The Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT)
-- a brief introduction

Introduction - Virtually all of us have emotional traumas

A large part of what we need to heal in order to bring about positive change in our lives and move towards enlightenment and optimal self realization / self actualization is stored emotional traumas. Most people, at least in the West, do not understand how much emotional trauma they are carrying. The usual healers' interpretation, as happened in my case, is that a great deal of the buried trauma that we are carrying is from past lives of ours. However, there are alternative interpretations, such as our getting 'parasitic' connections from 'lost souls', thought forms or memories or indeed archetypes in the 'Earth consciousness' or the 'human collective consciousness' when we start our current lives - these attachments then masquerading as parts of our own minds so that we have experiences and emotions and memories actually from long-past lifetimes that were not ours. I have come to a working understanding of what is the source of many apparently past life traumas and memories that actually do not belong to us, which very many people are carrying, and it comes down to what I call parasitic 'lost' souls that are attached or at least connected to many people.

In fact we do not need to know anything about the origin of particular traumas or difficult feelings or patterns in order to be able to release them. Neither do we need to have any belief in past lives. However, on that point I would say that, although actual belief is always unhelpful, acceptance of at least the possibility of past lives or other sources outside one's own current lifetime from which emotional stress and traumas derive is helpful for a particular reason, even though there is normally no need to know about specific sources outside your current lifetime. The point is that if you do accept that extraneous sources of trauma emotions are a possibility, then you are much more open to accepting that there may be more to release than might be accounted for in what may appear to be a relatively untroubled lifetime that you are living. People love going into denial about emotional issues that they are carrying, and having a healthily open outlook on what issues you may be carrying, and how much, makes it much easier to access those issues for healing purposes.

Another advantage in accepting past lives or other extraneous source of traumas / inner experiences as a possibility is that you would be more willing to accept certain images that may arise in your mind during the healing process, which are stylized representations (or indeed occasionally actual memories) of  particular past life situations (whether yours or, say, of one or more parasitic 'lost' souls attached to you), which you can use very effectively in a healing context. In such cases it is best that you do not actually believe that they are definitely past life situations or even happened to you at all - only to use them in a healing context as if they had been your own situations, in order to elicit the requisite emotional clearance and pattern breaking. It is best then to let go of the 'story' and keep a fully open mind as to what it had really been representing.

Buried traumas reveal themselves, at least to aware people who are 'in the know', through the rigid and limiting patterns of outlook and behaviour that they cause. Without such patterns each of us would naturally be joyfully peaceful, totally positive, alert, tremendously loving, non-judgemental, creative, full of energy... and the list of positive attributes goes on. Anything less than that and there is something in the way, which needs healing attention.

For much of my life I had been using the basics of Re-evaluation Counselling (RC) to enable me to release my old traumas and stresses and to go against rigid patterns. RC facilitates the allowing of our natural emotional healing processes of:

• crying (for grief),
• trembling (for fear and related emotions),
• laughter (for anxiety and the lighter level of fear-based emotions),
• bright indignant storming (frustration),
• yawning and stretching (the physical element of traumas)
• interested, non-repetitive talking (not analyzing) about the trauma situation.

For me this proved to be a lengthy, rough and rocky ride. I did hundreds - probably in total even thousands - of hours of crying since I started with RC in 1972. Indeed, it is almost certain that my load of supposed past life traumas was altogether too large* to be released in this lifetime just through the natural emotional release processes listed above. In fact most people who are into self healing do not readily spend a lot of time on natural emotional release at all, so a fast-track method must be very welcome for us all.

* These traumas, as I eventually found out in 2007, were not mine. It is still a very little known fact that many of us, and indeed nearly all people who would use the EFT with any sort of purposefulness, are carrying attached parasitic lost souls, all of which are carrying traumas from lifetimes that they have had in the past. These are the usual source of what people experience as past life memories or past life traumas, seemingly of their own. This is an extremely common phenomenon and may account for most or even all supposed past life traumas or memories that people are carrying and become aware of. More about this scenario in The True Nature of 'The Dark Force' and its Interference and Attacks. My understanding is that there are very many people who do have major past life traumas of their own, BUT they are generally less aware individuals who would never become aware of their past lives, nor be motivated to use healing or emotional clearance methods such as the EFT.

As I now understand, the reason for my exceptional load of emotional trauma to try to clear was NOT because anything particularly nasty had happened to me, but because I had an exceptional load of these parasitic lost souls attached to me. Virtually none of the trauma material was mine, so the emotional healing work that I was doing was actually nearly all of their material.

