EFT Therapy is a Fourth Wave Therapy
WHAT’S THE ISSUE: When people hear the word “therapy,” they often picture traditional talk therapy. However, psychology has evolved through four distinct waves of therapeutic approaches. The first three waves focus primarily on talk therapy, which Dr. Bessel van der Kolk describes as “top-down” methods. These therapies aim to change thoughts in order to shift emotions and, ultimately, reduce self-defeating behaviors.
With growing awareness of the mind-body connection, especially through Dr. van der Kolk’s work in The Body Keeps the Score, a fourth wave of therapy has emerged. These “bottom-up” approaches emphasize calming the nervous system through somatic techniques. By addressing the body first, they help transform negative emotions, which then lead to changes in negative thoughts and limiting beliefs.
So when you are investing in individual EFT tapping sessions with a certified EFT Practitioner, know that you are engaging in a fourth wave type of therapy. You are investing in your health and wellbeing via a well researched modality that forms part of Modern Psychology.
Three BIG Waves of Therapy
The clearest and most concise brief history of therapy I’ve found is in the introduction of Professor Peta Stapleton’s 2019 book, The Science Behind Tapping. Rather than attempt to explain it myself, I will share key excerpts from her work that provide an excellent overview of the evolution of psychological therapies through time. The full reference is included at the end of this article.
1ST WAVE THERAPIES
“Individual psychotherapy is considered to have developed in three great waves. In the field’s early days, we have psychoanalysis. You are perhaps familiar with the pioneering giants of this movement, such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung. They emphasized unconscious conflicts, early experiences, and the ‘transference’ of feelings from the patient’s childhood onto the therapist.” Professor Peta Stapleton
Following this foundational first wave of psychoanalytic therapy, exemplified by pioneers like Freud and Jung who emphasized unconscious conflicts and early experiences, we also see the emergence of Gestalt therapy as part of this initial wave.
It’s interesting to note that the key figures behind these early therapies—Carl Jung, Sigmund Freud, and Fritz Perls—often struggled with unhealthy romantic relationships themselves. Despite these personal challenges and their failure to model psychologically healthy partnerships, they were still regarded as leading experts in the field.
THEN VS NOW
Thankfully, the modern era of therapy has brought about established ethical standards for professional practitioners. While licensed psychologists are formally held to these ethical codes, there is also a growing expectation—especially in practices like EFT tapping—that therapists engage deeply in their own personal work and genuinely embody the principles they teach. Those of us who are certified EFT Practitioner and members of professional bodies like EFT International are also held to high codes of ethical conduct in our private practice.
Through my conversations with many colleagues who practice with integrity here in Athens, it is clear that ethical considerations and the commitment to embodying what we teach—living our values authentically rather than just in theory—have become central to our professional community.
This marks a meaningful departure from the old paradigm, where influential therapists like Jung, Freud, and Perls were treated as authorities in mental health despite their personal shortcomings and unethical behavior in their private and romantic lives. Today, ethical accountability and alignment between personal conduct and professional teachings are highly valued and expected.
2ND WAVE THERAPIES
“Researchers and proponents of behavior modification followed. Early leaders, such as Edward Thorndike, Joseph Wolpe, and B. F. Skinner, drew upon learning theory to formulate strategies for changing unwanted behaviors. Using positive and negative reinforcers (called contingencies), they were able to measurably increase desired behaviors and extinguish self-defeating behavioural patterns in their clients.” – Professor Peta Stapleton
The second wave of therapy changed not just the modern therapy world, but also modern education and coaching. Pioneers like Edward Thorndike, Joseph Wolpe, and B.F. Skinner applied principles of learning theory to systematically change unwanted behaviors. Thorndike’s “Law of Effect” demonstrated that behaviors followed by positive consequences are more likely to be repeated, while those followed by negative outcomes are less likely to occur. Skinner expanded on this idea with operant conditioning, highlighting how behavior can be shaped and controlled through the systematic use of reinforcements and punishments, which produce measurable changes in behavior patterns.
3RD WAVE THERAPIES
“Emerging from psychoanalysis and behavioral therapies came two movements that each considered itself a ‘third wave’. Humanistic or experimental psychotherapy challenged core tenets of psychoanalysis and behaviourism, such as the idea that every event is determined by an unbroken chain or prior occurences. It instead stressed the inherent goodness of each individual and the possibility of reaching toward this potential by supporting qualities such as free will, creativity, self-esteem, love, and autonomy. While the humanistic movement is no longer a major force within the field, it has left its mark on most contemporary psychotherapeutic approaches.
