A Practical Guide to EFT E-Book

Judy Byrne

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Ratgeber
• Serie: Practical Guide Series
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 221

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

EFT Founding Master Judy Byrne gives you practical advice on how to use Emotional Freedom Technique to improve your emotional well-being and change your life. In Introducing EFT, through the proven method of 'tapping' you will learn how to remove negative feelings, let go of the past, improve willpower and aim for a positive future. CLEAR AWAY NEGATIVE EMOTIONS and find inner peace CURB CRAVINGS and take back control of your life TAP INTO YOUR POTENTIAL and eradicate those nagging doubts

Leseprobe

Published in the UK and USA

in 2014 by Icon Books Ltd,

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ISBN: 978-184831-662-1

Text copyright © 2014 Judy Byrne

The author has asserted her moral rights.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.

Typeset in Avenir by Marie Doherty

Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

About the author

Judy Byrne is a therapist, trainer, author, speaker, and one of only 29 people worldwide to have been awarded the title of EFT Master by EFT founder, Gary Craig. She was privileged to do her own advanced training in a small group in the US with Gary Craig. Her passion is to help people discover how they can be the way they want to be by getting the word out about EFT so everyone can benefit from using it for themselves.

Judy has presented on EFT to large audiences worldwide and has been quoted extensively as an EFT expert in newspapers and magazines. She is on the executive board and chair of the ethics committee for AAMET International (Association for the Advancement of Meridian Energy Techniques), the lead body for energy therapy standards worldwide. She is also a member of the National Council of Psychotherapists, the National Council for Hypnotherapy, and is a fellow of the National Hypnotherapy Society. She has a private practice in London.

Contents

Preface

PART ONE: Introduction to EFT

1. What is EFT?

2. Where did EFT come from?

3. What can EFT do for me?

4. How do you do EFT?

5. Working with bad memories

6. Being your own therapist: Your Personal Peace Plan

7. Making friends with your inner critic

8. Tapping with children

9. Tapping for two

10. Have a nice day

PART TWO: EFT for anxiety

11. What is anxiety?

12. Panic attacks

13. Travel anxiety

14. Phobias

15. Improve your performance

16. EFT for sport: Upping your game

PART THREE: EFT for health

17. Optimum health

18. Pain relief

19. Irritable Bowel Syndrome (IBS)

20. EFT for eating and weight

21. Stopping smoking

22. Stress

23. Insomnia

PART FOUR: EFT for moving forward

24. Undoing trauma

25. Tapping into forgiveness

26. Dealing with grief

27. Attracting abundance with EFT

28. Troubleshooting and moving forward

Appendix A

Appendix B: FAQs

Appendix C: EFT training and resources

Index

Preface

This book is will explain how to use Emotional Freedom Techniques or EFT, an energy therapy that has swept the world over the last 25 years. Energy therapies combine working with the body’s energy system and, at the same time, focussing on the emotion or symptom of the problem we want to change. EFT, for example, uses tapping on a sequence of nine points of the traditional Chinese meridian system, also used by acupuncturists, while saying words that help us to keep our attention on what it is we want tapping to change.

Google Emotional Freedom Techniques and you will find more than 300 million entries. But what is EFT?

The amazing popularity of the technique lies partly in its simplicity and partly in its complexity. It’s simple to use – anyone can learn the tapping sequence that covers the points on the meridian system in a few minutes – yet it can be used to deal with complex issues. This book will first show you how to use these basic techniques, and then teach you to put it into practice at different levels and on different issues.

You will find this book easy to follow and its contents simple to work through, with a lot of guidance on how to do so. It will teach you how to use the technique on straight-forward problems like a single negative emotion or physical symptom, and then it will move on to more complex issues such as anxiety, stress, insomnia, weight loss, stopping smoking, phobias, trauma, grief, improving performance and health and demolishing barriers to attracting abundance into our lives. Each of these topics has its own section or chapter, so you can either read the whole book through in order or, once you have the tapping basics under your belt, you can skip to the issue that is most relevant for you.

I will also show you how you can clear out all the old negative experiences that influence how you are in the world right now, as well as how to become your own therapist. EFT can disempower the after-effects of old trauma, whether it’s big enough to be called officially trauma or is instead what we call ‘small t trauma’ or ‘everyday trauma’. This is the less dramatic but cumulatively equally influential steady drip of negative experiences. EFT can help you to have a happier past, as well as a better future. It gives you a way to go back to these influential memories and, without in any way losing the memory, detach the negative emotions from it so we are no longer slaves to its effects.

EFT has a knack of showing you where you really need to go. You may start tapping on something small and suddenly find something more serious or more complicated has just jumped into your awareness. If that happens, keep tapping until the emotion has subsided or gone down to a manageable level.