What the EFT does

The EFT is based on the 'insight' that unhealed emotional trauma 'energies' are stored in particular parts of the body* and cause blockages to 'energy' flow in particular subtle energy channels (meridians). The principle, then, is to get in touch with the feelings of a particular trauma while simultaneously tapping on a sequence of specific points on various meridians, so releasing the energy blocks in those meridians and the organs with which they connect. The effect of this is to speedily release the particular trauma emotion.

* This is just a convenient and practical way of describing the situation. My intuition here is that the trauma 'energies' are really stored in one's non-physical aspects, not in the physical body at all, but there are specific points on the body that appear to function as 'access points' to particular types of trauma energy - and it is these that are used in the EFT. As I note in the above-linked Glossary entry, my own current understanding is that the describably structured 'energy system' that psychics and healers generally 'see' or at least believe in does not exist in any objective way, and is really an illusion given to people with psychic perceptions for seriously troublesome purposes. It is thus important not to regard such 'energy' structures as being anything more than a convenient figure of speech for something much more subtle, which cannot be directly seen nor conceptually described.

Many people seek to justify their holding onto their issues (and thus not releasing or healing them) by imagining that if they released the traumas they would then be devoid of emotions, and that would be a Bad Thing. That misunderstanding is also fuelled by statements about 'releasing emotions', where what we really mean by 'releasing emotions' is releasing particular stress or trauma states involving the particular emotions - or releasing oneself from the compulsive grip of a particular emotion. If you are healing a trauma complex relating to feelings of separation and isolation, with masses of grief and loneliness, you would eventually come to a point where you still feel grief, sadness, loneliness or isolation when it is appropriate to do so (and that would be only briefly), but those emotions would no longer be colouring your everyday life, and would arise only rarely in response to specific circumstances. After all, they simply would not belong with you then as an everyday experience because they would be feelings relating to past events that are not happening for you in this lifetime. So, why hang onto them - except through fear of positive change?

This appears to be to at least a very considerable degree my own state nowadays, in which what people usually think of as emotions are fleeting when they are felt at all, and have a more 'transparent' quality about them than they used to, because I am now so much more in touch with my basic state of joyfulness and love, which is not transient at all; it can only be temporarily clouded, but, unlike the 'ordinary' emotions, it itself does not fluctuate except in 'flavour'. Life like this has a much freer, more abundant feel to it, with experiences being more vivid but without any 'clinging' or compulsive quality about them. When one experience passes away, rather than seeking to repeat it, I am immediately open to the next experience, which thus can be more 'immediate' and vivid, because it is not being clouded by any attachment to particular previous experiences. This is a much happier way to be living - but the catch is that people generally cannot understand that simple fact until and unless they get clear of their own addictions and attachments.

The EFT procedure

A certain clarity and skill is required to make best use of the EFT, in order to create just the right setup statement to use, for it needs to be one that really gets in touch with the feelings. If you lack the will or the awareness to home in on the particular feelings, then you could for evermore be creating setup statements that may sound as though you are an EFT expert but do not take you very far - and thus you could fool yourself into thinking that you do not have much to release, or that the EFT "doesn't work" much for you.

The procedure goes as follows. Let's take a session that I gave myself just before starting to write this page.

This sequence can be repeated up to several times in the particular session, usually with amendments to the setup statement, and the tapping sequence can be modified or abbreviated. It is fine and good to modify and sharpen up the setup statement during your tapping sequence. As you get in touch with the feel of the statement more during your tapping, it makes perfect sense to try out variations as you go, to see which version gets you most in touch with the underlying feelings so that you are releasing more through the tapping.

Please be aware that the EFT is not a ritual nor indeed a religion, and there is actually no one right way to practise it. Your own results are what count - not whether you are exactly repeating what Uncle Phil taught you. 

When substantial emotional issues are involved, such a session could not reasonably be expected to clear the whole issue, but it will have cleared or significantly reduced one part and it would be necessary to formulate another setup statement, probably relating to a particular feeling or a particular past experience, to clear another part of the issue. You carry on like this over a period, whittling down the issue till there is nothing left. With RC you have to work in a similar way, but with the EFT it is all so much quicker, with much less effort.

Postscript - More uses for the setup statement

In fact the setup statement, including the 'and I choose...' section, is a powerful tool that can be used in any healing systems, for no healing is complete without attention to positive life change and breaking patterns. I strongly recommend that it be taken up and used widely by all healers in any system, also in Re-evaluation Counselling and indeed by professional counsellors - though of course the practitioners would need to have the means to give the requisite emotional support, and then the use of EFT would greatly reduce the amount of any of the natural emotional release that might be necessary.

