I work with a group of extremely traumatized people: parents whose children have been taken - often unjustly - by child protective services. Some will eventually get their children back but the entire family will still be trauma victims in need of emotional healing. Others will never get their children back, and will carry the scars of extreme loss for the rest of their lives. There’s no trauma worse than the loss of a child, and when that loss is inflicted by a government agency that claims a parent is unfit, the emotional trauma is increased with shame, stigma, extreme grief, a sense of frustrated helplessness, fear for the well being of the child, and perennial anger.

Parents, grandparents, and others in similar traumatic situations need healing from emotional trauma - otherwise they will deteriorate from unresolved stresses. Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) causes exhaustion, impatience, aggravation, agitation, lack of ability to focus, and emotional outbursts. If left unresolved the grief of extreme trauma can lead to further stress on the body including increased risk of heart attack and stroke. Whatever injury harms our mental or emotional bodies will probably have an effect on our physical bodies as well.

These traumas must be dealt with, and EFT is one way to do it. EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Techniques. By resolving energy blockages in the meridian system we can clear past traumas and promote emotional stability. As we heal our emotional body, the mental and physical bodies respond as well.

Here are some articles that explain more about how to heal trauma and PTSD using EFT tapping techniques:

An EFT Formula for Specific Trauma
EFT After an Attack in the Street
Healing Emotional Trauma & PTSD From a Car Accident
Healing Trauma Caused by Childhood Molestation & Incest
The EFT Story Technique Can Help in Healing Emotional Trauma and Clearing the Past
Using the Story Technique to Heal Emotional Trauma After a Rape
The EFT Story Technique for healing Emotional Trauma After a Bombing
Healing the Trauma of a Car Accident With EFT
Healing Emotional Trauma Caused by Date Rape
EFT to Heal Trauma After a Miscarriage
EFT Self-Healing After Witnessing a Violent Crime
Healing PTSD Caused by Domestic Violence
Using EFT to Heal PTSD of a Paramedic
How a Doctor Used EFT to Heal Abuse Trauma
Healing the Trauma of Guilt After Witnessing a Child’s Death

* Learn EFT at home! Get Gary Craig’s FREE pdf e-book or buy the DVDs now!

I recently made a Squidoo lens about EFT: EFT - Emotional Freedom Techniques.

Many people want to know: does EFT work? More importantly, does it work on their specific needs?

The way to know is to try EFT by doing it daily for a while.

If you question whether EFT works, you’ll also need to know if changes in your life in any way relate to the EFT tapping you’ve been doing.

With that in mind, I’ve developed an EFT Progress Chart to encourage my clients to make a record of the EFT tapping sessions they do. Keeping a log of sessions not only helps organize our healing efforts, it provides historical context to the questions we may have about whether EFT works at all. Just like with any scientific inquiry, good records must be kept. Thus an EFT Progress Chart is what we need.

You can download my EFT Progress Chart as a word.doc file or as a pdf file. Either way, it is easy to print out and use.

Here’s a sample EFT Progress Chart I’ve filled out:

EFT Progress Chart for keeping a historical record of EFT sessions.

* Learn EFT at home! Get Gary Craig’s FREE pdf e-book or buy the DVDs now!

Worries about self esteem afflict millions of people worldwide. Too many of us worry about how we measure up compared to all the other beautiful, athletic, insightful and artistic people around us. We live in a goal-oriented society where our ideals of perfection, heaped on us by the media, are unattainable by most. In wasting time worrying about our shortcomings, we lose the opportunity to use each moment for the joy of appreciating our lives as they are.

When I was a child, I was shy beyond what I’ve seen in anyone else. I let my sister do the talking, feeling I couldn’t compete with her conviviality. I never knew what to say to people I’d recently met, and kept to myself as much as possible. I wondered what more popular girls had to talk about; I saw them chattering together incessantly.

I was worried I might say the wrong thing. I stressed over having nothing to say. My power of speech was blocked. I wasted precious moments in shy, suffering silence when I could have been speaking freely, enjoying friendships, and living a normal child’s life.

Since enjoyment of life makes everything worthwhile, boosting self esteem should be of primary importance to anyone who is concerned about issues such as not feeling loved, feeling inadequate, extreme shyness, or feeling a lack of success in life. Many if not all feelings of personal failure are tied into self esteem issues.

Boosting self esteem is easy with Emotional Freedom Techniques, EFT.* It helps to have confidence in the EFT process, but as we know, EFT often works whether you believe in it or not, and when nothing else produces results. EFT could have helped that shy child to learn to speak freely and without fear. EFT could help anyone feeling blocked socially, financially, or artistically.

One of the worst emotional problems I had when I started using EFT over a year ago was that I felt unworthy of being loved. I felt inadequate, which created a huge abyss in the relationship I was trying to build with my new boyfriend. In fact, for a while it looked like we wouldn’t make it through the forest of my fears and inadequacy feelings. Many of the issues I initially tapped on concerned my buildup of low self esteem feelings. I explored the reasons for my fears, and tapped on each of them in turn.

