Tag: <span>eft tapping</span>

EFT Therapy • • • • • • • • • • • • By Puja 0 Comments

EFT as an assistive approach for MHPs

How can EFT help you in your practise if you are a mental health professional?EFT can be used as an individual as well as an assistive tool to help your clients with emotional and psychosomatic issues.

Here are just a few ways in which EFT can help your clients. I’m highlighting the most common benefits of using EFT with your clients and introducing it into your therapy practise.

1. Clients often get dysregulated while talking about their issues or processing their issues in the sessions. EFT helps in regulating your client’s nervous system during a therapy session. Tapping helps by sending deactivating signals to the limbic brain and that in turn calms the mind and body. Imagine how much more your clients will be able to process, if they were able to get back into a regulated state easily and gently during a session! It also helps them self-regulate in between sessions.

2. Handling difficult persistent negative feelings is easier with EFT. You can creatively combine any modality that you use with EFT to help your clients cope with and manage their difficult feelings, in the session as well as on their own in between sessions.

3. EFT can help in unearthing and transforming limiting beliefs. Limiting beliefs keep clients stuck in negative patterns and EFT utulizes a unique method to change these unhelpful beliefs – the unhelpful conclusions the clients have arrived at about themselves, the world and others.

4. Anxiety and stress are two of the most common presenting issues that clients bring to the table in our profession. EFT helps in easing the symptoms of GAD ( Generalized Anxiety Disorder). Clients can also learn the basics of EFT and apply it on themselves while they’re experiencing symptoms of anxiety such as heaviness in chest, increased heart rate, sweating etc. EFT is very effective for social anxiety as well.

5. Most clients have had some form of trauma in their lives. A specific technique in EFT is used for disarming troubling, stressful and traumatic memories and reducing the emotional charge associated with them. This is turn helps in improving their quality of life. There are many emotional and physical consequences of trauma, and working on adverse childhood experiences with EFT has proven to be very beneficial.

6. Goal setting & improving performance is another area where EFT can help either by itself or along with CBT and REBT.

7. Stress management is another area where EFT is very effective. I’ve conducted a lot of stress management classes, and tapping helps in reducing stress rather quickly. Research in EFT shows that tapping can reduce cortisol by approx 43% in a one hour tapping session.

8. EFT can complement the top-down approaches that most mental health professionals practise. EFT is a bottom-up approach which also incorporates cognitive shift and exposure. Since the body component is involved, EFT can help in decreasing body based anxiety and processing stored trauma responses in the body.

9. Talk therapies can sometimes be very overwhelming. I remember being very overwhelmed after a few of my talk therapy sessions. It felt like opening a tap and not closing it before the session ended. EFT can help in closing the tap by the end of each session. It has containment techniques than can effectively lessen the client’s overwhelm by the end of the session.

10. EFT can also help in positively resourcing a client at the start of the session.

EFT is a trauma informed approach and with increasing research backing its effectiveness, it’s time more MHPs considered learning and applying EFT. Since MHPs already have a solid background in psychology, in my opinion, they can master EFT skills easily.

EFT • • • By Puja 0 Comments

There’s no deadline for recovery

“There is no deadline for recovery” were my client’s exact words in a session. She described how safe she felt during our psychotherapy & EFT sessions. She was able to be open up about her feelings and patterns, and she didn’t feel pushed to change. She felt she wasn’t given a deadline to heal!

Unfortunately a lot of people never experience safe connections with their caregivers while growing up. Because of early childhood trauma and neglect they develop a faulty neuroception wherein their ability to detect safety and danger get mixed up. As a result of this, they may feel safe in risky situations and threatened in totally safe situations.

To develop the ability to detect safety in safe situations and caution in threatening situations requires a therapeutic alliance where they can experience safety and acceptance without the fear of being told off or abandoned by their therapist. If a client starts sensing that their therapist will disown them if they don’t meet the preset goals, they will lose that opportunity to develop a healthy neuroception.

It’s only through a safe therapeutic alliance that the damaging effects of past unsafe relationships can be repaired and clients can begin to heal, grow and seek healthy connections in their lives.

Being trauma informed is not a one time pill that can be taken by attending a single or multiple courses. It requires reflection on our part as therapists after every single session to see whether the client felt safe in the session or not.

For example, do they feel safe enough to bring up their issues with you as a therapist? Do they feel they’re being heard in the sessions?

And most importantly, how do you handle critical feedback from your clients?

Rupture is a part of any relationship and repair is only possible if the rupture is acknowledged.

I made so many mistakes as a rookie therapist when I started out, but I made it a point to keep learning from those mistakes and honing my skills. Becoming a trauma informed practitioner is a life long process and your client is your best teacher.

EFT • • By Puja 0 Comments

Why is Mentoring important in EFT?

Why is supervision/ mentoring important in EFT?

If you are a psychology student, you already know about the importance of supervision. You know that a supervisor/mentor is needed to provide guidance and support, discuss difficult cases, encourage self-reflection, help you understand scope of practise & ethical code of conduct, provide constructive feedback to help you become better in your chosen area of specialisation, help you identify your areas of strength and limitations and a lot more.

EFT is the same. Once you finish your EFT course ( workshop) and desire to become a professional EFT practitioner, you’ll need guidance from experienced mentors for the same reasons as listed above.

The certification process is also like a mini internship where you get to practise EFT with friends/family/volunteers before you start working with clients professionally. In this process, you’ll need encouragement, support and constructive feedback. Students who apply for certification process and mentoring, have higher chances of delivering effective EFT sessions which in turn increases the success rate of EFT than those who don’t go for certification.

EFT may look very simple but like Ann Adams says, EFT is simple, people are complex.

Learning to customise EFT application according to the client’s issues is where the skill comes in. How to use the various techniques in EFT and when to use them is an important part of this skill set. EFT is a client-centric process.
It’s not just tapping on some points and saying some words randomly. That would be akin to applying CBT by just listening to 10 hours of lecture or reading a book.

Acquiring knowledge is different from having skills and expertise. Attending a lecture on how to practise EFT is different from sitting down with a client and applying EFT.

What you need in EFT, just like any other modality, is practise and guidance. Mentoring is the best way to achieve that.

All of us, practitioners and trainers, are required to have 6 hours of minimum mentoring hours every year along with 30 hours of CPD to maintain our membership with EFT International. This, in my opinion, is a very good practise to stay current with EFT and keep refining our skills.
Contact me to know more.