Reflexology
Reiki (and other forms of hands-on healing)
Shiatsu
Tai Chi
Traditional Chinese Medicine
Yoga
One of the main qualities that energy therapies possess is the ability to address the psychological as well as the physical aspects of a person, enabling positive changes within the thoughts, attitudes and feelings of an individual. For this reason energy therapies can achieve much more than just symptom management.
Although each particular system has its own characteristics, there are common threads that link each and every one. Together, they acknowledge that the energies of the body are vital to attaining health and well-being. The treatment is focused at the energetic level and by releasing disturbances within the energy system, physical and emotional imbalances can be corrected.
If we maintain a healthy and harmonious energy system, physical health and emotional well-being are easily achieved. When out of balance, disorder and disruption are likely to occur. EFT has drawn upon the knowledge of the body’s energy system and taken it one step further, by devising a way to intervene directly with the disruption caused by distressing thoughts and feelings. EFT focuses directly on our negative responses and works quickly to neutralize the discomfort, bringing rapid relief.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF EFT
EFT was developed by American engineer Gary Craig. He had a life-long interest in helping other people overcome their emotional limitations and devoted much of his time to investigating various psychological treatments of one form or another. For many years he worked with Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP), until he discovered a revolutionary technique developed by clinical psychologist Dr Roger Callahan Ph.D.
Roger Callahan had devised a complete system of psychological healing, based on the meridians, known as Thought Field Therapy (TFT). It was a completely natural and non-invasive technique which has the capacity to eliminate negative emotions, beliefs and traumatic memories rapidly and often permanently. The inspiration for his method came from Acupuncture combined with the modern day practice of Kinesiology.
In his capacity as a clinical psychologist, Callahan had been treating a client, Mary, for over a year and a half. The following story describes how Callahan happened on TFT.
mary’s story – phobia of water For as long as Mary could remember she had suffered from an intense phobia of water. This included rain, puddles and even seeing water on television! She could only tolerate bathing in a few centimetres of water and could not leave her house if it was raining. Large bodies of water such as the sea terrified her. Since childhood, Mary had also experienced horrendous nightmares about water and her life was a misery. No one within her family knew how this phobia had developed or if there had been any form of trigger.
In an attempt to alleviate her suffering, Roger Callahan tried every form of conventional psychotherapy known to him, including desensitization and hypnotherapy. Marginal progress had been made and she could now sit by his swimming pool during their sessions, as long as she didn’t look at the water.
One particular afternoon she described ‘an awful feeling in her stomach’ which occurred whenever she even thought about water. Desperate to help, and feeling that he had nothing to lose, he suggested that she tapped under her eye. Callahan knew that according to the meridian map of the body, the stomach meridian began just below the eye. No one could have predicted what happened next. Not only did Mary lose the awful feeling in her stomach, but also her fear of water completely vanished and within an instant her life-long phobia had disappeared. Mary immediately rushed over to the swimming pool and started splashing her face with water. Callahan was startled as he watched Mary move towards the deep end of the swimming pool. Anxious, because he knew she could not swim, he shouted to her to be careful. Mary, filled with delight, replied that although her fear had miraculously vanished she had not lost her reason; she knew she could not swim. Mary’s phobia and nightmares have never returned.
Callahan went on to develop his discovery and nearly two decades later the method has been refined to incorporate tapping points on the body relating to all the major meridians, thus enabling all manner of psychological problems and limitations to be addressed. He established certain ‘tapping’ points that related to specific problems and discovered precise sequences that needed to be performed.
Callahan identified precise tapping combinations for a wide range of problems, including such conditions as anxiety, addictions and phobias. He also created a system of diagnosis that indicated which particular meridians needed to be addressed within each individual and the correct order in which they needed to be treated. Callahan went on to author several books including The Five Minute Phobia Cure, Why You Eat When You’re Not Hungry and The Rapid Treatment of Panic, Agoraphobia and Anxiety.
Gary Craig trained under Callahan and became proficient in using TFT. He went on to develop a system of his own – The Emotional Freedom Technique – which he felt simplified the process and made it easily accessible to everyone to use and apply. Knowing that each meridian was interlinked with the others in a continuing energy loop meant that by removing a blockage from one meridian, the entire circuit would automatically clear. He felt that there was no longer any need to locate which specific meridians were disrupted or their precise treatment order. Additionally, as there were only 14 points in total, Craig suggested that if they were all used, the same results could be produced as well as giving the entire energy system a complete overhaul at the same time. He produced a revised treatment plan that could be used for all problems – physical, emotional and psychological. It was easy to learn and perform and, in his opinion, it was just as effective.
Gary Craig teamed up with Adrienne Fowlie to develop EFT further and was invited to put his system to the test. The opportunity arose to work with traumatized Vietnam Veterans. This is what Gary has to say about that experience:
‘They had Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) which is among the most severe form of emotional disorders known. Every day these men relive the catastrophes of war … like being forced to shoot innocent civilians (including young children) … burying people in trenches … and watching their own dear friends die or be dismembered. The sounds of gunfire, bombs and screams ricochet in their heads day and night. Sometimes only drugs ease the ever-present aches of war.
‘They sweat. They cry. They have headaches and anxiety attacks. They are depressed and in pain. They have fears and phobias and are afraid to go to sleep at night because of their nightmares. Many have been in therapy for 20 years … with very little relief.
‘I still remember how thrilled I was when the Veterans Administration invited Adrienne and me to bring EFT to our soldiers. They gave us free rein to counsel with these men in any way we wanted. This would be the ultimate test regarding the power of EFT. If all it did was make a modest, but noticeable, difference in the lives of these severely disabled men, most people would have considered it successful. In fact, it did much more. One of the video cases was about Rich, who had been in therapy for 17 years for his PTSD. He had:
‘After using EFT with him, every trace of those problems vanished. Like most people, Rich had a hard time believing that those rather strange-seeming procedures would work. But he was willing to give them a try. We started with his height phobia and after about 15 minutes with EFT it had gone. He tested it by going several storeys up in a building and