Therapeutic Coaching, EFT Tapping and Trauma
WHAT’S THE ISSUE: How does Therapeutic Coaching connect with EFT and trauma? Therapeutic Coaching, trauma, and EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques) Tapping can work together to provide transformation and positive mental health for children and adults of all ages. Here’s how.
What is Therapeutic Coaching?
Creating a safe, supportive environment that acknowledges the impact of trauma on your life is a key component of Therapeutic Coaching. As a therapeutic EFT Tapping coach, I am trained to be able to identify the practical ways that trauma can present itself in kids and adults behaviours, habits, ways of seeing the world, and ways of relating with others. I use a wide range of EFT techniques to help my clients build resilience and navigate their emotional challenges effectively.
As a coach I help my clients create meaningful change in their lives by addressing emotional issues, limiting beliefs, and cognitive barriers. This approach is beneficial for encouraging personal growth, reducing stress and anxiety, and resolving trauma, among other things such as high performance coaching.
How trauma affects us
Trauma can be defined as an overwhelming level of nervous system dysregulation in response to an event or series of events. Trauma can significantly influence a person’s emotional responses, thought processes, and behaviors because it re-wires our brain to avoid anything that reminds us of the initial wound. For example, school absenteeism is often a trauma response where a student’s mind may have gotten re-wired to feel that schools are unsafe environments. Therapeutic coaching aims to address these impacts by helping clients understand their trauma responses and develop positive coping strategies, habits, solutions, and behaviors that align with their personal goals. This process often involves exploring past experiences and neutralizing their impact on our nervous system, behaviors, and habits, fostering self-awareness and resilience
A common misconception is that trauma = PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). That’s not true. PTSD is a clinically diagnosable level of traumatic distress. The concept of trauma is broader than just PTSD. Traumatic stress is also trauma. Posttraumatic stress is also trauma. And you can certainly have trauma stored in your body without having PTSD. In other words, trauma exists on a spectrum, and not all trauma is a mental illness level of trauma symptomology. Trauma affects us all in our daily life, as unresolved small ‘t’ traumas cause us all of us to get ‘triggered’ into a stressed state of fight-flight-freeze-faint-fawn. But not everyone is affected by unresolved ‘T’ traumas.
Trauma lives in the body. So if you want to process unresolved trauma, just talking about your trauma with a qualified professional, be that a coach or a therapist, isn’t going to get you very far. In fact, it may actually make you feel worse rather than better as it can lead to re-traumatization. EFT Tapping is a somatic therapeutic coaching modality that solves this issue.
How EFT Tapping works for trauma
EFT Tapping, also known as Emotional Freedom Techniques, is a somatic therapy that combines elements of cognitive therapy, exposure therapy, and acupressure. During an EFT session with a skilled EFT Practitioner, individuals tap on specific acupressure points on the body while focusing on a distressing thought, memory of an event, physical sensation, or emotion. This technique is believed to help reduce emotional distress by sending calming signals to the brain, thereby interrupting negative emotional patterns associated with trauma and releasing stored trauma in the body’s nervous system.
Of course, not all upsetting events are traumatic. EFT Tapping helps with those too. But it is also a safe and effective modality for sudden and unexpected events that left a trauma imprint on your nervous system.
Benefits of EFT Tapping for trauma recovery include:
- Clearing emotional blockages: Traumatic experiences can create emotional blockages in the body. Tapping helps to clear these blockages, allowing the individual to process emotions in a healthy way so that they can think more clearly and access the problem-solve frontal lobe.
- Reducing stress, anxiety, and phobias: Trauma often leads to heightened stress, anxiety, and fear responses. EFT works by stimulating acupressure points, which can trigger a relaxation response and calm the nervous system, helping to reduce anxiety, fears, and phobias.
- Promoting relief at a deep level: By tapping on the body’s meridian points while focusing on the problem, EFT works at a deep, subconscious level, often unearthing and clearing deep-seated trauma held in the cells of the body. Talk therapy cannot access this level of depth because it speaks to the conscious brain. Trauma lives in the unconscious brain and body.
- Rapid results: Compared to traditional talk therapies like CBT, research has found EFT Tapping is often faster and more effective for long-term results.
- Reduced risk of re-traumatization: Tapping is designed to minimize the risk of re-traumatization during the therapeutic process.
- Holistic approach: It addresses both psychological and physiological aspects of trauma, promoting overall health and well-being.
How Therapeutic Coaching and EFT Work Together to Deal with Trauma
“The opposite of trauma isn’t “healed”, it’s aliveness.
The opposite of trauma isn’t “healed”, it’s connection.
The opposite of trauma isn’t “healed”, it’s curiosity.
The opposite of trauma isn’t “healed”, it’s play.
The opposite of trauma isn’t “healed”, it’s presence.
The opposite of trauma isn’t to find perfection, to become a contained or even calm version of ourselves. But rather, it’s where we begin to experience what couldn’t exist when all our body could do was survive.”
Lexy Florentina – Trauma Therapist
Trauma isn’t what happened to you. That’s the traumatic event. Trauma is what is left in your body after the event that has yet to be resolved. The limiting beliefs about yourself, the beliefs you have about the world, about relationships, about an area of life are often products of unresolved small ‘t’ traumas. The uncomfortable physical sensations, like chronic lower back pain, can also be products of small ‘t’ traumas. Anxiety is a common emotional side effect of unresolved trauma that is stuck in your body.
