‘Tapping’ your way to calm?

By Sara Mahdawi
Clinical Psychologist 

Want a method to use anytime and anywhere to regulate your guilt and shame, anger and frustration, sadness and grief? Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), which combines needleless acupuncture and psychology, helps ease stress, fear and anxiety.

Roots in traditional Chinese medicine

For over 3,000 years, acupuncture has been used to relieve pain by inserting a thin needle into the skin at strategic points of the body. Traditional Chinese medicine believes that physical pain is caused due to a disturbance in the body’s energy flow, so acupuncture can help balance the flow of energy or life force, known as chi or qi, through pathways known as meridians in the body. In addition, many Western practitioners use acupuncture to stimulate nerves, muscles and connective tissue to increase the body’s natural painkillers. 

Acupuncture-EFT link

Acupuncture uses needles to apply pressure to energy points, while EFT uses fingertip tapping to apply pressure while focusing on situations that represent fear or trauma. Similar to acupuncture, the basis of EFT is that the cause of all negative emotions is an imbalance in the body’s energy system. Thus, stimulating specific points through EFT can reduce the stress or negative emotion you feel, ultimately restoring balance to your disrupted energy. EFT is used to remove negative emotions, reduce food cravings, reduce or eliminate pain and implement positive goals.

How EFT works

The technique is safe and straightforward, so it’s one of the few psychotherapeutic techniques that can be taught to participants whenever appropriate or needed. Typically, tapping takes place whilst identifying a specific concern, distressing memory or event. Then you rank the stressor’s intensity on a scale of 0–10, with ten being the worst the stress has ever been. 

This ranking system allows a person to assess the effectiveness of the tapping at the end of the treatment. Then the concern or memory should be verbally acknowledged and paired with a reframing self-acceptance statement.

For example, “Even though I am struggling with feelings of unworthiness, I fully and completely accept myself.” The short reminder phrase as well as the statement keep your attention on the present problem and should be repeated while tapping five to ten times with the fingertips on these locations: The heel of the hand, three locations around the eye, the area below the nose, the area below the lips, the collarbone, the underarm and the top of the head.

Many people who seek EFT like to control their treatment completely. Although it is inexpensive, less time-consuming and easier to learn than other therapeutic approaches, speak to your psychologist or doctor first if EFT interests you.

Reprinted with permission from Family Flavours magazine