It is important that you start working on small stuff; ideally small stuff that, as far as you know, is not linked to something more deep-seated. If you have major traumas in your past, particularly if they are early traumas, it may not be safe to work with them on your own. If you want to try, start with smaller stuff until you have made friends with EFT. And even then promise yourself that if you realize you’re out of your depth alone, you will find help.

The ways in which therapy can make people’s lives better has been a career-long fascination for me. Over the past few decades I have done a degree in psychology, two diplomas in psychotherapy, and one in clinical hypnosis. I’ve attended so many workshops I lost count years ago. I trained in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) and using Mindfulness in Psychotherapy. All of this has been immeasurably valuable. But I can honestly say that EFT has been the biggest single discovery of my professional life.

I have always sought ways of working that empower the people I work with, rather than make them therapy dependent. The ideal therapy, in my mind, is one that deals with trauma, but with the minimum risk of re-traumatization. In an ideal world, therapy also needs to work fast: if you’re suffering, you want to be able to alleviate that as quickly as possible. EFT scores high on all three criteria. Of all the techniques I’ve learned in my career, it’s the only one I use on myself. If I’m worried about something, I tap. If I’m left stressed by a demanding day, I tap. If I’m upset or hurt or angry I tap.

So I am delighted to be able to share with you this brilliant energy therapy technique so you, too, can use it for yourself. I hope you will find tapping really transforms your life. It has mine.

If you have major traumas in your past, particularly if they are early traumas, it may not be safe to work with them on your own. If you want to try, start with smaller stuff until you have made friends with EFT. And even then promise yourself that if you realize you’re out of your depth alone, you will find help.

PART ONE Introduction to EFT

1. What is EFT?

We live not only in the physical world, but also in a world of feelings and thoughts. Our inner world often seems more real than the one outside us and we often feel we have no control over either. But actually, our inner world is an inside job.

Some places make us feel anxious. Some people make us feel angry. Some memories make us feel sad. Some days just totally stress us out. But does it have to be that way? What if we could choose the inner landscape – the world of our thoughts and feelings and memories and hopes – that we live in? What if we had that power? What if we could totally control our anxious and angry and stressed responses?

What if you had a tool that enabled you to wind down when you are wound up, to let bygones really be bygones, to let you shrug off anger, face the future without fear or remember the past without bitterness or regret? What if you could learn a way to achieve inner peace?

Well, the good news is that there is a way. It’s called Emotional Freedom Techniques, or EFT for short. If you’re stressed or unhappy with your life or feel you are over-anxious or underachieving, or if you want your life to be different in any way, then use this book to give yourself some serious attention and you’ll find you can have way more control over the state of your inner world than you ever imagined possible. And that comes with a built-in bonus. When we change how we feel it can change how others see us and treat us, which can change the way we feel even more, which can change how others see us – it’s a virtuous circle.

Not only can you use EFT to change how you feel in the moment but, with a little bit of time and attention, you can change your inner default setting. It’s a whole lifestyle change, rather than a temporary fix.

EFT, or as you might have heard it called, ‘tapping’, is a paradox. Although it can be used in subtle, complex therapy, it can also be a deceptively simple self-help tool. That is true whether you’re working with a therapist or doing it by yourself. You can use it to zap a current emotional or physical pain right now, or you can go back over negative things that have happened to you and change the way you live in the world.

Some people talk about EFT as being like emotional acupuncture. Others have described it as healing at 21st-century speed. It consists of tapping on the body at the meridian points – the ancient Chinese way of describing how energy is organized in our bodies – while putting our attention on exactly what it is that we want to change, and saying words that help us get and keep our attention focussed on what we are doing.

Tapping is a way of clearing emotions that are stuck in our systems. It draws on ancient Chinese wisdom in the same way as therapies like reflexology and acupuncture do, but it combines it with a very modern understanding of consciousness and psychology.

One of the best things about EFT is that it often shows us where we need to go. Even without any therapy skill it is likely that wherever you start, EFT will indicate to you what it is that you need to work on. It exposes connections we do not know consciously, and so cannot make for ourselves by logical deduction. It really does get to parts other therapy tools cannot reach.

In brief, EFT can help you to:

Deal with negative emotionsBanish or decrease physical symptomsBeat stress‘Rewrite’ your pastAllow you to be the person you want to beHelp you to have the life you want to haveAssist you to overcome self-imposed limitationsBanish phobiasHandle anxietyHelp you stop smokingChange eating patternsLose weightMake friends with your inner criticImprove performanceOvercome insomniaIncrease confidenceUpdate your self-image

EFT is also really versatile. You can do it for ten minutes or an hour. You can find a quiet space and make an appointment with yourself to really invest time and attention in yourself – or you can do a quick few minutes in the lavatory to reduce your pre-presentation nerves if you find making presentations stressful. It will fit in with you.

