Part 1:  EFT Telephone Partnerships:  What They Can Do For You

If we were to take a poll of EFT users, we’d probably discover that most people who know and value this method use it mainly when faced with an obvious need, not regularly as part of their daily life.  If you are one of these people you are actually short-changing yourself.  A scheduled use of EFT can multiply the value of this technique many times over.  In this series I will be suggesting a number of easy and fulfilling ways to do this.  Today I want to tell you about using what I call “EFT telephone partnerships”.

The benefits that come from “peer partnering” –– the partnering up of people of equal status as in members of a group –– is well known.  Telephone sponsorship or daily checking with another person in a recovery program can be an essential component of such a program.  Less well known though is the value of telephone partnering for self-help techniques such as EFT.  This can be enormously beneficial.

I have been receiving some interesting reports on EFT telephone partnerships that have now formed in several places in the world.  Using this process, EFT’ers have been holding telephone (or sometimes in-person) appointments with each other on a regular basis to enhance their respective use of EFT.  The partnerships that I have heard from seem delighted with the results of this.

So, I am going to suggest some ways you might pursue such a telephone partnership and make it really successful.

STARTING OUT

It will be important for you to set up your first EFT appointment on an experimental basis so that neither of you is committed to a plan that might not turn out to be right for you.  You should select a prospective partner with whom you think you would feel comfortable sharing EFT sessions and some confidential information.  This person can be a friend, acquaintance, family member, a person you have met at an EFT conference, or someone else.  Just be sure to choose a partner who already knows EFT, or if not, who is willing to arrange to learn it from a responsible source and feel at ease with the process before the two of you start working together.

The plan will be for you and your partner to meet regularly on the telephone (or in person if in the same household or nearby) once or twice a week, every other day, or at whatever interval you agree upon.  Bear in mind that predictability is an essential component of such a plan.  It should not be a hit or miss arrangement.  Instead of saying “Let's meet sometime and do EFT together”, you should set up a definite day and time for your first appointment.  Predictability of your EFT partnership sessions is an important component of the process and will greatly increase your success with it.

Your initial partnership session should be looked upon as an experiment. During it you will be establishing the structure of your sessions together and get a feeling for how each of you approaches EFT, and each of you will be deciding if you find the partnership comfortable.  It is conceivable that you and your partner might find yourselves mismatched this time and this arrangement won’t work out for you.  However this same plan might work out excellently if the two of you were working with different partners.

Each person should bring to the EFT session one or two current issues that they would like to work on using EFT.  These should definitely not reflect chronic conditions such as a long standing depression or an inability to leave one’s house without panic, etc.  It usually takes a great deal of skill and patience to deal with issues such as this and if a person wants help handling them he or she should consult an experienced EFT therapist rather than trying to obtain this help from an EFT partner.  Instead, the problems brought to the partnership session should be immediate in nature, such as a confrontation one has just had or expects to have with another person, an upcoming evaluation, concern over finances etc.

Ideally, each partner will be able to work on an issue of his or her own during the session.  Occasionally, however, one of the partners may need a longer amount of time to handle a particularly difficult problem and the two of you might then agree to meet for an extra session that week in order to give the other partner a chance to work on their problem.

Here are my suggestions for holding an EFT partnering session.   I will refer to the person who is doing the tapping as the "EFT'er”,  and the person who is playing the role of the helper as the "Guide".  The partners usually switch roles about halfway the through the session.

The role of an "EFT'er" is, of course, familiar to most of you.  If it is not it can easily be learned from Gary Craig's or others' training materials.  The role of the Guide, however, needs to be clarified.

The Guide's main task is to act as a prompter for their partner, reminding them of certain things that are easy to forget when one is doing EFT, and to raise certain questions that are sometimes necessary so that the EFT session can move along smoothly and be as effective as possible. If carried out responsibly, the role of Guide is a very valuable one.  Here are my suggestions for the person who acts as Guide:

1.  Have a pad and pencil on hand to take notes during the EFT process.  These notes can be very important.

2.  Start out by helping your partner select a meaningful current issue to work on.  It will be useful if you help them to be VERY SPECIFIC in the way they define that issue.   Although Gary Craig reminds us repeatedly of the importance of being SPECIFIC when doing EFT, I find that this is still one of the most neglected areas in practice .  This, I believe, is because the human mind tends to think in abstract terms –– we naturally generalize in our thinking and this is one of our greatest strengths as a species.  However it is NOT an asset when doing EFT!

