Advanced EFT

Articles for people who are familiar with tapping and want to get more out of it. Posts are appropriate for experienced tappers and practitioners.

EFT Cafe – Four Elements Tapping – 11th September 2019

On Wednesday 11th September the ‘Autumn Season’ of the EFT Cafe kicks off with a new process created by my good friend and colleague Masha Bennett.

In standard EFT problems are deconstructed into their emotional aspects and ‘tapped out’ to defuse the emotional blocks and distress that hold those problems in place.

Unfortunately some problems can be hard to deconstruct and process in this way.

Masha Bennett has created ‘Four Elements Tapping‘, a new technique that powerfully combines tapping and metaphor to create a change process that is particularly valuable for problems that are hard to define or just plain stuck.

Join Andy Hunt to learn this new tapping process at the EFT Cafe from 7pm to 9pm on Wednesday 11th September 2019 at St Oswald’s Hospice Education Centre in Newcastle upon Tyne. The EFT Cafe costs £10.

Note: Masha Bennett is coming to the north east to present Trauma Awareness For Holistic Therapists in November 2019. If you are an holistic therapist working with clients who have experienced trauma this training could be invaluable.

Tracking Down The Right Memory With 3 Questions

Image by Michal Jarmoluk from Pixabay

A central tenet of EFT / Tapping is that most of our emotional problems have a history. We learn unhelpful feelings and limiting beliefs in situations that are embedded in our memory and play out in our current lives, long after the original experience is over.

One of an EFT Practitioner’s jobs is finding and neutralising the memories of where problems start, thus neutralising the unhelpful feelings that came out of that experience.

There are lots of ways to identify these formative memories.

Practitioners may ask their clients:

  • What does this remind you of?
  • When did this problem start?
  • etc

These are all good questions, and I’d like to introduce you to a sequence of three questions that are an easy and effective way of finding the ‘original memory’ of that feeling.

Read moreTracking Down The Right Memory With 3 Questions

What Does Intention Tapping Add To EFT?

Image by Hans Braxmeier from Pixabay

Since Gary Craig invented Tapping / EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) back in the 1990’s there has been an explosion of different varieties of ‘tapping techniques’.

One new addition to the field are the Intentional Energy Processes (IEP) created by psychologist and performance coach Steve Wells (co-creator of Simple Energy Techniques and Provocative Energy Techniques).

While IEP is recognisable as a tapping technique it differs from standard EFT in important ways.

In this article I’m going to explain my understandings of those differences and what, in my opinion, makes IEP (sometimes known as Intention Tapping) a very powerful addition to the tapping techniques family. (I’m going to assume that you are already familiar with EFT/Tapping).

Read moreWhat Does Intention Tapping Add To EFT?

The Road Of Fire And Ice

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Imagine you are driving down a road.

It’s a wide road and you are the only car on the road.

This road is very strange.

On one side there is a raging forest fire that reaches right up to the edge, on the other there is a deep cold lake covered by a thin layer of ice.

Your car is also very strange.

You can turn the wheel to steer the car but it also has a special feature where the wheel will turn itself when you feel emotional distress. It will turn left or right (you’re never sure which) and the stronger the distress the further the wheel will turn.

You have to drive along this road you have no choice.

Read moreThe Road Of Fire And Ice

Get Out Of Your Mind To Tap

“Lose your mind and come to your senses”
    – Fritz Perls, founder of Gestalt Therapy

MindEveryone lives in a sensory world.

Our experience is what we see, hear, feel, smell, taste, think, imagine, remember and do (thinking, imagining and remembering are seeing and hearing in our inner world).

When we tap we are tapping on our internal sensory experience and how that makes us feel.

If you know about EFT you will know one of the foundations of successful EFT / Tapping is to be specific about what you are tapping on.

When we talk about being specific we are focusing on the sensory parts of our experience. The unpleasant feelings, the scary images, critical voices and painful memories that distress us, all happen at the level of sensory experience.

If we spent all our time in our sensory experience our tapping would be very simple, but because we are able to think and imagine we can take ourselves out of our sensory world into the realm of abstraction.

Thinking About Our Problems Can Cause Problems

Our capacity to think gives us ways to create abstractions and theories about why we are suffering. These theories, concepts, names, abstractions about our experience take us away from our sensory experience.

In one way it may be less distressing to spend our time thinking about the problem, in another way it can get in the way of resolving the problem.

We talk about low self-esteem, co-dependency, procrastination, borderline personality disorder and all the other conditions and syndromes that can appear on social media or in our Google searches.

While it might be useful to discuss diagnoses amongst ourselves or with professionals such abstractions are not directly amenable to tapping.

You can’t show your therapist low self-esteem, co-dependency etc because they are abstractions. They are labels for experience not the experience themselves.

The further away from sensory experience we get the more vague and un-tappable the problem gets.

Some things are just so vague that it is like wrestling with (or tapping on) fog.

So, how exactly do you tap on low self-esteem, procrastination, indecisiveness or all those other abstractions? These problems are very real to the people experiencing them, but they are hard to tap on directly.

Read moreGet Out Of Your Mind To Tap

A Crucial Distinction For Releasing Troublesome Memories With EFT

Warning: This article is for EFT Practitioners who work with difficult or traumatic memories. It is not designed as a self-help intervention. If you recognise some of your own memories from this article I encourage you to find a skilled and experienced EFT Practitioner to help you process them.

Disassociated perspective

Have you ever cleared a memory using the Movie Technique, reducing the emotional charge to zero, but still find the memory bothering, even if there is (apparently) nothing left to tap on?

You may have had this experience and wondered what you did wrong or what you missed. Well you probably didn’t do anything wrong, but you may have tapped on only one part of the memory.

If you have such a resistant memory, bring it to mind for a moment.

There are two ways of remembering an experience, one of them yields to tapping very readily one of them requires a little extra something.

Are you on the inside of the memory looking out, or the outside of the memory looking in?

I suspect that if your memory bothers you, even if you have tapped it down to zero, it is because you are on the outside of the memory looking in.

But what does that statement even mean?

Read moreA Crucial Distinction For Releasing Troublesome Memories With EFT

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