In my case the problems originated with my relationship with my older sister, who I considered in all ways better than me. She was the oldest, the pretty blonde one, the talkative one, the mother-child who tried to take care of us all. She got perfect grades in school and had the perfect boyfriends and the car and the college education and good career. My life has been a perfect contrast to hers! I had a lot to tap about, but working through these feelings of inadequacy was crucial to recovering from the fears that made my relationship-building incredibly frightening.

My first EFT sessions may have started something like this: “Even though my sister did better than me in school, I deeply and completely accept myself.” Or: “Even though my sister talked freely and I couldn’t because I was shy, I deeply and completely accept myself.”

When doing EFT for issues like these, other issues come to mind. While I’m doing the tapping process, I often have some secondary issue bubble up from my sub-conscious, and I take mental note of it. When I’m done tapping, I take a deep, slow breath, and meditate for a moment to see how much the original issue still bothers me. If I’m over it, I can go on to the next issue that occurred to me. In this way I can tackle many aspects or facets of a problem in one session.

When doing EFT it is important to address each of these aspects separately, and to tap on any individual hurtful events of the past that come to mind. Years later, we may still be psychologically reeling from the impact of painful or shocking events. Some things sink in and never totally go away, leaving us feeling blocked energetically and in our outward lives. EFT is a method for removing those blocks, restoring our health, and giving us back the emotional freedom to live life fully without fears or pain.

So if you are feeling anxious or fearful about life and think you’re not doing as well as others, take a few moments to explore the roots of your feelings. Write a list if you need to. Then start tapping.

I worked through the painful old feelings and thankfully, my relationship with my boyfriend is still thriving. Just yesterday we had the best day ever; we drove to Mt. Shasta for shopping and dinner out. Two women spent time talking to my boyfriend and I didn’t get stressed at all – I enjoyed seeing him have someone new to talk to for a change. I didn’t waste any time thinking I wasn’t good enough because I wasn’t able to talk exactly the same way they did.

* Learn EFT at home! Get Gary Craig’s FREE e-book now!

Something else I wanted to mention, is that when I do EFT I always turn off my computer screen. Something about the brightness of it, or electromagnetic energy, seems to distract me.

I’m going to start using this blog to discuss something very personal – and that is the EFT I’m doing on myself, to solve my own long-standing personal problems. Perhaps I should have started this many months ago when I first started using EFT. Since then I’ve overcome many problems including fear of driving on cliffs and high bridges, and a general fear of abandonment.

I like to do a little personal EFT self-improvement every day. Today my effort will be to give myself more confidence as a Reiki healer – something I’ve just begun. I got my Reiki level one attunement earlier this month. Actually it was the second distant attunement I’d gotten for level one but I asked to do it again because the person who is attuning me now will take me through the Master level and certify me.

Here’s my EFT for this issue:

Setup phrase: Even though I’m new to Reiki and haven’t used it much, and feel unsure of my ability to do so effectively, I deeply and completely accept myself.

Tapping: Reiki Confidence (using the Basic Recipe version of EFT *)

After going through the tapping process it is my habit to sit back and relax, and take a few breaths. I center myself this way and meditate a bit on how I feel about the issue. In this case, while I was doing the tapping it had occurred to me that my real issue is about effectiveness, not just confidence. I will do the procedure again, this time concentrating on effectiveness.

I’m at about a 5 re: being unsure of my ability to be effective as a Reiki healer.

Setup phrase: Even though I’m still unsure of my ability to be effective as a Reiki healer, I deeply and completely accept myself.

Tapping: Reiki Effectiveness

During and after doing this procedure for the second time, I had a light-hearted feeling – something that alerts me to the fact that I’ve had my emotional break-through. I got happy and then thought ‘how silly – of course you’re as effective as anyone!’ And now I’m at a 0 level of concern for this issue. I feel that I’m as effective as any Reiki healer with only a few weeks experience – in other words, someone who is at the beginning of being a level one Reiki healer as I am.

Another EFT success!

* Learn EFT at home! Get Gary Craig’s FREE e-book now!

Anxiety comes from free-floating fears that keep us from our greatest happiness. We cannot be totally happy while we’re worrying about things that might happen, that haven’t happened yet. Too many of us are kept back from total happiness in life because of anxieties, whether rational or not. Either way, they have to go - and this is one thing EFT is especially good at defeating.

EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) can eliminate blockages along the energy meridians; these blockages cause various types of problems including emotions and some types of pain. If you don’t know how to do the ‘basic recipe’ tapping procedure, it is fully explained in Gary Craig’s free e-book on EFT. There’s a link to the free e-book on the front page of my site, EFT Joy.

During a recent meditation I realized that in order to cleanse our auras, we must eliminate bad attitudes. When I questioned how I, as a healer, could help people do this, I learned I should be cheerful and tap on all fears that keep us from feeling our complete happiness.

Go ahead and try it. I did. Picture yourself in a condition of complete joy and happiness. Bliss. Feel it.

If there’s anything blocking you from feeling your total happiness, consider what that is. I quickly realized I had some free-floating fears that kept me from being able to feel cheerful all the time.

