By Dr. Patricia Carrington

In 2007, I conducted a survey, asking how people do EFT Tapping, which was reported in my newsletter, during the same year. Here are a portion of those results.

What the Tapping Points Survey Has Shown Us

I am frankly amazed at how many of our readers completed the EFT Explorers Center survey, and how they did this with such care, sincerity and intelligence.  Six hundred and five people participated in the survey before it was closed down on the 10th day at the end of the survey period.  More would surely have participated if we had kept it going longer.

This response is not only excellent because of the number of people who took part in the survey but because of the generous way in which they shared their detailed subjective comments about their use of the EFT tapping points.

There were nine questions in the survey.  Each question required the respondent to check one of several possible short answers, and then provide optional comments.  I had thought that our respondents wouldn't add many detailed comments, because that is time consuming, but in fact almost all of the participants commented on one or more questions, providing us with over 2,000 detailed comments, which give us extremely valuable information about EFT.  It is a veritable treasure trove of EFT information.

I went over these comments with the help of enthusiastic family members and friends who sat at our dining table for days, cutting and pasting the comments from the printouts so I could group them into meaningful categories and draw useful conclusions.

Below is important information from some of the quantitative findings.  These give us a broad overview which is extremely useful in itself.  I show them below as pie charts, so that you can see at a glance what happened.

Questions 1 and 2
 

As seen in the above pie charts, the Short Form of EFT is preferred by most people who use this method, but the Long Form as originally taught by Gary Craig (but rarely used by him today) is also used by a substantial minority, at times. The respondents’ individual comments shed light on this finding and I will describe them in detail in the next issue of this newsletter.

Question 3
 

Close to half of the respondents said that at least occasionally they use a favorite tapping spot in place of the whole sequence, I will report in a future issue which spots were chosen for this purpose and why.

Question 4
 

As you can see, the karate chop spot is used much more often than the sore spot as a psychological reversal point. The reasons for this are interesting.  I will report on them in a later issue.

Question 5
 

The Touch and Breathe (TAB) method (that uses no tapping, just a light touch) is used, at least occasionally, by almost half the people who responded.

Question 6
 

While most respondents say they use two fingers to tap with, a number reported using other combinations of fingers, attesting to the remarkable individuality of EFT practice.

Questions 7 and 8
 

As can be seen, most people use one hand only for bilateral tapping spots such as those around the eyes, collarbone points etc. I do this myself as it feels natural to me, but many people reported that they will switch to two hands at the bilateral points and then back again to one hand for the others.

In summary, one of the most striking things that this survey revealed is the extraordinary innovativeness of EFT users. The survey reveals a great deal about these individual responses to EFT and they strongly support the wisdom of the old adage "What is one man's meat is another man's poison.” People feel very strongly about their own variations of EFT and often find that other variations just don't seem to do the same thing for them at all.  Fascinating…

Related Article: EFT Tapping Styles