WTF?! I can tap on my face and feel better about things that happened?!
The EFT “Basic Recipe” for phobias
This published work is for informational purposes and should not be relied upon as medical, psychological, coaching, or other professional advice of any kind or nature. Enjoy my full disclaimer for more information!
My first EFT tapping experience: Got rid of a bee phobia in five minutes!
My journey to EFT tapping was circuitous.
The year was 1997, and I was an overanxious overachiever who needed to correct a humongous mistake: I’d gotten a degree in Chemical Engineering and Technical Writing (with an academic focus in Colloids, Polymers, and Surfaces!) from a top 10 engineering school.
How did someone who would end up being a lifelong performance artist and woo-woo practitioner start out by doing one of the squarest things on earth?
Well, we all make our youthful mistakes.
Working as an engineer threw me into an instantaneous life crisis. Between pretending that I cared about making products for 40 hours a week, and a boss who gave me a crap yearly review — and who then, when I suggested that this feedback could have been more usefully shared in one of our hour-long weekly meetings that we’d been having all year, said, well, you are a very attractive girl — it felt like an emergency. I needed to figure out what to do with my life, and fast.
I knew I wanted to help people, so I originally targeted social work. However, social work programs want you to actually have experience in the field, a real drawback for me. Good news, though: Psychology graduate programs just want you to have taken a bunch of psychology classes before you apply. As a chronic overachiever, this was something I knew I could do.
It was while binge-enrolling in every undergrad psychology class at every community college in the Bay Area, that I first experienced tapping in a passing moment. I had no idea how significant that event would be to my life.
I was in a class with my favorite teacher at the UC Berkeley Extension program, on a day we were scheduled to discuss Alfred Adler — you know, normal psychology.
But this day the teacher, a lovely, elegant man in his 60s, walked in and said, Hey, I learned a technique for phobias, would you all like to try it?
I’d lived in California for several months at this time, working as an engineer and taking in the gorgeous variety of natural beauties — forests! oceans! cliffs! fields of flowers! — by going camping all over California with my soon-to-be-husband.
Now, we both bring a lot of talents to our marriage table, but neither of the people in our marriage is great at the more elegant of domestic skills. So, instead of artfully learning how to cook complex and classy camping recipes, we just ate lots and lots of sausage.
And do you know who loves sausage? Bees.
Gather round, children, while I tell you of a time long ago, a bygone age when you could experience what felt like too many bees!
My partner and I hiked through thousands of bees amongst meadowy fields between old forest glades; set up tents amidst dozens of low-flying, zig-zagging bees traversing the hard pack of campsites; were dive-bombed at dry season trailheads. Bees flew so thick they would brush by your cheek or bare arms in passing, circle you incessantly, surprise you out of nowhere with their buzzing in your ear. Their low hum often vibrated the landscape for miles around. Bees, bees, bees.
And then, they would crawl all over your sausage sandwich while you were trying to eat it!
By the time of this class, I’d gotten pretty bee phobic. When the teacher asked if we wanted to try something for phobias, I immediately knew what my phobia would be.
We just did the EFT “basic recipe” that day, but my teacher was careful to explain how we needed to focus on all the “aspects” of our phobia: all the sights, smells, sounds, and emotions that occurred together as part of the phobia experience.
For my bee phobia, I focused on the sounds of single bees and thousands of bees; their coloring; how sometimes there was just one bee and sometimes there were lots of bees; the look of their little antenna antlers and feet; how they were sometimes really fuzzy and sometimes almost smooth… and how they looked crawling on my freakin’ sausage.
After five minutes of tapping the points while focusing on all these things, my fear had gone to zero. And I never, and I mean never, felt that way again. So much so that I am now less scared of bees than people usually are.
It was 1997, and I’d learned a technique that would be monumental to me. But it was before the internet had really gotten going. I looked for information from time to time, but all I found was people saying how it was “hocus-pocus” and “a new kind of snake oil.” Of course, my feelings of stone-cold calm about bees told me otherwise.
I didn’t run into more opportunities to learn tapping until 14 years later, but I never forgot that day. My younger son was really scared of bees when he was little, and I would say, I know how you feel! I too was once afraid of bees. I wish I could find the thing that helped me stop being afraid of them so that I could share it with you!
The EFT Basic Recipe
In the “basic recipe” of EFT tapping, you focus on a problem (in this case, I focused on the feeling of fear when experiencing a phobia).
Find the feeling (usually a sensation somewhere in the body) and rate it from 0-10.
Then, tap on the side of your hand while saying, “even though I have this problem” — this fear / this 7 of intensity in my throat / this scared feeling when I think of bees — I truly and deeply accept myself.
Next, tap on the main tapping points on your face and torso, from top to bottom. The tapping points are all located at the “farthest from the ground” points of the Chinese meridians, which are the same energy pathways that are used in acupuncture.
As you tap each point (starting with 4-11 taps per point is classic, but notice if a point seems to want more time), say your problem statement. You are pointing your intention to release what is stuck in your energy system, so you might say, this fear / this 7 of intensity in my throat / this scared feeling when I think of bees.
When you get done with a round of tapping, you return to the intensity of your problem feeling. Is it higher, lower, or the same? If it is not down to zero, you do the basic recipe again.
That’s all I did to get rid of my phobia. In fact, I didn’t even rate the official 0-10 of intensity, or say the things out loud. But I thought about them very hard while I tapped!
Important for understanding EFT tapping in the context of all energy medicine:
Closed system: only uses points on Chinese meridian system, which is a finite number of points on your physical body
Closed system: only considers events that happen from your conception through the present, a finite amount of time
Usually clinical: as most frequently taught, EFT tapping reduces distress, but does not explicitly build new landscape where the distress had been
Great resources to learn tons of EFT tapping skills:
— EFTUniverse has a free mini guide
— emofree.com has EFT founder Gary Craig’s original “gold standard” tapping coursework available for free
— the Association for Comprehensive Energy Psychology has trainings for licensed therapists and counselors as well as a trove of clinical data on EFT’s effectiveness.