Top Benefits of EFT Tapping
WHAT’S THE ISSUE: The benefits of tapping range from stress management and self-help to deep therapeutic work such as healing complex trauma at it’s roots. Ultimately, the level of benefit that you get from tapping depends on what you want, how deep you are ready to go, and whether you are willing to pay for a skilled EFT Practitioner’s services at this point in time. Here are the top benefits of EFT Tapping organized into terms of the three main levels of depth at which you can do tapping.
LEVEL 1: Basic EFT Tapping
At the most basic level, if you are feeling upset or angry, and you’ve got the space, you can sit down, and you can tap. You don’t need to say anything. You just tap. You just concentrate on what you’re feeling, and you just tap.
In other words, at this basic level, EFT Tapping is an emotional self-regulation tool. It’s a self-management tool for managing stress and gaining relief from any uncomfortable emotions or physical sensations that are related to stress that you may be experiencing in any given moment.
It’s not the type of EFT that is going to transform your life. For that you need to identify what the underlying issues that are keeping you stuck. You need to be willing to invest in the services of an EFT Practitioner who is skilled in helping people identify and clear the root causes of their issue for that.
But I’ve found that most people don’t want transformational EFT. They just want to learn how to cope with their emotions on their own, in the moment. They want self help tapping. And that’s perfectly OK.
For self help tapping, whenever you are experiencing emotional or physical distress, you can just tap without needing to add words or anything like that. This type of tapping meditation is suitable for managing uncomfortable emotions such as anger, frustration, or anxiety. It can also serve as a Mental Health First Aid tool when something shocking or unexpected has happened.
Even if you don’t speak Greek, you can still click on the image below to see what this self-help application of tapping for children over 10 and adults looks like, in practice.
Children under 10 can just tap on the eyebrow points, under the eye, under the collarbone and under the arm because they can process emotions quicker than the rest of us can. So they don’t necessarily need to work through all the points.
To sum up, if you are someone who just wants a tool that can help you or your child/students self regulate when you are angry or upset or suffering on some level, you can just tune in to that upset or hurt and start tapping until the distress reduces to a level that feels OK for you.
There’s nothing wrong with staying at Level 1 tapping for however long you need. I tapped this way for many years, from 2012 to 2015. It wasn’t until the winter of 2015 that I was ready to learn how to tap with words and start to develop Level 2 tapping skills. And I still practice EFT this way in certain situations. I just tap through the points with no words because it helps me relax and keep my ‘thinking brain’ online.
Try it for yourself, and see if you find this way of tapping for navigating stressful moments in your day in a more grounded, calm way.
LEvel 2: TargetING Specific issues using EFT TApping
Another way of tapping, which I also practice regularly for my continued personal and professional development, is to target specific issues. You can start with an event – nothing traumatic. Just a recent, everyday event that when you think about it, it brings up a stressful emotion. It could be something from the week that’s just gone by, or something that you have to do in the week ahead.
We all have stuff that happens to us and challenges we have to face. Choose one that happened in the past week that still has some emotion attached to it, or something that’s coming up. So when you think about it, what happens to your body? What do you notice? Any thoughts? Do you notice any emotions? Which emotion or sensation bothers you the most? Can you locate where that feeling is in your body?
Keep tapping until you can think of that event and not get ‘triggered’, in the general sense of the word, meaning that your nervous system no longer gets dysregulated when you think about it. If you are doing therapeutic tapping with a skilled EFT Practitioner, you want that emotional intensity to go down to a 0 if you can, so that it’s cleared at it’s root. But if you just want to learn how to manage the emotion, you can learn how to do this process through a one or two day educational introduction to EFT Tapping workshop so that you can practice how to do it and at least get it down, say from an 8, to a 3. And that’s fine too.
This level of targetted tapping is reasonably straight forward. You don’t necessarily need an EFT Practitioner for that. But if you have a level of anxiety, stress, or anger that is causing you problems in your life, that’s a more complex issue. For example, if it’s causing problems in your relationships with family members, school life, college life, health, or career, that’s a deeper issue.
In other words, if your relationships are suffering or you are unable to improve your health via self-help tapping alone, you might want to reconsider what you are currently spending your money on. It might be time to rethinking your priorities and budget for investing in specialist services with a skilled EFT Practitioner. Because I don’t think you can work on that deeper kind of stuff on your own.
If you are not willing to pay for 1:1 of group EFT Tapping sessions right now with an experienced EFT Tapping coach like myself, that’s totally OK. One option would be to find someone who is still completing their EFT Practitioner accreditation and therefore offering free 1:1 online tapping sessions to help them get the expeirence they need to become qualified. You can leave a post asking if any EFT Practitioners in training is available to offer them some free sessions in exchange for using their sessions for the hours they need to qualify.
Either way, if you find somebody who is specialized in clinical EFT Tapping, then it can help you change:
- the way you think about yourself.
- the way you think about things.
- the way you manage stressful events or situations.
- how quickly you can clear blocks to achieving your goal(s).
- your unhealthy habits for coping with stress.
It can be really transformational. That’s when EFT Tapping achieves it’s full potential for people.
In the meantime, you are welcome to help yourself to my growing libary of free EFT Tapping meditations as a starting point.
LEvel 3: Trauma Healing EFT Tapping
The third and most advanced application of EFT Tapping is for resolving single event trauma and even complex trauma. None of us can do this kind of work on our own, for obvious reasons. Even I don’t do this kind of work on my own, and I’m a tapping specialist. I work with colleagues who are fellow EFT Practitioners with the experience and qualifications to go there who I feel safe with.
It’s important when doing trauma processing work with a skilled EFT Tapping specialist that you check whether what you want to work on is within their scope of practice. Some EFT Practitioners are specialized in treating PTSD (Post Traumatic Stress Disorder).
Others, like me, are specialized in helping heal trauma wounds that are within the traumatic stress and posttraumatic stress section of the trauma spectrum. And if someone comes to us wanting to do therapeutic coaching sessions who is presenting with symptoms of PTSD, we present them with a list of relevant professionals who can help them since treating mental illnesses is outside our scope of practice.
Trauma exists on a spectrum. It’s not just that there are ‘people who have trauma’ and ‘people who don’t have trauma’. It’s not that simple. If this is all new to you, you can learn more about the trauma spectrum by reading an article I wrote called “Traumatic Stress, Posttraumatic Stress, and PTDS”.
I’m also happy to share that I will be co-presenting with George Brooks, my EFT supervisor and mentor, on a method I’m certified in applying in my practice that’s called Trauma-Focused EFT at the November 16th EFT International Symposium.
George was one of the mental health specialists who developed Trauma-Focused EFT, which is a protocol that combines elements of clinical EFT Tapping and EMDR to help heal trauma quickly, gently, and effectively.
At the November 16th Symposium, we will be talking about our experiences of introducing this fabulous new Trauma-Focused EFT protocol in schools for both staff and students who are struggling with their mental health, and we will be sharing some recommendations.
Registration is open, more info here.
MEET ELENI
Eleni Vardaki (BA, PGCE, MEd, Advanced EFT Practitioner) is an experienced educator and therapeutic coach who specializes in working with school and college students who want her assistance to deal with their academic-related stress and anxiety.
