When the weather turns cold, how often do our thoughts turn to being at home cozy on the couch, fingers laced around a warm drink, the dog at our feet? But what if, once again, you’re on that couch alone? Worse, what if you’re married, but your spouse avoids such an intimate setting with you?
As despairing as you may feel if you find yourself perpetually alone or if the intimacy has gone out of your relationship, hope is at hand. A powerful self-help method known as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT or tapping) has proven effective in helping people develop lasting romantic relationships.
EFT implements elements of cognitive therapy and exposure therapy along with acupressure in the form of fingertip tapping on 9 or 12 acupuncture points (thus the name “tapping”). Research shows that EFT can alleviate or eliminate the symptoms of a range of distressing conditions, including PTSD, depression and anxiety, eating disorders, and physical pain.
EFT is simple to learn and use. Here’s how it works. You focus on an upsetting event or physical pain (the exposure element) while tapping (acupressure) and saying a statement of self-acceptance (the cognitive element). Then you continue tapping, while repeating a phrase that sums up your event or pain, which keeps your focus on it. The tapping sends a calming signal to your brain. That signal of safety sent by your fingertips tells your brain’s stress machinery to disengage. In this way, the conditioned association of the event or pain with the stress response is broken.
Relief from physical pain can arrive within minutes. Problems embedded in childhood, which are often at the root of intimacy issues, can take longer to resolve with EFT, but this technique has proven as or more effective than conventional talk therapy.
Author of EFT for Love Relationships, Dawson Church, PhD, has identified 12 deliberate love skills crucial to creating and maintaining lasting intimate relationships. With these 12 skills in mind, Church created a course called Loving Relationships Now that focuses on building or repairing romantic relationships by managing emotions through tapping. When one or both partners in a couple feel wounded in some way, negative emotions usually prevail. Hurt, disappointment, fear, and other toxic emotions often cause partners to stop communicating.
Couples who learn to use EFT to manage their individual emotions strengthen not only that relationship, but also their relationships with children, parents, siblings, friends, and coworkers. Learning to tap creates a peace inside you that radiates to all parts of your life.
In his 12-week course, Loving Relationships Now, Dawson Church teaches participants how to build a romantic relationship that lasts. The program is designed both for couples whose bond needs repair and singletons seeking the skills to form lasting links.
In each week of the course, a module covers one of the 12 love skills for creating and maintaining a love relationship. The modules are:
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- Week 1: Fostering Secure Attachment
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- Week 2: Voices from the Shadow
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- Week 3: Why Everything You’ve Tried So Far Hasn’t Worked: Neuroplasticity and Stress
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- Week 4: Emotional Mastery: Riding the Wild Elephant
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- Week 5: The Elephant in the Bedroom: Tapping the Power of Emotional Self-Management
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- Week 6: Avoiding Spiritual Bypass: Practices That Foster True Intimacy
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- Week 7: Finding Your Soul Mate with EFT
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- Week 8: Freedom from Love Addiction
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- Week 9: Unequally Yoked: When Only One Person Wants to Change
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- Week 10: Relationship as Spiritual Path
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- Week 11: Dealing with Attractions and Affairs
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- Week 12: Energy Ecology
By teaching participants in his Loving Relationships Now course about tapping for relationships and how to heal, Dawson Church is helping people transform their lives. Because of the possibilities EFT offers, you can retrain your brain to be destined for love.
