EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Techniques. Very simply put, EFT Tapping is an extremely effective, evidence-based stress relief technique that combines Acupressure with techniques borrowed from Exposure Therapy and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. We can use it to help clear the emotional charge and your body's subsequent stress response to many types of traumas.
EFT Tapping is used to confront negative experiences. It doesn't push positive thinking, which often doesn’t allow space for healing. Tapping typically focuses on finding specific events that together have caused, or at least contributed to, our core issues. If you have trauma that is too difficult to talk about, there are tapping techniques specifically designed to hold the memory at a safe distance while we carefully and gently peel away the layers together. You control the pace.
If it feels too private to share, there are tapping techniques that allow us to work through entire events without you ever having to share the story! Stress (or any negative emotion), especially prolonged, is proven to be extremely detrimental to our physical and mental health. Some of the many effects of prolonged stress include:
Degenerative diseases, obesity, chronic pain, illness, immune suppression, organ function depletion, depression, anxiety, chronic fatigue, and more rapid effects of aging.
This video provides a simple explanation and demonstration of EFT Tapping. There are many techniques, but this explains the most basic form of EFT Tapping.
Source: www.youtube.com/@TheTappingSolutionChannel
Dawson Church Podcast Interview
Check out this interview on Living in 4D with Paul Check where Dawson explains EFT and Epigenetics.
Any negative emotion or memory can almost instantaneously trigger the body’s stress response. The fear is conditioned, which means you’ve associated a situation or thing with negative experiences. When the brain releases stress hormones, it prepares our bodies for danger by shutting down our immune system and cell regeneration, slowing digestion, draining blood out of the frontal lobes of our brains, and many other functions. This prepares our bodies for danger but, when sustained, hinder our ability to live a healthy life.
The hippocampus groups memories it deems similar together and triggers the same physiological and emotional response to them all. Labeling a situation as safe or dangerous was a feature that allowed our early ancestors to survive but is detrimental to our health for prolonged periods.
EFT Tapping uses acupressure on some of the body’s many meridian points (or acupoints) to send a fear-dampening signal associated with the memory to the limbic system. The memory is then no longer tagged as a cue to activate the body’s stress response. By combining Tapping with individually-crafted statements about core problems and self-acceptance, we countercondition our brains. It transmutes the emotional charge from traumas from negative to neutral, or even positive. Your cognitive experience of the memory shifts, and you’ll find you don’t have to be afraid of traumatic memories. You now have a secret weapon to promptly dispel their emotional charges.
Often, many physical problems also vastly improve as a side effect of releasing emotional trauma and stressors as well.
EFT is considered an “evidence-based” practice. Evidence-based standards are defined by the American Psychological Association Division 12 (Clinical Psychology) Task Force. These define an “empirically validated treatment” as one for which two controlled trials have been conducted by independent research teams. For a treatment to be designated as “efficacious,” the studies must demonstrate that the treatment is better than a placebo or an established efficacious treatment.
It is summarized in this statement from the APA journal Review of General Psychology:
A literature search identified 51 peer-reviewed papers that report or investigate clinical outcomes following the tapping of acupuncture points to address psychological issues. The 18 randomized controlled trials in this sample were critically evaluated for design quality, leading to the conclusion that they consistently demonstrated strong effect sizes and other positive statistical results that far exceed chance after relatively few treatment sessions. Criteria for evidence-based treatments proposed by Division 12 of the American Psychological Association were also applied and found to be met for a number of conditions, including PTSD. (Feinstein, 2012)
When a psychology or medical journal is described as “peer-reviewed,” it means that it uses a committee of reviewers, usually doctors, statisticians, and psychologists, to scrutinize every word and number in a study before publication, and point out any weaknesses or errors, to ensure that only high-quality research is published (Church, 2013)
Research shows that treatment with Clinical EFT by a trained professional can produce the following results:
Reductions in anxiety of 40%+ – sometimes in a single session (Clond, 2015)
PTSD is remediated in 84% of veterans in 6 sessions (Sebastian & Nelms, 2016)
Overweight clients don’t just lose weight – they keep weight off long-term (Stapleton et al., 2014)
Reductions in depression symptoms of 41% (Nelms & Castel, 2016)
The elimination or reduction of stress-related conditions (Church, 2013a) Follow-up studies show that for most clients, the results last over time (Church, 2013a)
Pain levels drop by an average of two-thirds in a 30 minute treatment (Church & Brooks, 2011)
The symptoms of autoimmune diseases like psoriasis and fibromyalgia are reduced (Brattberg, 2011; Hodge & Jurgens, 2014)
Effects are similar in many different populations, from stressed workers to students to refugees (Boath et al., 2014; Church 2013a)
The neutralization of traumatic memories, using memory reconsolidation (Church, 2013b)
Reductions in stress hormones like cortisol (Groesbeck et al, 2017)
The regulation of inflammation and immunity genes (Maharaj, 2016)
Church, Dawson (2013). Clinical EFT as an Evidence-Based Practice for the Treatment of Psychological and Physiological Conditions. Psychology, 4, 645-654
Brooks, A.J. & Church, Dawson, Borrowing Benefits Experiment Integrative Medicine: A Clinician’s Journal, 9, 40-44, 2010
Church, Dawson & Marohn, Stephanie, Coaching Psychology, Fulton, CA, Energy Psychology Press, 2021
Church, Dawson, EFT Manual 3rd Edition, Fulton, CA, Energy Psychology Press, 2013
Church, Dawson, Genie in your Genes, Santa Rosa, CA, Energy Psychology Press, 2014
Church, Dawson, Mind to Matter, London, England, Hay House, 2018