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 now!

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!

“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.