain.
You may have noticed a hint of the “law of attraction” in what I just wrote. Many people who use EFT believe in the validity of that law and tap accordingly, but it’s not necessary that you do. Whatever your reason for taking up EFT, you will engage in a journey of self-reflection and mind-body-spirit awareness. Whatever your objective, EFT is available to make your path straight.
Kj Bohmgarden is an EFT practitioner who holds a Ph.D. in music. She invites you to email her: kjbohmgarden@proton.me
Resources
Films and videos:
Operation Emotional Freedom Technique: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hEpU9YRrGN0
Dawson Church interview https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LZ8iv5-Wqx4
Dr. Peta Stapleton on the current state of EFT science https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GMa6Dv4OUrc
Nick Ortner basic tapping tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVg50ox8czo
Brief tapping session with Nick Ortner and Russell Brand: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rE3pcyfqCtA
Jenny Johnston using “gentle techniques” for a difficult issue: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l1MLjt_ZIt8
Scientific resources:
https://eftuniverse.com/research-studies/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/?term=emotional+freedom+technique
Manuals:
Church, Dawson. The EFT Manual. Hay House, 2017
Ibid. The EFT Mini Manual. Available as free download at EFTUniverse.com .
Also see:
Van der Kolk, Bessel. The Body Keeps the Score. Penguin, 2014.
Oschman, James L.. Energy Medicine: The Scientific Basis. Churchill Livingstone, 2000
Classes are available through EFTUniverse.com.