Archives: FAQs

A. No. You can tap near the points, or even far away from the points, and still get some effect. At the beginning, just tap, without worrying too much about whether or not you’re on the exact points.
Researchers have asked the question of whether using acupuncture needles on sham points that are not real acupuncture points is as effective as needling the points themselves. Their research results are ambiguous, with some studies showing equal effects from sham and real points, while others show the real points having a larger effect (Harris, Zubieta, Scott, Napadow, Gracely, & Clauw, 2009). If you can imagine a line between the full effect of stimulating the points and no effect, stimulating the wrong points may lie somewhere in the middle. It might be better than no acupuncture at all and less effective than using the precise points.

When you next have an EFT tapping point diagram available, note the location of the points and practice tapping on those exact spots. When you practice EFT using the standard instructions, you can find the exact points by looking at the diagrams and then in a mirror. Most of the points have tiny indentations in the bone and cartilage right below the skin, and you can find them with your fingertips. It’s worth doing that a few times, so that you get into the habit of tapping on the actual acupuncture points rather than nearby places on the skin.

When you need EFT in real life and don’t have a diagram available, however, just tap on the locations as you best remember them.

–from The EFT Manual, by Dawson Church

A: No. If you forget a point, skip it and tap the next point. With practice, you’ll quickly memorize all the points, and tap them all. At the beginning, it’s fine to skip a point or two. Even experienced practitioners sometimes forget to tap a point if they become completely focused on a client. You’ll be doing many rounds of EFT and you’ll catch the missing point later on.

–from The EFT Manual, by Dawson Church

Answer 1 (from The EFT Manual, by Dawson Church): One of the most common worries of newcomers to EFT is that they’ll select the wrong words for the Setup Statement. How can you be sure you’ve phrased it correctly, especially if you’re in a situation where you don’t have the instructions in front of you?

The answer to this question is to start tapping the side of the hand point and say the first thing that pops into your head. It’s more important to tap than it is to formulate the Setup Statement perfectly. You say the Setup three times, and you can change it on the second or third rounds if a more descriptive phrase occurs to you.

Keep it simple. If you’ve hurt your thumb, and you’re tapping for that, you can simply say, “My thumb hurts.” If you’ve been emotionally triggered by a bad experience, you can say, “This bad experience.” If you’re feeling annoyed, you can say, “Even though I’m feeling annoyed” while you tap. Start tapping, say any words that keep you focused on the problem, whether they’re the perfect words or not, and complete a round or two of EFT. You don’t need to go into elaborate explanations of why you feel the way you do, such as, “I’m annoyed at Sally. She told me to mind my own business, and she’s always saying things like that. She’s such a pain that I don’t know why I ever talk to her…” and so on. Just keep it simple: “I’m annoyed at Sally.”

With experience, you’ll find yourself easily selecting the words that have the most emotional impact, but at the beginning, it’s fine to use any words that come to mind. What’s important is to stay focused on the problem and tap, and avoid getting into mental considerations about the relative merits of this or that Setup Statement.

Answer 2 by Certified EFT Practitioner and Trainer Jenny Johnston: If you are tapping with clients, it’s important to use their exact words. For example, if they say “solar plexus” and you change it to “stomach” for tapping, they will not feel heard and may not fully tune in to the body part where they are feeling their emotion.

If you are tapping for yourself, I suggest that you sit in front of a mirror and imagine that you are telling your best friend all about an issue/emotion/event that’s going on for you.

Notice what you are feeling and where you are feeling it in your body until a specific event/memory comes up for you. Then tap on all of the aspects you remember, speaking out loud to yourself in the mirror. Tap on what you heard, saw, felt, smelled, and tasted and be as specific as possible as to where you feel it in your body. As long as you are saying out loud how you are feeling and where in the body you are feeling it and also putting a SUD score to it (0-10), then you will be able to see if your reactions are reducing as you tap. The more specific you are about an event and the feelings in your body and use the exact words of how you feel, the better your results will be.

A: Sometimes the emotions we feel defy description because we first felt them before we had language, for example, as an infant or toddler. Other times, we’re feeling a combination of emotions and it’s hard to sort out which is which. In both cases, you can tap using the feeling alone, noticing everything you can about it as you tap, just trying to be the observer that allows the body to feel that unnamed feeling while the tapping processes it for you. I find it helpful to ask, “How do I know I am feeling this?”

