By Dr. Patricia Carrington

Borrowing benefits Is a powerful EFT technique. Do its results hold up over time?

At Gary Craig’s final Flagstaff EFT Conference I watched with interest as psychologist Jack Rowe diligently sought out the participants who had signed up for his study — most of the people in the room actually – to hand them their test forms for the SCL-90- R., a highly respected measure of psychological distress.  His purpose in doing this was to study the effects of Gary's Borrowing Benefits technique on the stress levels of the audience. 

Borrowing Benefits is a process that allows someone with little or no experience in EFT to tap along while someone else is undergoing EFT (e.g. in a session, seminar, group or video) and will often experience profound benefits. This is true even though the issues being tapped on appear to be widely different.

During the study, Jack wanted to find out whether any effects that might emerge would hold up at retesting six months later.

The outcome of his study proved to be so promising that Jack’s article reporting these results was accepted for publication in the peer-reviewed, Counseling and Clinical Psychology Journal.  Here, in brief, is what Jack did and what he found.

The SCL-90-R test was administered to the participating workshop members a total of 5 times: one month before the workshop; again at the beginning of the workshop; at the end of the workshop, and again one month and six months after the workshop.  This test can be readministered numerous times and retain its validity as a measure of current level of stress, one of the reasons it was chosen for this study.

What did Jack find?

The results showed a highly significant (p < .0005) decrease in all measures of psychological distress as assessed by the SCL-90-R, from pre- workshop to post-workshop.  This was a striking finding although of course not surprising to those of us who know EFT.  Equally important, however, were the results of the six months retesting which showed that the decreases in stress observed right after the workshop held up at this later period in the 102 participants who completed the study.  Although slightly attenuated at this time they were still highly significant statistically (p<.0005), an impressive finding.

As in all other research studies, there is of course more to be done by future researchers along these lines.  The group studied here was enthuiastic about EFT – they had paid substantial sums to travel to Flagstaff to study with EFT’s well-known founder, Gary Craig, so we do not yet know how well a less motivated group would do with the Borrowing Benefits technique, especially when studied over time.  Also, there was no official "control group" used (no comparison group of similar people who did not learn Borrowing Benefits). Finally, Gary Craig himself conducted these sessions.  Would another group leader have obtained similar excellent results using this technique?  The answers to these questions are not yet known but they are the type of question we always find in research.  What is clear is that the preliminary results are very promising indeed.

The upshot of this study is that we now have one more peer-reviewed publication which we can confidently cite when presenting EFT to groups unfamiliar with it.  Our congratulations to Jack Rowe!

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Dr. Jack Rowe can be contacted at http://www.JackEasonRowe.com