Emotional Freedom Technique

Practitioners: Kate Birch

Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) is a specific form of psychotherapy that involves a practitioner to guide a subject to tap on specific pressure points on the body, while the subject focuses on a traumatic memory.

The technique involves a three-step process:

Baseline Phase

  • This phase is often considered the preliminary phase because it sets the stage for the actual treatment and what particularly the treatment is meant to alter. The subject identifies and rates their own level of emotional intensity of the particular instance that they are in the therapy to treat. Several breathing exercises help relax the patient once the fear has been identified.

Treatment Phase

  • During the treatment phase of the emotional freedom technique, subjects relax on a chair while they try to focus on their most feared circumstance. This is often a difficult phase because it deals with re-living/re-feeling a particular experience that was traumatic for the person for an prolonged period of time through a call and response period of re-calibration interpretation. While the subject focuses on the experience, the practitioner guides the subject to tap on specific areas of their body to stimulate nerve activity which helps to release the emotional constraints.

Post-Treatment Phase

  • In the post-treatment phase, subjects are then asked to rate the intensity of their emotional intensity again to determine how effective the treatment was. If the level is similar, additional treatments are scheduled to work through the layers.

Alternative Use of Emotional Freedom Technique

  • Though the emotional freedom technique is most frequently used for the release of underlying or traumatic events, it can also be used to stave off food cravings, implement positive goals, reduce pain in certain areas of the body, and otherwise remove painful emotions. For all of these different treatments the procedure is the same, subjects are merely asked to focus on different traits, behaviors, qualities or objects they want to work on.