Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT)

 

Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) belongs to an emerging field of treatments referred to as Energy Psychology.  EFT was developed by Gary Craig (www.emofree.com), who has dedicated his life and work to teaching people how to overcome emotional and physical blocks to success.

Doctors and scientists agree that emotions, both negative and positive, play an integral role in the health and wellbeing of our body and mind.  Every thought or emotion that you have causes a neuro-chemical reaction in the brain that directly affects your body. An obvious example would be getting sweaty palms and butterflies in our stomach when we’re nervous, or feeling our heart pound when we’re frightened.  Less obvious examples, however, would be experiencing chronic pain (ie: back, shoulder, knee), an inability to lose weight or hitting a performance plateau when we’re holding on to fear based thoughts and beliefs.

The key factor in all of this is what’s happening at the subconscious level of the mind, because that’s where all of our thoughts, emotions and beliefs are programmed and run on automatic-pilot. In fact, our subconscious beliefs are almost completely programmed by the age of seven, so that everything we’re experiencing right now, joy or sadness, love or jealousy is a result of subconscious programming that took place many years ago.

What happens then, is that we’re often operating from dysfunctional behavior, habit and belief patterns that cause us to experience everything from self-sabotage to unnamed anxieties, irrational fear, anger or jealousy and unprovoked bouts of depression.

Western medicine has to this point, produced very few treatments that take full advantage of the ways the body’s energies and biological information can be directed to influence physical and mental health and wellbeing. Other cultures around the world have been working with the body’s energy sytems for thousands of years.  From shamanic healers to Hindu yogis to traditional Chinese medicine, there are many models for working with the body as an energy system. 

Perhaps the most common alternative approach to healing that Western medicine has accepted is acupuncture.  Not only is acupuncture almost 5,000 years old, it’s one of the most widely used health care systems on the planet.  Specific accupoints, when stimulated either by needle, massage, tapping or holding them will cause signals to be sent along an electrical ‘information highway’ called the meridian system.  These signals are sent directly to the brain and are associated with emotions.

 

Tapping these specific points on your skin will send electrochemical signals to your brain.  If at the same time, you hold in your mind a situation that triggers an unwanted emotional response, you can actually shift your brains response to that situation. In other words, you can reprogram your subconscious thoughts, emotions and beliefs!
EFT frequently produces undeniable improvement in just one session, and often works where other approaches don’t.  EFT can be used to help you achieve specific goals like thinking more positively, improving performance or eating more sensibly.

Following is an exerpt taken from The Promise of Energy Psychology by David Feinstein which explains the process of how a dysfunctional emotional response is created and how EFT interrupts that sequence to overcome the response.

1. A harmless sight, sound, smell, feeling or thought (the trigger) is   recongnized by the amygdala, a part of the brain that identifies threat, as being similar to a previous experience that involved physical danger or emotional threat (the subconscious belief program).
2. The amygdala sends impulses to the autonomic nervous system that elicit the “fight, flight or freeze” alarm response.  Chemicals such as adrenaline, noradrenaline and cortisol are released into the bloodstream, causing the heart rate, blood pressure and other bodily processes to undergo a series of dramatic changes.  At the same time, primitive areas of the brain, designed to respond to threat, shape perception and thought.  The rational mind has little involvement in this sequence.
3. The physical sensations of the alarm response are experienced as angerlike feelings (fight), fearlike feelings (flight), or an inability to take action (freeze).

 Here is an outline of the the way we believe energy interventions (EFT) interrupt the above sequence:

1. The triggering image is brought to mind while physically stimulating a series of accupoints that send impulses directly to the amygdala, which inhibit the alarm response.
2. These impulses also cause a reduction, within the amygdala of the number of neural connections between the image and the alarm response.
3. After a number of repetitions of number 1, the image can then be brought to mind, or the situation can be experienced directly without experiencing the alarm response.

This explaination addresses the way that stimulating acupoints may help overcome psychological problems.  Other research holds implications for the way energy interventions can enhance peak performance and the achievement of goals.  It has been estabilished within sports psychology, for instance, that mental rehersal can improve performance.  Vividly imagining fifty successful free throws initiates neurological shifts and increases shooting effectiveness on the court.  Reports from energy psychology practitioners suggest that combining such imagery with acupoint stimulation intensifies this effect.  Based on these observations, a hypothesis can be formed to explain rapid improvement that is so frequently reported after EFT:

Stimulating specific electromagnetically sensitive points on the skin while bringing a psychological problem or goal to mind can help a person overcome that problem or reach that goal by changing the chemistry in the amygdala and other areas of the brain.


EFT makes a profound contribution in our ability to manage our thoughts, emotions and potentials and puts the power to effect change directly into your hands.

Important Note: EFT is gentle and easy to use, and has to date yielded remarkable results for relieving emotional and physical distress. And while there have been no distressing side effects reported, EFT has only been used in it's current from since 1992, and thus is still in the experimental stage. IF YOU INTEND TO USE THESE TECHNIQUES, YOU MUST AGREE TO TAKE FULL REPONSIBILITY FOR YOURSELF. Lisa Engles is not a licensed health care professional.  She is, however a qualified EFT practioner who has trained extensively under Master Practitioners Lindsay Kennny and Zoe Walton.