Trauma leaves emotional wounds, often resulting in anxiety and unhealthy habits that you turn to in an attempt to calm your anxiety down. This is where therapeutic coaching can be incredibly beneficial, providing clients with tools to process their unresolved trauma and transform their unhealthy habits and negative coping strategies so as to transform their lives.
Therapeutic coaching doesn’t just guide clients to set goals or overcome everyday obstacles. It also helps them resolve deeper emotional wounds, including trauma wounds, that are causing them to self-sabotage or otherwise block their ability to take the consistent action needed to achieve a specific goal. In cases where, rather than inaction, anxiety coupled with catastrophizing is the issue, therapeutic coaching helps clients identify when they formed these negative self-beliefs (I’m not good enough, I’m stupid, I’m incapable) and neutralize the intensity of the impact those past experiences have on their self-confidence in the present.
Therapeutic coaching and EFT Tapping combine nicely for:
- Personal growth and transformation: A coach trained in EFT can offer a safe and supportive environment for clients to explore their trauma. EFT helps process painful memories and emotions that may arise during coaching via a gentle approach to deep healing.
- Enhanced emotional regulation: Coaching often includes helping clients regulate their emotions in difficult situations. EFT can support this by calming the emotional reactivity linked to trauma and stress, allowing clients to gain more control over their emotional responses. Clients learn to manage their emotions more
effectively through tapping techniques. - Working on limiting beliefs: Trauma often leads to the development of negative beliefs, such as “I’m not safe” or “I’m stupid” or “I’m not good enough.” EFT can help release these limiting beliefs. The therapeutic coaching aspect of tapping sessions with an EFT Practitioner includes reframing your thinking and developing healthier perspectives, habits, and relationships as a result.
- Increased self-awareness: By focusing on specific issues during tapping sessions, clients gain insights into their emotional triggers and responses.
- Empowerment through skills: Clients acquire practical tools they can use independently to cope with stressors or traumatic memories in everyday life. Both therapeutic coaching and EFT Tapping focus on empowering the individual. Through coaching, clients are guided to set goals, take action, and build resilience, while EFT helps them clear the emotional obstacles that may be preventing them from achieving their goals or fully healing from trauma.
- A holistic approach: Integrating EFT with therapeutic coaching offers a holistic mind-body approach to healing trauma. EFT helps release emotional tension, while coaching provides the framework for personal growth, goal achievement, and emotional resilience.
Examples of integration in practice
As you can see from the following examples of therapeutic coaching, being in a test or exam can be experienced as traumatic. Studying for a professional exam can be experienced as traumatic. So it’s not just car accidents, wars, or invasive medical procedures that can result in trauma wounds.The impact of any experience where you felt psychologically or physically trapped and powerless can leave an emotional wound that imprints as trauma.
- EXAMPLE 1: A client who experienced a panic attack in a recent Maths test may struggle with feelings of fearing getting another panic attack in an upcoming Maths exam. It’s not common for panic attacks in school settings to be experienced as traumatic because students often feel psychologically ‘trapped’ in the classroom/exam hall. They know they have to sit there until the test/exam is over. During therapeutic coaching sessions, the EFT Practitioner helps the client identify goals (e.g., overcoming his limiting belief of “If it happened before, it will happen again”, neutralize the emotional charge of past negative experiences so that similar future experiences no longer trigger a panic attack). When emotional blocks related to the traumatic panic attack arise, EFT Tapping can be used to help release the emotional charge around these issues. Here is an example of how: https://elenivardaki.com/panic-attacks-in-tests/
- EXAMPLE 2: A therapeutic coach may teach a client about how trauma can present itself as procrastination (e.g. avoiding re-sitting a professional exam that triggers memories of past exam failures that imprinted as traumatic), reframing their trauma-related beliefs of what’s possible (e.g. just because “I have a bad memory” feels like a fact for you right now, doesn’t mean it’s true), and setting a new empowering goal (e.g. re-sitting their professional exam and passing on their next attempt). They can then agree to use EFT to release the emotional residues of past experiences in good time so that successful studying to be possible). This process helps the client feel more empowered and capable of creating lasting change. Here’s an example of how: https://elenivardaki.com/exam-stress-procrastination/
In summary, therapeutic coaching provides a framework for understanding and addressing trauma, while EFT Tapping offers specific techniques for emotional regulation and trauma healing. While therapeutic coaching focuses on setting goals and fostering personal growth, EFT Tapping works on releasing the emotional blockages and stress that trauma can create. Together, they provide a powerful toolkit for improving well-being, preventing a problem from developing into a mental illness, achieving goals, and healing emotional wounds. They allow clients of all ages to free themselves from past wounds and build a healthier, more empowered future.
ABOUT Eleni Vardaki
Eleni Vardaki was one of the higher performing teachers in the schools where she used to work. When the pandemic hit, she decided to change course, resigning from her teaching job to go all in on her dream of helping bridge the gap between the fields of education and psychology. She now works as a Therapeutic Coach in private practice for children and adults of all ages, and as an Educational Consultant for schools seeking staff training and coaching. She specializes in EFT Tapping for stress, anxiety, and academic performance.
Schedule a 15 minute consultation or contact Eleni for more information: eleni@elenivardaki.com