Jane found it really difficult to go in lifts. She couldn’t work out what it was that made it so frightening. She knew if the lift broke down there would be an emergency phone, and at worst she might be stuck for a while but she would not be in danger. Yet she couldn’t reason herself out of the deep terror she felt when she even thought about it.

She started tapping on all the EFT points on her body while putting her attention in turn on everything she could think of to do with this. She imagined she was waiting for a lift and tapped on the feelings that came up in her body just from thinking about it. She imagined being in it and tapped. She stood outside a lift and tapped on what she felt as she waited for it to open the door.

Then, she suddenly found her mind wandering. She started to think about a time when she was a little girl and shut herself in a cupboard when she was playing and was unable to open the door again. As she remembered it, she noticed the feelings that came up in her system were exactly the same as the ones that came up when she thought about going in a lift.

When she detached the emotion from that early memory, in the way you will learn in this book, lifts were no longer an ordeal for her. They were just the fastest way from one floor to another.

2. Where did EFT come from?

EFT’s earliest roots lie in the tradition of Chinese acupuncture and the idea that energy is organized in the body around certain channels called meridians. There is reliable evidence that this concept has survived more than 5,000 years of use. Longevity does not, of course, prove anything but it does show that many hundreds of successive generations have found it useful.

We have indisputable evidence that it has been around at least as long as that. Rising temperatures in the Ötztal Alps between Germany and Italy caused a thaw which, in September 1991, revealed a well-preserved body. It was reliably dated to about 3,300BC. On it were tattoo marks for what would today still be the points an acupuncturist would use to treat arthritis and a stomach condition and the body showed that the man had had both.

Acupuncture has continued to flourish, and in the last 50 years a number of Western healthcare professionals became interested again in other implications of the meridian system. One of them was a chiropractor called George Goodhart, who founded Applied Kinesiology, a way of diagnosing physical conditions by the relationship between muscle strength and meridians. Another was the psychiatrist John Diamond, who brought emotions into Goodhart’s ideas about physical diagnosis to found Behavioural Kinesiology, which used muscle strength in relation to meridians for emotional diagnosis and treatment. And a third was clinical psychologist Roger Callahan, founder of Thought Field Therapy (TFT), which was the direct predecessor of EFT.

In 1980, Callahan had a client called Mary with an intractable water phobia. She was so afraid of water that getting into a bath would bring on an anxiety attack. She could not bathe her children. She had nightmares about water. She was even afraid of rain. For two years he had tried all the conventional techniques. She could still only get as far as dangling her feet in a pool. And when she thought about water, she reported a strong sensation of fear in her stomach.

When she told Callahan where she felt the fear, he did an experiment. He tested his knowledge of meridians by tapping a point associated with stomach sensations. He thought it might help the discomfort in her stomach. He was amazed when she suddenly said the phobia had disappeared. (Not only did she say she no longer felt afraid of water but, to Callahan’s dismay, she began running enthusiastically towards the swimming pool. He knew she could not swim.)

He began experimenting to see which points needed to be tapped to clear which specific emotions and developed a series of protocols to deal with them. As his knowledge base increased, he started teaching other therapists with an appetite for exploring the unconventional.

One of the people who did Callahan’s TFT training in the early 1990s was a Californian personal development coach called Gary Craig. Craig had an engineering degree from Stanford, and though he had never actually worked as an engineer he had an engineer’s mindset when he reflected on what he had learned on the course.

He came up with the idea that the series of specific tapping protocols of TFT could be simplified into a single sequence that covered all bases. Admittedly, it would be a longer sequence and have some redundancy built in. For each person who used it some points would not be relevant, at least for the problem they were dealing with. But it would, he reasoned, be quicker to do them all than to spend time working out which ones to use when. It would also leave plenty of attention available for what was being tapped on, as opposed to worrying about where to tap.

When you use it yourself you will find that the sequence quickly becomes so automatic that you will do it without even thinking about where the points are. This leaves your full attention for concentrating on what it is you want to deal with. That is just as it should be.

It is key when you are tapping around the meridian points and repeating the words you have chosen to say, that you keep all your attention on what it is you are tapping on – what you feel and where and how you feel it. The entire point of the words is to help you to keep your attention focussed.

3. What can EFT do for me?

The purpose of EFT is to give us power over our thoughts, feelings and emotional state. It enables us to change the life we are having to the life we want. It is a portable tool that we can use quietly and privately by ourselves, or that we can take with us into situations that cause us problems. We always have it literally at our fingertips.