So I started with this EFT setup phrase:

“Even though I have fears that keep me from feeling totally happy, I deeply and completely accept myself.” Then I repeated the words, “I deeply and completely accept myself.” I realized that the first time I said those words I questioned it but the second time it really settled in and I identified with deeply and completely accepting myself, totally and absolutely, without a doubt.

For those not familiar with EFT: while saying the chosen setup phrase three times, we either tap on the ‘karate chop point’ on the side of our hand, or rub the ’sore spot’. You really have to get that free e-book to understand where the sore spot is at.

After doing the setup phrase I used a kinesiology technique to determine if the setup message was working. (It might not have worked right if I were experiencing a reversal. Reversals are also explained in the free e-book.)

Next I started tapping on the energy meridians commonly used in EFT. While tapping on these points I repeated the word, ‘fears’. The common points for tapping are the eyebrow, side of the eye, under the eye, under the nose, chin, collarbone, under the arm, thumb and fingers. (All locations fully explained in the free e-book.)

After working through this complete ‘basic recipe’ I reassessed my anxiety level, and found that some residual fears still existed. So I started again, with this setup phrase, “Even though I still feel some of this residual fear that keeps me from being totally happy, I deeply and completely accept myself. I deeply and completely accept myself.”

Again I tapped through the entire basic recipe, but this time I paid attention to the points at which I felt the most effect. The collarbone point gave a huge response, plus I felt hits on this issue when I tapped on my middle finger, face points, and wrists. So I continued tapping, rotating through those points that seemed to directly correspond to the anxiety I was feeling.

I could do this easily because I was working on myself. If I was working on someone else with this issue I’d be relying more on my intuition to tell me which points were most effective for eradicating whatever the issue is.

After a few rounds of tapping, I suddenly felt a complete release of the issue. Immediately I filled with happiness because the fears keeping me from my total happiness were gone.

EFT usually eliminates fears forever. However there may be other aspects of the fear that will need tapping on, or there may be completely different fears that come up and cause new bouts of anxiety. Keep tapping! I believe we can overcome them all with EFT.

[Note: It is best to be specific about fears when we're doing EFT. In this example I was not at all specific. If I were to name the exact fear, EFT would be more effective in eliminating it. For example, “Even though I'm afraid of driving because I might have a flat tire on the freeway, I deeply and completely accept myself.” ]

Brandon’s Story brought tears to my eyes. It is about a seven-year-old with behavior problems who learned to use EFT. I’m impressed that Shari Snow, the practitioner who trained Brandon, was volunteering at the school. What a great place to go to get experience in helping children with EFT.

You are welcome to join the Energy Therapy group at Gather, where you can read about Reiki, Qigong, Quantum Touch, EFT, and other energy healing therapies. The group members post articles about energy therapy modalities of all types, and comment on one another’s writing.

If you’re going to join Gather, please do me a favor and use this link so I’ll get credit for you and so you’ll automatically be connected to me in the system. There’s no cost to join Gather.

“Tapping? How can that help?” I asked my boyfriend. This was about eight months ago right after he found an advertisement for EFT, Emotional Freedom Techniques, on his favorite website.

“Well, hold on,” he said, “I’m reading about it now.” There was a website full of information and a free e-book for anyone wanting to learn how to do EFT. We dove right in and tried to get as much information about it as we could.

The e-book, written by EFT promoter Gary Craig, explained that we can be set free from emotional traumas by tapping on our energy meridians – the same ones used during acupuncture. With EFT we don’t use needles – just our fingers, tapping on the right places. This is supposed to eliminate energy blockages that occur along the meridians, and free us from emotional or physical pain. The e-book explains exactly where those places are – at the inner corner of our eyebrows, on the side of our eyes, under our eyes, under our noses, under our mouths, on our collarbone, at our sides, and various places on our fingers and the side of our hands. (You should read the free e-book before trying this as it explains exactly where to tap.)

To do EFT we start by using a ’setup phrase’ based on whatever we’ve experienced that’s causing us problems. It is better to focus on specific events than on generalities. For example if a childhood incident of abandonment is causing an adult to fear being alone, the setup phrase might go something like this: “Even though my father left me alone in the house when I was little, I deeply and completely accept myself.” In basic EFT, the setup phrases always start with “Even though…” and end with “…I deeply and completely accept myself.”

After saying the setup phrase three times while tapping on one of two places (these are explained in the e-book) the person needing help goes on to tap on the various energy meridians while repeating a phrase such as “abandoned” or “left alone”, or whatever the problem is.

Of course there’s many other reasons to seek relief using EFT — it isn’t just about feelings of abandonment. EFT can be used on almost anything including physical pains and ailments. Gary Craig encourages people to try it on everything. There may be things it doesn’t work for, but there’s no harm in trying, and many people have found relief for the following types of things: phobias, traumas, panic/anxiety attacks, chronic pain, headaches, backaches, toothaches, snoring, ADD/ADHD, dyslexia, weight loss, addictions, allergies, sports performance, hypertension, diabetes, and depression.

If you’re interested and want to try it, please look into getting the free e-book and reading some of Gary Craig’s articles.