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ENERGY PSYCHOLOGY What is EFT?
By aiming to achieve this balance, the body is less prone to having a physiological reaction to stress and to negative emotions like anger, guilt, anxiety and fear. Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) delivers a form of “emotional acupuncture” without the needles to resolve identified issues, whether these stem from emotional, psychological or physical origins. Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) is an effective treatment tool for anxieties, fears, trauma, procrastination, addictions, weight loss and much more. It is a gentle and highly effective way to transform any issues blocking emotional happiness or personal achievement. Developed by Gary Craig, in the USA, Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) is the leading technique of one of the treatments referred to as Energy Psychology. The success of these treatments with a wide range of emotional and physical issues is creating breakthrough understandings about the nature of healing and personal change. It really seems that if we view the body as a dynamic "energy configuration", where thoughts, emotions and memories are entwined in an information feedback system with our subjective and physical experience (and can be influenced by energetic interventions such as meridian stimulation).
How does EFT work? Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) is also known as ‘Energy Psychology’ which is developed from the ancient Chinese meridian energy system. It is a form of “emotional acupuncture” without the needles, and is based on the premise that all negative emotions are the result of a disruption in the body’s energy system. Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) works by clearing the blockage or disruption by tapping on the end points of the body’s energy meridians while addressing a specific issue. These combined actions sends pulses of energy to rebalance and unblock the body’s energy system in relation to that specific issue. Shifting energy changes the way the brain processes information about a particular issue, and so tapping while tuned in to the issue is like rewiring or rerouting the brain's conditioned negative response. You can imagine how liberating this is if you or someone you know has suffered from a phobia, traumatic memories or emotional baggage. Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) works in the same way to release the limiting thoughts and beliefs that get in the way of your success, happiness, health and inner peace. The Energy Psychology Breakthrough Acupuncture points can be stimulated for therapeutic effect through the use of needles or heat. But less invasive procedures—such as tapping or massaging points on the surface of the skin—have also been found to produce therapeutic outcomes. This allows a broader range of practitioners to use the approach, and it allows clients to self-administer the methods back home, in conjunction with the therapy. Because the stimulation of acupuncture points produces physical change by altering the body’s electrical activity, the various mental health protocols that utilise acupuncture points – such as Thought Field Therapy, Emotional Freedom Techniques and Energy Diagnostic and Treatment Methods – are collectively known as Energy Psychology. Energy psychology protocols generally combine the stimulation of particular electromagnetically responsive areas on the surface of the skin with methods from Cognitive Behaviour Therapy, including the use of imagery, self-statements, and subjective distress ratings (SUDs). In energy psychology, a subset of acupuncture points is stimulated, usually by tapping them while mentally activating a dysfunctional emotional response. Tapping specific acupuncture points sends signals to the brain, and these signals appear to be similar to those produced by the more traditional use of needles. Various studies have demonstrated that the stimulation of selected acupuncture points modulates the activities of the limbic system and other brain structures that are involved in the experiences of fear and pain. This triggers electrochemical shifts in the brain when the inductive points on the skin are stimulated. Energy psychology, as it is most commonly practiced, is both a psychotherapy built on the principles of acupuncture and a clinical development that introduces the principles of acupuncture into psychotherapy.
While it is relatively easy to learn the Energy Psychology tapping protocols, astute clinical judgment in identifying the issues to focus on is critical for the approach to be effective with complex psychological problems. For instance, the investigative work within Energy Psychology often resembles that of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT). Both approaches focus with precision on the thoughts and images associated with maladaptive physiological, emotional, and behavioural responses and intervene to extinguish such responses. Some Energy Psychology interventions resemble CBT methods—such as systematic desensitization and in vivo exposure—for decreasing the limbic hyperarousal responses to stimuli. The difference is that Energy Psychology uses acupoint stimulation while Cognitive Behaviour Therapy uses techniques such as muscle relaxation or repeated exposure for reducing the elevated responses. Energy Psychology also utilises carefully crafted positive self-statements, similar to the affirmations used in CBT, and the tapping is believed to facilitate the integration of the statement and related imagery into the cognitive system. Other parallels between Energy Psychology and CBT include:
In both approaches, the therapist and client collaboratively identify and come to a shared understanding of psychological problems by focusing on triggering internal and external events, leading to personalised, highly specific goals that are continually monitored and evaluated. The distinctive purported advantage of Energy Psychology in working with anxiety disorders is the reported speed and power of tapping the acupoints for changing the response to a stimulus that had been causing maladaptive limbic arousal. In treating post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), for instance, a series of traumatic memories can be focused on, one at a time, while acupoint tapping is introduced in an attempt to abate the memory’s ability to cause limbic hyperarousal. Abundant anecdotal reports suggest that this procedure is unexpectedly effective and that by neutralising the emotional impact of traumatic memories, as well as of anticipated distress, the debilitating effects of severe emotional trauma may frequently be mitigated quite rapidly.
Positive Supportive Evidence What about issues other than phobias? Between 1988 and 2002, a team of 36 therapists from 11 allied treatment centres in Uruguay and Argentina tracked over 29,000 psychiatric patients who were being treated with a protocol that used acupoint stimulation. There was an estimated 70 percent overall improvement rate and various informal sub-studies suggesting that the energy psychology treatments yielded markedly stronger outcomes than conventional treatments with a range of disorders. Click here to read the research report. Systematic interviews with the therapists further identified the conditions for which energy psychology treatments seemed more effective or less effective. Overall these clinicians indicated that energy psychology interventions were most effective with:
They did not appear to be as effective with disorders that were more biologically entrenched, such as:
For anxiety disorders, the therapists’ uniform impression was that no other treatment modality at their disposal (including Cognitive Behaviour Therapy combined with medication as needed) was as rapid, potent, and lasting. Energy approaches have no known side-effects and they appear to relieve the suffering brought about by a number of psychological conditions with unusual speed and power. The field continues to gain proponents among a wide spectrum of clinicians. Randomised investigation establishes energy psychology as an empirically supported therapy, meeting the Society of Clinical Psychology’s criteria as ‘Efficacious Treatment.’ |
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