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Deepak Chopra, MD
"EFT offers great healing benefits."
Emotional Freedom Techniques® Where emotional relief brings physical health
Self help method often works where nothing else will No Drugs Involved ~ High Success Rate
EFT Resources
Note: This article assumes you have a working knowledge of EFT. Newcomers can still learn from it but are advised to get our Free EFT Get Started Package or our Affordable DVDs for a more complete understanding. For more, read our EFT Info and Disclaimer Document
Rapid relief for a smoking addiction
Hi Everyone,
Addictions often take persistence and skill to unravel because there are usually many emotional contributors to deal with. Sometimes, however, we get a pleasant surprise and the addiction goes away cleanly with little or no withdrawal. I've experienced this on occasion and it is a delight to behold. A thank you to Valerie Whiteley for providing us with such an experience regarding a smoking addiction. I intersperse some comments within her message.
Hugs, Gary
Dear Gary
Reading Glenn Turner's "one point wonder" posting has prompted me to write to you for the first time to see what you think about this experience.
I am an Occupational Health Nurse at an alumina refinery in Western Australia and I use EFT frequently in my work setting for both counselling purposes and together with Bowen Therapy, which is a physical therapy
About 6 months ago a refinery worker, who had been a smoker for 35 years, approached me for assistance to give up. He had tried several times over the years with no success. I explained the "conventional" approaches available, followed by a quick explanation of "the tapping method ". Our discussion was very brief as I had a line of people waiting to be seen. He said he would give the "tapping stuff a go". This was Monday morning and I was not able to give him an appointment until Friday.
On Thursday morning he left a message for me to say that he had not had a cigarette since we had last spoken (we had not discussed when he would actually stop). When he came for his appointment he was very excited about having not had a cigarette and could not understand why I had asked him to make sure he brought one with him.
He was unable to reproduce the feeling of a craving, so I started the process of getting him to look at the cigarette and think about smoking it etc. Still no craving. He just kept saying things like "I don't want to smoke it" and "I don't think I'll ever smoke again", which I thought was coming from a fear of associating fully and having a strong craving. I then held the cigarette under his nose and he drew back saying "it makes me feel sick" - I asked him to try a "dry drag", at which point he started dry retching. I was quite taken aback and unsure of where to go from there. I tried the "treating any anxiety" approach with very little success. This gentleman had stretched his usual boundaries a great deal to even consider this method and wasn't going to get into any of "that psychology stuff".
We made another appointment for a week later - he still wasn't smoking and said he'd had no cravings. This time I questioned him in great detail about what he had done in that first week. Eventually we established that after we first spoke, he had sat in front of TV in the evenings and had been tapping the centre of his forehead and repeatedly saying "smoking, smoking, smoking...." (During our initial conversation I had briefly tapped the eyebrow point to demonstrate when I explained EFT.) From this, it appeared that he had already dealt with his addiction by the time he saw me for the first session. Any further attempts to get him to sniff or dry drag on a cigarette produced nausea or dry retching and any attempts to do any tapping met with "it's OK, I won't be smoking any more".
GC COMMENT: The center of the forehead is known as the "Third Eye" and is one of the chakras. It is also in the vicinity of the eyebrow points. It is not one of the specific EFT tapping points but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be used. There are energy points all over the body.
VALERIE CONTINUES: I saw him 3 months later and he was still not smoking, and said that on the few occasions he had wanted a cigarette, he only had to tap between his eyebrows a few times and the urge would go. I saw him again today, 7 months later and he is still a non-smoker. Interestingly enough, he was very stressed about a personal issue, but didn't think the "tapping stuff" would be of any help!
GC COMMENT: Isn't that a hoot? People have been conditioned to think that a given problem has a given solution (e.g. a headache can be helped by aspirin) and thus have a hard time believing that the same procedure can be used for everything. It just doesn't fit "normal" beliefs. To say that tapping could help smoking AND an emotional issue is, to them, like saying that aspirin helps a headache AND your bowling score. Yet that is what we do. EFT's one simple procedure has been known to successfully address the vast majority of human ailments.
