Here, I will address the most frequent question that is asked of me by the many people.  They want to know whether EFT can be used for one or another specific medical condition that they themselves suffer from or that someone close to them does.

Very often people write to ask me whether EFT can be helpful for a specific physical condition, often it is a serious one.  Many of the conditions they mention are so rare that, not being a medical doctor, I may not have even heard of them, however, their questions are legitimate ones.  The only trouble is that they are futile.

QUESTION:  You speak about the kinds of problems that EFT can deal with.  What about positive goals that a person might, for instance improvement in some kind of performance?

ANSWER:  Gary Craig points out that as any accomplished athlete will tell you, mental set is critical to performance.  He says this about EFT’s use for athletics, for example:

“The difference between good days and bad days for the athlete is almost always due to emotional causes.  Of course, sickness or injury can take their toll, but to a remarkable extent the athlete always brings the same highly skilled, highly trained body into the field of battle.  The only thing that changes regularly, and it does do so, is the effect that emotions have on the body.

Since in athletics timing is everything, and even the slightest tension in the muscles affects timing, and hitting a baseball or tennis ball or golf ball requires perfect timing, if one is off by just an eighth of an inch it can be the difference between hitting a home run and flying out, or hitting a killer serve or one that hits the net, or making or missing a put in golf. 

This is the reason why sports psychologists are in such great demand.  It is well known that any negative emotion, even the mildest one, and even one that the person is not totally conscious of, or not conscious of at all, can be absolutely critical to a person’s performance.

EFT provides a remarkably effective solution to this problem.  Since its purpose is to neutralize negative emotions and their effects, one of the most common responses to it is that people feel a relaxation of tension in their muscles, in fact, in their whole bodies.  For the athlete this neutralizes the tensing of the muscle groups that are not necessary for the activity at hand, and leaves the rest of their athletic ability and their musculature intact and able to perform at peak levels.  It allows their potential for excellence to flow through their body without being hindered by any resistance in the muscles. The results can often be dramatic.”

EFT Master, Dr. Patricia Carrington

QUESTION:  I’m the kind of person who likes to understand why my problems arose in the first place.  I just can’t tap on problems and have them leave without first having this kind of understanding.  How does EFT address this important need?

ANSWER:  Actually, during EFT a shift in your understanding of your problem will often occur simultaneously with the relief you feel from tapping on that problem.  I have seen people experience remarkable insights after only one or two rounds of tapping.  This doesn’t happen to everybody of course, but not everyone is either prone to having insights or even interested in having them.  But the fact is that many people experience a remarkable shift in perspective during EFT, and talking about that shift, when it happens, can then be extremely valuable. 

There is no contradiction, as I see it, between EFT and conventional therapy which uses talking about problems and understanding them as its basis.  EFT actually augments psychotherapy when it is used with it.  Not only does it speed it up, but it can greatly deepen it, allowing a person to become so at ease with their problems that they can face portions of them which were previously too painful to look at.  As a psychologist who was trained in conventional forms of therapy using talk and understanding, I find that the EFT process assists the kind of understanding that we all seek.   

You will often notice that what happens when you use EFT is that your response to your problem soon changes remarkably.  If you have gone down to a 0 or near 0 on the Intensity Scale, your understanding of your problem will often be shifting right along with the relief you feel, and you will get an “ah-hah” experience that is extremely valuable. 

EFT Master, Dr. Patricia Carrington

QUESTION:  EFT works so rapidly that it sometimes makes me feel almost uneasy.  How can you get really good results that quickly for something that has been around for most of a person’s life?

ANSWER:  One of the best responses I have heard to this question is given by Gary Craig in the manual for his extensive basic training series in EFT.  He writes as follows: 

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QUESTION:  I’m wondering if the good results I’m seeing in my life, since I’ve commenced using EFT, really come from using EFT.  I can think of other explanations for them — maybe the method just distracted me from my problems, or maybe all the years of therapy I had for those problems finally paid off, all at once.  How can I know?

ANSWER:  There’s no way you can know for certain that EFT has brought about any particular change, but this same thing can be said of any effective form of therapy and even of certain medicines.  It’s often hard to trace what really causes a given result.  That’s why controlled research is so important — that is research in which one group of people are exposed to a condition such as EFT and another group to a completely different treatment or to none at all, and the results compared.  By carefully varying the types of treatment that are given in this way, we can begin to see what works and what doesn’t work for specific problems. Some important research has been done and more is now underway demonstrating that EFT does, in fact, have the effect of greatly reducing many fears. These results are statistically significant so there is almost no possibility they could be due to chance alone.

EFT Master, Dr. Patricia Carrington