Emotional Freedom Techniques

I started my Clinical EFT Practitioner training in March of this year and attended the 4-Day Intensive Training for EFT in July. I am now in the Mentoring part of the program, learning about the 48 different EFT techniques to help clients with various issues. Releasing emotional pain, physical pain, trauma, unwanted habits, phobias, humiliating memories, cravings, anxiety, depression, and many others. I have used EFT to help me bring my systolic blood pressure down from over 200 to less than 120. I have reduced my craving for chocolate, released emotional pain from humiliating memories, lessened my fear of spiders and increased my income. EFT can also be used for goal setting, envisioning and empowering clients to let go of whatever it is that is holding them back from manifesting the lives they want. We use a technique called "Releasing Tail Enders" for these kinds of issues.

A typical session with me would begin with a grounding and centering exercise, a statement of intention for the session (PEACHIE - Perceptive, Empowering, Accepting, Compassionate, Helpful, Inspiring, Energizing) as well as some questions about what the client wants to receive from the session. We would typically then start Talking and Tapping (tapping on the side of the hand) while you share what it is you would like to work on.

From there, we would often use the Basic Recipe by tapping through 8 of the acupressure points on the head and body, helping the nervous system calm down, along with lowering cortisol levels and moving the activity in the brain from the highly charged limbic system (amygdala) to the parasympathetic nervous system, helping both the body and the brain to regulate and relax. Along the way I would ask you how "charged" or triggered you felt by the event or events you are describing to me on a scale of 0 to 10. We call this the "SUD" score or Subjective Units of Distress"). We would be working to lower this score to a 2 or lower, hopefully to a zero.

We might use additional techniques such as the 9 Gamut procedure to help the brain access and process the "aspects" (sensory input from what you saw, heard, felt, tasted, touched, smelled, sensed in your body or thought about) about the event you are describing. We use this exercise quite often if we aren't able to bring the SUD score down lower than 3.

Sometimes clients don't want to have to talk about what they experienced due to shame, embarrassment, or guilt or some other emotion. We can use a technique such as "Chasing the Pain", "The Silent Movie Technique" or "Tearless Trauma" which is just as effective without the client needing to say out loud what the event is. In the case of "Tearless Trauma" the client doesn't even need to think directly about the painful event at all and still make progress in healing the emotional pain.

To end the session, we may use a technique called "sneaking away" which helps the client feel safe, even if there is more work to do (often it can take several sessions to release all of the emotional or physical pain from an event, especially if it is long standing or very traumatic).

I hope to become Certified as a Clinical EFT Practitioner by May of 2024. I have already seen amazing results with many of my clients - releasing long standing emotional pain from events that may have happened decades ago. We often work with childhood events that need clearing. In which case I will often add some "Inner Child" work along with "Reparenting the Inner Child" exercises to our session.

I have been in the counseling field for over 35 years, so I also use the counseling skills I have learned over this period of time - compassionate listening, empathy, pacing of the client, and many others. The goal is to create an environment (or "hold the space") where extraordinary results can be achieved - often in 3 sessions or less.