In my own experience certain setup statements seemed to be very useful to repeat in my mind in situations where tapping was inappropriate. In that usage I did not concentrate on getting strong emotional feelings but instead focused on the positive change aspect. For example, on one of my hikes when I was taking a 'pit stop' and was just waiting for my pee to start (this has been quite a problem area for me), I was repeating something like "Even though people are about to pass by and see what I am doing, and might wonder why I am just standing here with nothing coming out, I deeply and completely love and accept myself, and I choose to honour myself and enjoy letting it flow anyway for all to see."

If I can't accept the statement "I deeply and completely love and accept myself" can I still find any benefit from EFT by substituting another positive saying in its place?

Yes, definitely, though it is important to keep in mind that "I deeply and completely love and accept myself" is a crucial part of anyone's self healing and self actualization process, and so it is necessary to come to terms with and fully embrace that statement as soon as you can possibly manage it. A good interim alternative to use would be something like "I am coming towards deeply and completely loving and accepting myself". Indeed, that would also be assisting you in focusing your intent on becoming able to deeply and completely love yourself, so it would be very beneficial while you have that particular block.

Also, you can directly address the issue with the EFT, using a setup statement something like:

"Even though at the moment I feel I can't (deeply and completely) love and accept myself, I actually love myself enough that I am working right now to make it possible, and I choose to stand my full height and joyfully to accept the most fundamental positive change in my life".

...But it is important for each person to use wording that is most appropriate for them and does not turn them off, so my suggestion here is simply one that you can use as a basis for a setup statement of your own.

However, there is more that you can do to enable you to move very quickly to deeply and completely loving yourself - in particular, using The Work on the issue. The way I would expect to go about it for myself would be to see what thoughts arise in my mind to justify my apparent inability to deeply and completely love and accept myself. Such thoughts might be ones like "I am bad because I am unloving to others / to xxxx", "I am bad because I feel resentful / jealous / angry at people", "I am ugly / fat / disabled [you name it!]", or maybe "I am bad because I did xyz".

Having written down those particular thoughts that arise, then I would examine them further with the aim of making them and any related thoughts into the most effective format for putting to inquiry using The Work - and then I would work through the list I had created, putting each of those thoughts to inquiry.

Best to use at least two methods - try The Work as well!

In fact, although theoretically a person could clear all their emotional issues with just one method, the practical reality is that few people indeed would manage to do so. This applies not only to the EFT but indeed to any emotional clearance method, never mind how good, that requires one to identify particular issues, or 'handles' upon those issues, to work on. All such methods are limited by the user's own 'blind spots' and limitations on their thoroughness of using a particular method. For this reason I recommend that, even if you really love the EFT and get on with it just great, you take on one or more at least equally powerful method(s) to use in addition. Belt and braces is King!

One such method is The Work, developed by Byron Katie. It is a process of methodical inner inquiry based on four fundamental questions and a turnaround that are applied to each of one's beliefs, judgements and stressful thoughts. This simple but powerful method rapidly sorts out one's life and, at least theoretically, brings about a self actualization process, putting enlightenment and enlightened living theoretically within reach of many.

I came into what seemed to be an excellent approach to using both these methods. If a clear judgement or belief came into my mind and was the predominant experience rather than a stressful feeling at that time, then I would write it down and put it to inquiry using The Work. However, if a particular stressful feeling was more prominent, then I used the EFT. Then quite often, as the setup statement clarified during the tapping stages, I arrive at a specific belief or judgement that was strongly amenable to putting to inquiry, and so I wrote that down and finished off the clearance of that issue (or that part of an issue) by doing The Work on it.

Indeed, I recommend finishing off ANY issue by using The Work on it - for a very important reason. When you use the EFT or other method that primarily releases the emotional charge or payload of an issue, what can readily happen is that you release the emotional charge to such a level that you no longer very much notice it and so you are no longer motivated to continue clearing it - indeed you may well believe that you have already cleared it. Yet you may not have released enough for full inner re-evaluation of the underlying believed or misunderstood thought(s), so that you would still to some extent be carrying limiting patterns and beliefs caused by the particular underlying beliefs / misunderstandings.

Therefore it makes sense to finish off each issue with The Work, because that method focuses precisely on achieving inner re-evaluation. Indeed, I know of no other method which is so direct and precise in achieving re-evaluation. Inner re-evaluation marks the final clearance of any issue.

