Tapping for Personal Peace (Emotional Freedom Technique)

Why we can benefit from using this technique in our daily lives.

Have you heard that our body stores emotions in our cellular environment, and holding onto painful emotions, depletes our energetic body?

Freeing your body of heavy emotions,  releases energy within your energetic body, allowing you to be creative and visualise personal and life opportunities.  You liberate cells in your physical body –  allowing them to heal you.

And as Dr Joe Dispenza says, “when you  keep these heavy emotions in your body and energetic body you are  more particle and less wave, more matter and less energy and then the only way to achieve things in your life is to fight for it manipulate it.. because then we are matter trying to change matter!”

Are you harbouring:  hatred, fear, jealousy, competition, aggression, suffering, guilt, shame, unworthiness, prejudice, anxiety, depression? – these are survival emotions which ironically limit our ability to thrive and eventually affect our ability to live healthily.

These emotions make us shrink from ourselves, other people, or situations that would aggravate these emotions further. Suddenly we find ourselves living a smaller life, restricted, maybe breathing shallowly. With an increased heart rate, stress hormones pulsing through our body, i.e. the cocktail of adrenaline and cortisol, keeping our brains switched into high Beta brainwaves = incoherent brain activity = life becomes hard!

Emotional Freedom Technique (Tapping) has developed over many decades.

There are over 100 peer-reviewed scientific studies documenting the success of Tapping in removing severe PTSD symptoms from returned veterans (over an average of six sessions with a clinical EFT coach).

Why is Tapping so effective?

1. It is a practical, quick to learn, hands-on technique for dealing with and releasing emotional distress at the deepest level.
2. The tapping points used in EFT correspond to points used in acupuncture, and they release stress and unwanted emotions
3. It also combines Acupoint tapping with “Exposure” A psychological term for facing and remembering a traumatic or stressful experience.
4. Tapping also soothes the body, introducing a non-traumatic physical stimulus and interrupting the emotional triggering we are experiencing. Tapping signals safety to the body, so the conditioned loop is broken.

Therefore, the combination of gentle tapping whilst recalling traumatic memories reduces stress hormones and settles the body; afterwards, the nervous system no longer associates the memory with stress.

Memory intensity levels, and stress of the original circumstance, determine how many sessions are required with a professional to achieve peace.

The beauty of this therapy is that once learned, it’s a skill for life!

I teach most of my counselling clients tapping, so when the body/mind remembers a stressful event, the client can tap their way through it, breaking the cycle.

The speed at which EFT can drain the emotional intensity of even long-held memories is quite startling to people who have not witnessed it before.

Here is an example of Clinical EFT.

A woman, routinely abused as a child, had been living in fight or flight mode for 46 years. She was exhausted, quite unwell, her relationships were fractured, and she trusted no one, including herself.

(I always work with clients to establish what, who or where are their resources. Everyone has resources;  sometimes, we must search for them. Once clients are resourced, we measure stress levels out of ten based on memories.)

As a child, this woman’s resource was her dog and a woman who ran the local corner store. We ensured these safe resources were energetically connected with her.  We began tapping, the anxiety and fear were 10/10.

I asked her to select only one memory.

We tapped together, and she slowly shared the memory. Painful or distressing memories were played out silently in her mind, and we kept tapping.

She cried, and her breathing slowed.

After five rounds, we stopped.  Reported anxiety and fear were a 4/10.

During the process, we went deeper under the ‘incident’ discovering a constant fear she held, that her siblings might be hurt. She had told no one about this incident until now. The tapping continued her statement was ‘ I experienced this to protect them’ refering to allowing herself to be abused so that her siblings would be safe. A life long pattern emerged, of taking on challenging workplace roles to protect others and occasionally facing potential danger in order to protect others. We focused on these learnt behaviours and many aspects of her life, originating from accepting personal danger in order to protect others. After ten more rounds,  the dialogue changed from fear, anger and anxiety to establishing boundaries and recognising that all these things happened in the past and could no longer hurt her.

The whole process took about one and a half hours.

Subsequently, her anxiety and fear were 2/10.

She also recognised a deep pattern of suffering that she had subconsciously taken on throughout her life and she now expressing her excitement on breaking that pattern in her life.

Once we reach 2/10, the process keeps working and often reaches 0/10 in the following hours.

This client had many memories to work through over several sessions, however, after seven sessions, she had 0/10 anxiety and fear when remembering abuse in her childhood.

This process doesn’t erase the memory, it teaches the body to recognise events are in the past; negative memories no longer evoke fearful reactions or initiate survival mode.

Example 2. Tapping with a 13-year-old girl who was carrying deep anger from her parents split and eventual divorce – her situation evoked the following dialogue: “ Even though I have all this anger, I still completely love and accept myself  (said x 3), mum and dad love my sister and me, we are still a family, no-one will replace me I am still their eldest daughter, I can make a place for mum and dad’s new partners, they won’t replace mum and dad, my sister and I will always belong.”

This reframing took 20 minutes.

Her body’s response and facial expression were startling, as the truth of the words,” we are still a family, no-one will replace me” entered her body. The tapping released fear and anger, now reduced from 9/10 to 3/10 in 20 minutes!

She had flown into fits of rage since she was 6.  She is now at peace rather than in constant fight mode. Her school work has improved, she enjoys music and is focused.

Maintainance and healing modes activate in our bodies, when the body is not in survival mode. Tapping enables us to break the cycle of living in a highly anxious state and/or from a hyper vigilance state.

Similarly, from a high anxiety state – (high range Beta brainwaves), can adjust to low Beta waves, ( peaceful state ) which perform better for critical reasoning.  It is easier to move into Alpha brain waves and achieve deep relaxation – which supports day-dreaming, creativity, heightened memory, learning and concentration when we have removed stress and difficult emotions linked to memories.

Tapping also helps children struggling with lack of contact with friends or connections in the playground. Children may unconsciously carry their parents’ stress, feel disturbed by people wearing masks or fear of catching the virus. Happily, children respond quickly to tapping; it can be as simple as two rounds of, “I am safe, I am loved, I have good friends.”

Emotional Freedom Technique is for all of us!

It is, as its name suggests, a process that provides personal emotional freedom.

Disclaimer : This article was written and provided by Rosemary Meads –  B.A.V.A | Dip. Holistic Counselling | Master Hypnotherapist | Reiki Master| Master Coach and Master NLP and Time Line Therapy practitioner | Family Constellations Facilitator