Meanwhile, cognitive therapy or cognitive behavioral therapy (since it builds on behavior therapy) emerged as another ‘third wave’, and it has now become the dominant force in psychotherapy. Cognitive therapy targets a client’s thoughts and interpretations of situations, as these can result in negative emotional states. Pioneers in this area include Aaron Beck and Judith Beck, Albert Ellis, and David Burns. A recent development within cognitive therapy has been a shift of emphasis from the symptoms caused by faulty cognitive appraisals (the way you think) to deeper changes in thought processes through witnessing, accepting, and being with the ongoing flow of inner experience. These newer approaches include mindfulness, acceptance, and commitment therapy, dialectical behavior therapy, and blends such as mindfulness-integrated cognitive behavioral therapy.” – Professor Peta Stapleton
Emerging from earlier waves of psychotherapy, cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) has become the dominant approach in Modern Psychology, focusing on changing thoughts to influence emotions and undesirable behaviors. That is why CBT is a “top down” therapy approach. It focuses on changing thoughts (so starting from the ‘top’ – our mind), first. Meanwhile, EFT is a “bottom up” therapy approach. It focused on changing emotions and somatic sensations (so we start with the emotions and the stress sensations of the body) in order to change thoughts and undesirable behaviors.
Interestingly, research comparing CBT with clinical EFT Tapping reveals that EFT sessions can deliver comparable results more quickly and cost-effectively. Studies show that not only do clients often require fewer EFT sessions to achieve their goals, but follow-ups at 6 and 12 months show that the benefits of EFT are more lasting. In contrast, those who who underwent CBT were more likely to experience a relapse.
A clear example is the study by Stapleton et al. (2016), titled “Food for Thought: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Emotional Freedom Techniques and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in the Treatment of Food Cravings.” This research found that EFT produced significant improvements in just 8 weeks (with two hours of EFT per week of therapy), whereas CBT required 6 months to reach similar outcomes. Furthermore, at the one-year follow-up, EFT was shown to be more effective both in reducing food cravings and easing anxiety than CBT.
These findings highlight the capacity of EFT sessions to work faster and sustain long-term improvements more effectively than CBT sessions, making it a promising option within modern therapeutic practices.
The Limits of Talk Therapy: A Paradigm Shift in Healing Trauma
“Historically, psychotherapy has been a very long process. But the need for briefer treatments is being pushed for obvious economic reasons so that the wide range of people who could benefit from psychotherapy can have a chance of receiving it. Insurance plans and subsidized treatment such as Medicare often have limitations on the number of sessions that can be accessed in any one calendar year. This has resulted in an upsurge of research on briefer approaches, which are generally regarded as therapies that require more than 2 but fewer than 10 sessions.” – Professor Peta Stapleton
To understand how fourth wave therapies like EFT Tapping emerged, it’s essential to recognize why leading mental health experts began openly acknowledging the limits of traditional talk therapy in healing psychological trauma. It doesn’t matter whether these deeply painful wounds stem from the most horrific experiences imaginable—such as torture, sexual abuse, or war—or from more common traumatic experiences, like getting your first panic attack while feeling trapped in an airoplane.
What truly matters is the growing consensus among therapists that fully helping a client heal requires more than talk alone. Achieving memory reconsolidation—the process where a traumatic event can be recalled without its overwhelming negative emotional charge—cannot be effectively done without incorporating somatic therapies, such as EFT Tapping, into 1:1 sessions. This understanding is driving a major paradigm shift in the field of Modern Psychology. Especially in the private mental health sector where people pay out of pocket and therefore (understandably) want to see results.
It takes an inspiring level of humility for a world-renowned psychiatrist like Dr. Bessel van der Kolk to stand before hundreds of therapists, as he did in Athens at Deree College in September 2023, and openly admit that we are still in the early stages of understanding what truly works in human psychology. He also acknowledged that body-based therapy methods once seen as “weird,” such as waving a finger in front of someone’s eyes (EMDR) or tapping on accupressure points on your body (EFT Tapping), often prove more effective than simply talking about traumatic experiences using CBT or other traditional talk therapies.
