Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) is a psychotherapeutic tool that intends to relieve many psychological conditions, including depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder, general stress, addictions and phobias. The basic EFT technique involves holding a disturbing memory or emotion in mental focus and simultaneously using the fingers to tap on a series of 12 specific points on the body that correspond to meridians used in Chinese medicine. The theory behind EFT is that negative emotions are caused by disturbances in the body’s energy field and that tapping on the meridians while thinking of a negative emotion alters the body’s energy field, restoring it to “balance.” EFT has been described as pseudoscientific by some critics, while others have suggested that its utility stems from its more traditional components, rather than from manipulation of energy meridians.
EFT was created by Gary Craig in the mid 1990s, and is meant to be a simplification and improvement of Roger Callahan’s Thought Field Therapy techniques. Craig trained with Callahan in the early 1990s. In 1993, Craig was the first person Callahan trained in his most advanced procedure, a proprietary procedure known as Voice Technology. Craig found through his experience that the sequence of tapping points did not matter and that special proprietary procedures were therefore unnecessary, so by the mid 1990s he had simplified Callahan’s procedures. It is numbered among other non-traditional psychotherapeutic theories known collectively as Energy psychology.
The basic principle of EFT is: The underlying cause of all negative emotions is an imbalance in the body’s energy system.
The theory states that negative emotions are built in the following stages: A negative experience occurs; negative emotions are felt in response to this negative experience, leading to inappropriate programming inside the body; and then the body’s energy system gets disrupted due to these negative emotions. The contention of EFT is that in order to remove the negative responses, tackling the negative experience is not enough, because doing so cannot correct the energy imbalance. Rather, the energy imbalance must be restored along with curing the negative emotions.
The main difference between EFT and TFT lies not in principles, but in application. In TFT, a specific sequence of tapping points (known as an algorithm) is used for a particular problem. This sequence is determined using a procedure borrowed from applied kinesiology, called muscle testing.
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