Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)

Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) is a very interesting form of brief therapy.

Originally developed by Dr. Roger Callahan and named TFT for Thought Field Therapy, EFT is a simplified process of TFT.

Roger Callahan was a psychologist and as the story goes, he once treated a female patient who was incredibly phobic about water.

Nothing Callahan did made a big difference in the woman's phobic reaction.

One day he tried to have the lady move closer to his swimming pool, but she immediately had a phobic reaction and said that she had horrible stomach cramps.

Callahan had a background in accupuncture and in that system, the point directly under the eyes (both sides) is related to stomach problems. In a flash of insight, he tapped that point under his client's eye with his finger. Nearly immediately, the lady felt better and even stopped feeling bad about water.

Afterwards, he tried the same technique with other patients and sometimes got good results, while sometimes he didn't.

After a long process of trial and error, he developed a complicated system of algorithms for dealing with all kinds of different mental and physical problems.

Gary Craig learned the technique from him and (maybe because his background was in engineering) made some changes to the algorithms and simplified the whole system into what is nowadays known as EFT. The nice thing is that he made EFT available to the public for free.

Here is the basic technique:

You think about what you want to change about yourself and put it in a sentence. Let's say you have a headache and you want to get rid of it.

You would say something like "Even though I have a headache, I really like myself!"

What this does is telling your body/mind that you want to deal with the headache. While you are making that statement, you either rub a spot on your left chest (this is called the sore spot and is usually the most sensitive spot on that side of your chest). Do that about three times.

Alternatively, you can tap the "karate chop" point (the part of your hand you would use to hit someone with a chop in karate) on your hand while making the statement.

Then you softly tap several points on your body with one or two fingers. Depending on the system (yes, there are now dozens of subsystems of EFT out there. This is the one I tend to use.), you tap 7 or 8 points while saying out loud the most emotionally charged word of your earlier statement, in this case maybe "headache"

.

Say it about 7 times or so while tapping 

- the inside of your eyebrow

- the outside of your eyebrow

- the bone under your eye

- the spot under your nose

- the spot under your mouth

- your clavicle

- the ribcage under your arm

- the top of your head

That would be one round of tapping. I normally use three rounds, as each round only takes a minute or so and most of the time, people feel much better afterwards.

It helps if you gauge the intensity of the headache/negative experience before the tapping, maybe on a scale from 0-10, then you can easily notice any change afterwards.

It does not really matter if you do the taps on your left or your right side.

If you wish to work on animals, you could use something called surrogate EFT, where you basically imagine that you are the animal and then do the whole process as if you were the animal. Example: if you have a phobic dog, you would say something like "Even though I am afraid of thunderstorms, I am a great dog." while imagining that you are the dog.

Good luck, there is lots of free information about EFT available on the net.