I can only hope that more and more leaders in the mental health sector will model his legacy of honesty, humility, curiosity, openness, and lifelong inquiry into uncovering what works.
Below is a screenshot from the recording of Dr. Bessel van der Kolk speaking to over 500 Greek therapists at Deree College in Athens (September 2025). He shared the story of a woman who had undergone three years of psychotherapy, including EMDR, without success in processing a single event trauma—a severe car accident. When her therapist brought her to Dr. van der Kolk, he decided to try EFT Tapping with her. It worked.
And in this second screenshot, you see a close up of EFT Tapping in action as she recalls the traumatic event while tapping to soothe her nervous system.
EFT works by providing the nervous system with a contrasting experience—reminding the body that she is now safe. We cannot be calm and distressed simultaneously, this process breaks the connection between the stress response (triggered by the memory) and the body, allowing the memory to be experienced from a calm state. This signals the brain that the trauma is over—that “this was then, and this is now”—helping the brain to process and integrate the memory. It severs the link between the stressor (in this case, the memory of the traumatic car accident) and the body’s stress response.
4th Wave Therapies START TAKING OFF WORLDWIDE
“Many of the most successful brief treatment models utilize somatic interventions, including movement, sensory stimulation and integration, or the activaion of areas on the skin, such as acupoints (areas important in acupuncture), that set into motion desired neurological processes. The emergence of brief psychotherapies that include a somatic component are now being considered psychotherapy’s fourth wave.” For instance, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) is being recognized as an empirically validated treatment for trauma, anxiety, and depression. I consider EFT to be the most promising of the fourth-wave psychotherapies that I have investigated.” – Professor Peta Stapleton
At that live training with Dr. Bessel van Der Kolk in Greece two years ago, the only video he showed was a demonstration of EFT Tapping helping a client regulate. When he asked how many of us were already using tapping in trauma work, only a few hands went up. He then said, “If this were America, in a room full of trauma therapists, everyone would raise their hand.”
Since then, I’ve been getting referals for EFT sessions from psychotherapists and psychologists based in Athens who feel they may have reached the limit of how far they can work with a client through talk therapy with a client, so they send them to me to see if EFT can help them. I now also have a significant proportion of my clients who are either psychotherapists and psychologists coming for EFT sessions for themselves, or who have sent me their school age or adult child, or their parent for some EFT sessions.
That’s not to say other fourth wave therapies like Psychodrama, Havening, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, or Tapas Accupresure Technique aren’t effective. They all help process phobias, emotional distress or unresolved trauma, and regulate the nervous system during stressful high pressure periods of life. Plus, different approaches work for different people.
Of course, there has to be a connection between client and therapist, no matter what the approach. It’s also important that the therapist themselves to be grounded, doing their own work and engaging in regular supervision, no matter what their specialization.
But from my personal and professional experience, EFT stands out because of how it combines a wide range of tools and with a gentle, accessible, and safe approach for all ages. It’s a versatile, effective, gentle, and cost-efficient therapy that achieves rapid, long-lasting results beyond leading talk therapies.
References
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk (2015) The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma.
Professor Peta Stapleton (2019) The Science Behind Tapping: A Proven Stress Management Technique for the Mind and Body.
Stapleton, P. et al (2016) “Food for Thought: A Randomized Controlled Trial of Emotional Freedom Techniques and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy in the Treatment of Food Cravings.” Applied Psychological Health & Well-being, 8 (2).
Dr. Judith Herman (2015) Trauma Recovery: The Aftermath of Violence – From Domestic Violence to Political Terror.
Lucy Scholes (2016) “Labyrinths: Emma Jung, Her Marriage to Carl and the Early Years of Psychoanalysis by Catrine Clay: Review”, The Guardian.
Dr. Bessel van der Kolk (2023) “Discover How to Heal Therapy” Live trauma training for therapists in Athens, Deree, brought to us by Trauma2Therapy.
Professor Peta Stapleton, TEDxTalk, “Is Therapy Facing a Revolution?”
ABOUT Eleni Vardaki
Eleni Vardaki’s is a certified and accredited Advanced EFT Practitioner with one of the world’s best trainers in EFT International. She is also a certified Trauma-Focused EFT therapist. Her therapeutic EFT Tapping coaching services for kids and adults are available worldwide through telehealth. She also offers in-person sessions in Athens, Greece. You can book an introductory EFT consultation or via email. Languages spoken: English, Greek, and French.
