Emotional Freedom Technique: A tool to support you in attaining your health goals

When working towards achieving goals related to our personal health or some other aspect of our lives, it can bring up many emotions. Some of these emotions can feel less than helpful and impede our progress. Having the tools to effectively work with these emotions is crucial.

Today, I want to tell you about one tool that I find very useful. It is a tool that I use in my clinic and one that I teach to patients because it is so effective in many situations. This tool is called the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT).

Before I talk more about EFT, let’s talk about emotions.

A little bit about emotions...

How do you define an emotion? And what are some examples?

You might say an emotion is something we feel. Examples of emotions are anger, sadness, or shame.

Next, I might ask you how you know you are having an emotion.

You might say, because I feel it in my body.

And I would agree with you.

We experience emotions in our bodies. We feel certain sensations in our body that our brain translates and names as sad or mad, etc.

As we move through our day, we experience many emotional states.

In the morning, we may wake up to the sun warming our face, our partner lying next to us in bed, and we are happy. A few minutes later, as we are getting ready for work, we may stub our toe and instantly feel annoyance. Later, as we read the news, we learn that a beloved childhood idol has died, and we are sad, and the day has just begun.

We may inhabit these various emotional states, shifting from one to another and letting the emotions process and resolve themselves naturally. But what if we encounter a situation where the emotions are intense, and we become overwhelmed or feel unsafe to fully express them in the moment? They continue to be in our body - possibly as that tightness in our neck or that uneasy feeling in our stomach. Later in the day, we may work through these by speaking with a friend, going for a long walk, taking some moments to breathe, or journaling. But what happens if we are consistently experiencing emotions that we are not able to process and express?

Experiences that exceed our capacity to respond to them or that we do not feel safe to respond to fully in the moment can result in these emotional experiences becoming stuck in the body.

The emotional experience is an embodied experience. It is not an experience of language. The language is applied by the mind. So, when we have a number of unprocessed emotional experiences that persist in the body, these will often present as physical symptoms or emotions that may arise (seemingly out of nowhere) when we are in situations that remind or trigger us (consciously or unconsciously) to recall an event in the past that is associated with an unprocessed emotion.

And so, with this understanding of emotions, let’s return to EFT.

What is EFT, and how does it work?

EFT is a practice that allows us to access, work with, and transform these unprocessed emotions. EFT holds that distressing emotions or body sensations lead to disruptions in the body’s energy flow.

EFT is often called acupuncture* for emotions because it combines light tapping on acupuncture points and repeating specific phrases to focus the mind’s attention on a certain event or body sensation. The combination of tapping helps to create a state of balance in the nervous system so that even when a distressing sensation or memory is called up, one can do this with a sense of resource and equanimity.

What is EFT helpful for?

EFT can be used in two main ways:

First, as a self-help and self-treatment tool to relieve distress in the moment. If you have just experienced a troubling interaction with a family member, or you are experiencing anxiety before a work presentation, you can “tap on it,” and it will often result in a prompt shift in your emotional state. One that will better allow you to deal with the situation in the moment.

The second approach, known as clinical EFT is a form of EFT that you can do where you work with a trained EFT practitioner to systematically and effectively shift and dismantle larger emotional triggers or problematic beliefs. These can be belief patterns that come up again and again, seemingly out of nowhere, when you are trying to make changes in your life.

I work with many people who are wanting to make changes in their routines to support their health. Often, they have a lot of desire to make changes. Not infrequently, though, they will express a low or moderate amount of confidence in their ability to make these changes. When I ask them why this is, they will often cite many previous experiences of wanting to make the same shifts and not being successful.

They carry not only the objective memory of what happened during these past attempts with them but also the emotional memory of feeling disappointed and defeated. This emotion is held in their body and continues to color and live on in this very different present moment. EFT can be a helpful approach to identify and systematically neutralize these negative emotions. Doing so provides more space and resources to create their desired outcome in the present moment instead of reliving the disappointments of the past.

I have worked with clients who have used EFT to discharge the negative emotions related to accidents and injuries that were impeding their healing process. EFT can be used to work with food cravings and explore the roots of other behavioral patterns that you may wish to shift. It has applications addressing distress related to chronic pain and the symptoms of chronic or acute medical conditions.

Clinical EFT is an evidence-based approach with multiple studies showing its effectiveness in treating depression, anxiety, PTSD, and phobias.

How can you learn more about EFT?

If you are interested in learning more about EFT, you can watch my video where I go more into the details of how EFT works and how you can start to use this approach for yourself.

I am also offering virtual support and coaching using EFT. You can schedule a call if you want to learn more.

Below is a summary of the potential benefits of EFT using the EARTH practices framework that I have developed, a tool that takes into account not only the potential benefits of practice to individual health but also looks at the health benefits of practices and accounts for the potential planetary benefits (or harms) as well as recognizes the ancestral/indigenous origins or elements in many practices.

E(cological)

EFT, done as a self-care practice or with a facilitator, requires no additional equipment.

A(ncestral)

EFT incorporates aspects of East Asian Medicine in its use of acupuncture points and its understanding that energy blockages lead to imbalances on the emotional and physical level. The relationship of energy flow to health is common to many indigenous healing systems, in addition to East Asian Medicine.

R(esources)

EFT, when employed as a self-management technique to address stress, can be done in a few minutes.

Clinical EFT which is done with an EFT practitioner, is usually scheduled in clinical appointments that are often an hour long. Depending on the intensity and complexity of what is being worked with, multiple sessions may be required. Studies have found EFT to yield results in conditions such as PTSD within 4-10 sessions and to be comparable in effectiveness to Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing Therapy (EMDR). [2] The wider availability of EFT practitioners and EFT-trained therapists (compared to EMDR practitioners) potentially makes EFT a more affordable treatment option than EMDR.

T(herapeutic benefits)

EFT creates a more calm/neutral emotional state by tapping on acupuncture points. While tapping, individuals focus on specific body sensations, thoughts, or memories. This process allows an individual to shift the negative emotional content associated with these sensations, thoughts, or memories to a more neutral state. In clinical EFT these effects have been found to be enduring.

H(ealth impacts)

Clinical EFT meets the criteria for evidence-based practice as defined by the American Psychological Association. The Veteran’s Administration also employs it in the treatment of PTSD. [3]

To your health,

Dr. Nicole 🌿

References

[1] https://www.energypsych.org/researchdb8c71b7

[2]https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27889444/

[3] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36438382/

*Acupuncture is part of the healing system of East Asian Medicine that works to support and restore health by working with the flow of energy (that it calls qi) through acupuncture channels. Acupuncture uses fine needles to support and manipulate the flow of qi to restore health.