EFT - EMOTIONAL FREEDOM TECHNIQUE
Where did EFT come from?
The principles behind EFT were discovered by Dr Roger Callahan, a clinical psychologist with over 40 years experience, who had made it his life’s work to find ways to cure people of unfounded fears, phobias and anxieties, because he himself had suffered from these since childhood. He called his discovery Thought Field Therapy (TFT) on the grounds that thoughts related to the energy field in the body and that changing this energy field by tapping on the meridian points could release negative emotions rapidly and easily. He refined and researched this method and today TFT and its descendants are the subject of serious scientific study and have already gained wide-spread acceptance.
One of Dr Callahan’s students, Gary Craig, a Stanford Engineer, came up with a brilliant idea to just tap all the points for every presenting problem, there are 13, so whichever points or points were the correct ones they would always be covered. Gary Craig called his streamlined version EFT – Emotional Freedom Technique
How does it work?
All energy based meridian therapies rest on what Gary Craig calls “The Discovery Statement”: The cause of ALL negative emotions is a disruption in the Bodies Energy System
It used to be held in psychotherapy that a negative emotion was caused by a negative or traumatic memory or event. Every time this memory was accessed or “lit up” as a result of a thought or an environmental reminder of some kind, the negative emotion was experienced.
Callahan, on the other hand, discovered that there was a step in between the memory/thought and the negative emotion and this was a disruption in the smooth flowing of the energy through the meridians. So instead of the memory or thought causing the negative emotion, according to the “discovery statement” the process is more like:
A thought or memory
TriggersA Disruption in the Body’s Energy System
Which is experienced as
Physical and Psychological Pain
