When Gary Craig developed the Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) in the mid 1990s, his plan was for it to be readily accessible to as wide an audience as possible. It’s a simple technique that, once learnt, you need never be without. As one of the burgeoning breed of Energy Psychologies, you can go into much greater depth with an EFT practitioner and, as an EFT practitioner myself, I count it as an important part of my therapy toolbag.
How I use EFT in my practice
I may use this in two distinct ways. I can teach you how to use it for yourself, then direct you to the Help Yourself page on my website so that you can remember the tapping points, and once you have mastered that, you have a self-help tool at your disposal for life – there when you need it, for whatever you need it for, and you’re doing it for yourself – so empowering!
The second way I might use it is in a psychotherapeutic way, teaching you to tap on the points on yourself and follow me as I tap on myself along with you, but in this method I guide you with words while we tap, based on your thoughts and feelings we discuss at the start and during the tapping process. It’s like talking therapy with tapping. I’ll guide you and will change tack depending on what comes up, and it can bring many insightful moments along the way to reducing feelings that might have been stuck, or hindering your progress to happiness, for some time.
It’s often quite profound. I love seeing people start their tapping journey possibly thinking it all looks a bit odd (because yes, it does) but then the change happens or the sadness lifts or the lightbulb moment occurs and suddenly, people start feeding back to me about the times they went on to use it themselves, how they taught it to family, friends, work colleagues, children, spreading the word far and wide. If you try it, you’ll likely be an advocate, too.
And how I discovered it
Gary Craig, based in America, trained only 29 Founding EFT Masters worldwide about 20 years ago, and when I read about the technique in a book Gary had co-written in 2005 called The Healing Power of EFT & Energy Psychology (David Feinstein, Donna Eden & Gary Craig) I tried it for myself and found it so powerful that I wanted to learn it and then help other people with it. In order to learn the most ‘undiluted’ version I could, I chose Karl Dawson, one of those original Founding EFT Masters trained by Gary Craig, as my teacher and, once I qualified as a practitioner, I was able to pass on this amazing technique to patients and relatives in the hospice setting, both as a volunteer complementary therapist and later as a nurse.
It really is such a gentle, yet powerful, therapy to use.