With feelings you can’t describe, it’s still helpful to get a SUD rating because that way you can track your progress and make sure you keep going when you haven’t cleared it completely, even though you feel much better than when you started. In the case of emotion that is a confusing, colliding jumble of more than one emotion, the tapping will usually have the effect of “teasing out” the separate emotions–perhaps anger, sadness, guilt, and shock. You can then take each one and work on it separately to uncover the specific events that gave birth to it.

–Naomi Janzen, Certified EFT Practitioner and Trainer

A: This frequently puzzles newcomers. EFT practitioners keep asking about negative life events to tap on. They ask you about problems that have occurred in your recent past, in your work, your family, your marriage, your finances, your health. They dig deep into your childhood for negative events that happened early in life.

What about the power of positive thinking? Why don’t we tap on positive affirmations as well as negative feelings and life events?

There are several good reasons that EFT takes this approach. The first one is that our culture emphasizes positive thinking and does not emphasize fully processing negative emotions. From an early age, we receive messages like “Big boys don’t cry” and “This too shall pass.” We’re encouraged to look on the bright side of life, to find the silver lining behind every cloud.

As a result, we rarely mourn our losses or grieve adequately. Children are urged to stop crying and cheer up, rather than receiving a respectful hearing as they grieve pets, relatives, and friends they’ve lost. After decades of this, most of us have a large backlog of unprocessed emotional trauma. EFT sessions are often the first real opportunity we’ve had to catch up on this backlog of grief and loss. If you go to the positive side too quickly, you short-circuit the natural process of letting go, grieving, and moving on.

As with every rule, there are exceptions, but one of the biggest mistakes novice or poorly trained practitioners make is going positive. What you’ll notice is that once you’ve really and truly processed your negative emotions, you’ll naturally move to the positive pole without any prompting or urging. If you’re working with a client, you’ll find the client will choose when the grieving process is complete and tell you when they’re ready to go positive. Leading them in a positive direction before this point actually aborts the grieving process, delaying their progress and ensuring that they have to come back to their negative feelings in the future in order to heal. You can’t easily go wrong focusing on the negative with EFT, but you can easily deprive yourself or a client of an opportunity to heal by going positive. That’s why EFT has you focus relentlessly on the negative. When it’s time to go positive, you’ll naturally shift to that perspective, with the healing process complete.

–from The EFT Manual, by Dawson Church

A: Basic EFT produces great results quickly, but it is essential to learn the standardized form of EFT that’s been proven in more than 100 clinical trials: Clinical EFT. This will ensure that you are using the EFT that has been validated many times over by high-quality research and is taught systematically by experts in EFT workshops. The basic Clinical EFT tapping routine (the Basic Recipe) utilizes only six of Clinical EFT’s 48 methods. You will usually get good results from the simple form and phenomenal results from the full range of techniques. To make progress with difficult issues and difficult clients requires knowledge of the 48 methods. For superficial problems, superficial knowledge of EFT is usually effective. Once you go to deeper layers of the psyche and encounter intractable problems, however, you will likely need the more advanced tools.

A: Your body is 70% water, and water is an electrolyte that conducts electricity. Water is essential for the biochemical processes by which your cells signal each other. Many people are dehydrated without knowing it, because we’re rarely trained to drink enough water. We’ve become accustomed to being dehydrated and may mistake our body’s signals of thirst for hunger, anxiety, or compulsive behavior. It’s a good idea to drink water before and during an EFT session, to make sure that you and your client, if you are working with someone, stay well hydrated.

During the experience of strong emotion, your sympathetic nervous system becomes active. It shifts resources toward body systems required for fight or flight, such as blood circulation and your muscles. It shifts resources away from nonessential systems like immunity and digestion. That’s why your mouth goes dry when you’re under stress. Remember that intense job interview during which your salivary glands dried up? Or when you proposed marriage to your spouse? Or when you had to make that public speech, you were very nervous, and your mouth went completely dry? Those are symptoms of the fight-or-flight response.

The simple antidote is to have water handy during each EFT session, and take frequent sips. This helps reassure your body that it’s being taken care of, even though you’re processing strong emotion.

–from The EFT Manual, by Dawson Church