The thinking behind EFT is this: stuff happens. That stuff might be a negative or even traumatic experience, or a negative thought pattern, or a destructive relationship. The result is disruption of the body’s energy system. Even if you are sceptical about the ancient Chinese vision of the body’s energy system, you will have felt how stress or trauma can have a physical effect. Stress can give you a pounding headache, or a sudden shock can leave you feeling your legs are going to buckle under you. EFT can help us by soothing the energy system disruption when we tap on certain points, while putting our attention on the negative emotional and physiological feeling that we want to rid ourselves of.

So what EFT can do for you can be really simple – like getting rid of anger from a row five minutes ago, or making a lifelong phobia go up in a puff of smoke. Or it can be subtle and complex – like clearing the residue in our systems from years of negative childhood experiences in which we were constantly criticized or discouraged or hurt, for example.

Write down the earliest negative memory you have. For example, your mother going out and leaving you with someone you did not really know well. When you think about it, how high, on a scale of 1–10, would you rate the negative emotion attached to it at this moment? Now, try to get a sense of what impact it would have had when it happened. Imagine you’re back at that age again and see if you can what impact on a scale of 1–10 it had on you then.

Keep this in mind whenever you are deciding what is worth spending time focussing on. The impact of an experience is not what it would be if it happened at your current age but what it was when you were the age at which it happened.

Identifying what to work on

We human beings operate by template matching. At any minute there is far more information available to us than we could possibly process. In your present surroundings there will be more sights and sounds and smells and tastes and sensations than any human brain could possibly perceive, so we need to have a way of choosing what we notice and what just passes us by.

We do this by matching up what is present with what is past. The experiences and relationships we have had influence first what we are actually aware of in any situation and then whether we react to it as safe, unsafe or neutral. For example, if you have been mugged walking down a street in the dark, next time you are walking down that street and hear footsteps behind you, you might be more inclined to feel really anxious. Or you might find yourself ‘predicting’ the behaviour of a new partner based on your experience of your last relationship.

Template matching enables us to function in a world of information overload, without blowing a neural fuse or just shutting down in the face of so much stimulation. But it also means that we automatically judge every situation we encounter by whether, when we had a similar experience before, it was good, bad or neutral. It happens out of conscious awareness and so fast that we do not even catch it, let alone have time to argue with it. Subconsciously, we are trapped by the patterns of the past.

Not only does what has happened to us determine how safe we feel the world to be but also who and how we are in it. Break those patterns, and you are free to be who you want to be.

EFT can disempower the after-effects of old trauma, whether it’s big enough to be called trauma or is what we call ‘small t trauma’ or ‘everyday trauma’. This is the less dramatic but cumulatively just as influential steady drip of negative experiences.

EFT can help you to have a happier past, as well as a better future. It gives you a way to go back to these influential memories and, without in any way losing the memory, detach the negative emotions from it so we are no longer slaves to its effects. It can be truly transformative.

4. How do you do EFT?

Much of this book will be the long answer to that question. But to get started, here are the absolute basics:

Decide what negative emotion you want to work on.Rate its intensity on a scale of 1–10. How much does it distress or disturb you? This is called SUDS, short for ‘subjective units of distress/disturbance scale’.On the karate chop point, on the side of the hand (see diagram on the next page), you tap firmly with the tips of three fingers while you say this set-up statement three times: ‘Even though I have this (describe the problem feeling here) I accept myself.’

Self-acceptance is key to successful EFT as it is to many different therapies. It is also a key component of Mindfulness. It is a way of acknowledging that, although a part of you has the problem you just described, you’re okay with yourself, in spite of it. You can, if you prefer, say: ‘I accept myself’, or ‘I deeply and completely accept myself’, or ‘I accept myself anyway.’

I’m now going to do a run-down of each tapping point in detail. When you tap on a feeling, you should go round these points in turn.

Crown of the head. Make your fingers into a bunch and tap with the tips of all five fingers around this point. Half of the meridians in the body meet here, so it is a particularly powerful point. The Chinese name for it translates as a metaphor that means ‘the meeting of a thousand pathways’.Eyebrow. This is on the nose end of the eyebrow, straight above the tear duct. It’s easiest to tap with the tips of two fingers here because you cover a big enough area so that if you are a bit out, you are still hitting the spot.Side of the eye. This is still on the eye socket, so when you tap it – two fingertips again – you should feel the bone of the socket under your fingers.Under the eye. You are still on the socket, so, as before, feel the bone and use two fingers.Under the nose. On the fleshy part above the top lip.Chin. Between the bottom lip and the point of the chin.Collarbone. This point is actually at the junction of the collarbone, the first rib and the breastbone, and the easiest way to find it is to run your fingers along under the collarbone until you feel it meet up with the rib and breastbone, in a slightly off-centre little dip. If you are really having trouble finding this and using two fingers, you can thump with your fist about where a man would knot his tie.Underarm.