An example of using the EFT with The Work

This relates a bit of work I did a matter of minutes before writing this (in March 2007). The following is how I worked. I started with the EFT, formulating the setup statement while I was tapping on the 'Karate chop' position on the little-finger side of my left hand. Almost once I started crying and feeling a slight ache at the solar plexus caused by some of the associated anger which was now beginning to surface. I came up with the following setup statement:

Even though the religions are tools of darkness and have harmed me and countless other people,
I deeply and completely love and accept myself
and I choose to stand my full height and joyfully get on with life with no further attention to religions.

Please note that the setup statement is not about making a factually correct statement but about making one that puts you most in touch with the painful emotions that you are seeking to release.

Time for The Work...

The task now was to frame a thought from this issue about religions, in a form that was really amenable to the inquiry process. I came up with:

"Religions should be condemned, because they are tools of Darkness".

I could really feel the solar plexus ache* of more anger as I tuned into that thought. So, I applied the standard four questions of The Work to it, and then the turnarounds. The turnarounds especially give you a very direct and precise set of angles on the relevance of a belief in your life, which you don't really get with the EFT or any other method I know, and this greatly facilitates the inner re-evaluation which finally clears an issue. Therefore The Work really is a great way to finish off an issue which has already been worked on by any of the other methods.

* Actually, in hindsight I am fairly sure that it would not have been genuine anger of my own anyway, but rather, an attack from the dark force with a distortion of some anger relating to such issues that was being carried by one or more of the parasitic lost souls attached to me at that time. That menacing solar plexus ache gives the game away. Generally, when you get that you can be reasonably sure that you are getting dark force attack.

These were my turnarounds:

• Religions shouldn't be condemned, because they are tools of Darkness
• Religions shouldn't be condemned
• Religions should be commended, because they are tools of Darkness
• Religions shouldn't be condemned, because they are tools of Light
• Religions should be commended, because they are tools of Light
• I should be condemned, because I am a tool of Darkness
• I should be condemned, because I am a tool of the Light
• I should be condemned, because I am me
• I should be me, because I am me

I pondered the relevance of each of these to my life and indeed supposed incarnational history* - not as a lengthy analysis but just in considering whether it is truer or less true than the original thought and what relevance it might have had for me - e.g. whether it was a belief that I may have carried. Indeed, I am sure I could have had something of every one of those turnarounds instilled into me at some time or other as a belief that had then gone on to adversely affect me in the particular lifetime and subsequent ones (which, as I have already remarked, were presumably actually not genuinely lifetimes of my own at all, but lifetimes of particular parasitic lost souls attached to me.).

* Oops! At that time I was still embracing the big story that the dark force, posing as various supposedly 'higher' sources, had given me about my supposely long and extremely turbulent sequence of previous lifetimes - actually a huge and troublesome fiction. I had no idea then that actually I appear to be a no-soul person who has had no previous soul incarnations, so I had no cause to suspect that my various apparently past life memories and traumas were not my own.

And that is it! ...No, I cannot know for sure that every bit of that issue is now cleared, for there may be related aspects that are still awaiting similar work in order for me to gain the necessary re-evaluation (i.e. deep learning).

Later note (2008) - What a hassle!

In mid 2007 I took up methods that effectively made the EFT and The Work redundant for me, never mind how good they are in relation to what had been available before they had been developed. Now, in December 2008, on reading through all the above on this page, my immediate gut response is "Phew! What a bloody hassle!". Although I am keeping this page and the one on The Work on this site for the time being, I am doing so as much as anything so that people can see how much easier and simpler and indeed more powerful it is to use the Self-Power Walking and Grounding Point methods, especially when these are combined with use of exceptionally powerful affirmations and declarations of intent for comprehensive genuine self actualization. One thing that is especially great about Self-Power Walking is that no particular mental acuity is required to use it. The EFT and The Work cannot work effectively at all for the vast majority of people, who lack the sort of mental clarity that would enable them to be sufficiently focused to make major gains from those particular two methods (even though many people could no doubt make welcome limited gains with them). Also, a combination of Self-Power Walking, Grounding Point and the Returning Life Sequence and similar practices is much more effective in progressively healing and eventually clearing out any parasitic lost souls or indeed other attached entities, which may well be the true owners of most or even virtually all of the emotional issues that you are carrying.

However, both the EFT and The Work are very suitable to be used by counsellors and therapists for guiding clients through addressing specific issues, where the people involved have no special motivation towards genuine comprehensive self actualization. They would thus be used in the context of more limited life improvement rather than the comprehensive self actualization that I promote, and that is why I am not involving myself in that way.