Along these lines, you may want to ask focusing questions in order to help your partner be more specific.  Suppose that your partner starts out with an EFT statement that begins, "Even though I'm worried about my finances...", at that point, you could gently interrupt them and ask, "What specific financial situation (an expenditure, debt, requirement etc.) are you particularly worried about TODAY?"  This would help the EFT'er to narrow in on a concrete goal.  By doing this they may greatly increase the effectiveness of their EFT session.

You can suggest to your partner that for the last part of the set-up phrase they use one of the default phrases, "I deeply and complete accept myself" or the Choices Method (see below) default phrase, "I choose to be calm and confident".  This simple solution works for many issues.

If you are familiar with and regularly use my EFT Choices Method, you can be of great help to your partner in creating a positive "Choice" to use in the last part of their set-up phrase, one that can reflect their desired outcome (the way they would ideally LIKE to be or feel in this situation).  For information on the Choices Method see my Choices training session on Gary Craig's “EFT Specialty Series #2”, or consult my Choices Manual. You can find my contact info on my listing in the EFT Master's section on Gary's website.

Then WRITE DOWN your partner's setup phrase so you can refer to it later o if necessary.

 

3.  Remind your partner to take an initial intensity rating, so that their progress can be charted.  If they are uncomfortable with numerical ratings (some people find these difficult) then ask them to gauge their degree of distress in another manner.  You can be quite imaginative in suggesting a more compatible way to judge this.

WRITE DOWN your partner's initial intensity rating.

 

4.    As your partner taps on their issue you will be acting as a prompter in case they forget their own EFT phrases during tapping (this happens more often the than you would think) or forget which EFT spot comes next in the sequence.  It can be helpful if you gently remind them of these things. 

At the end of each round of tapping remind your partner to retake their intensity rating.  Record what it is as part of the running record.

5.  When your partner has decided they are “finished” with this session, if their Intensity Rating has not yet come down to a “2” (preferably to a “1” or a “0”) you would do well to encourage them to get the very most out of their EFT session by continuing to do EFT until their intensity rating has come way, way down.  This advice to "go for the jackpot!” as I call it, can be extremely valuable because the majority of people will tend to quit as soon as they "feel better".  If their intensity rating has come down to say, a “4” or a “5” when it started at a “9” or “10”, they may think they have achieved a great result because the issue now seems manageable.  However, the truth is that if they had only kept going with EFT at this point, the issue could have been completely cleared and they would feel fantastic rather than just “better”.  I suggest you note the way Gary Craig and other highly experienced EFT practitioners will insist that the person they are working with keep on doing EFT until they get the best possible result from the session.  In my own clinical practice, I always insist that the person I'm working with try to get the full value of an EFT session by keeping on tapping until their intensity rating is way, way down.  This has never failed to get a much better result than we would have gotten otherwise.

Aside from the above contributions that you, acting in the role of Guide, can make to your partner, I would encourage you to study and re-study the many EFT training tapes available to acquire ever more skill in this process.  Learning how to help others with EFT is a never ending experience that can result in great satisfaction.

I hope that many of you will try partnering with another EFT user to practice EFT together on a regular basis, and if you do so perhaps you can let me know your experience with this so that I can report any refinements you may have thought of, or any problems encountered and met, to this newsletter.

Patrician Carrington, PhD

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Part 2: Emotional Cleansing with EFT

Every one of us must clean up our environment to some extent each day in order to operate effectively.  Whether it is brushing our teeth, washing the dishes or taking our car to the car wash, we spend considerable time each day making sure that debris does not accumulate in our possessions or our bodies to the point where it is injurious to our health or detrimental to our functioning.  This is taken for granted.

When it comes to cleaning out emotional debris that is hampering us and blocking optimal functioning, however, most of us are pretty neglectful.  While we won’t allow a heavy build-up of plaque on our teeth, we think nothing of allowing a heavy buildup of resentments, worries, sadness and other undesirable emotions to accumulate in our systems, with all the damage they are capable of creating.

In this second part of my series for this newsletter on the use of EFT in daily life, I can think of no more relevant topic than how to use EFT as an emotional cleansing ritual.  I find that the best way to ensure that you use it in this fashion is to couple it with one or more of the physical cleansing rituals that you regularly undertake.  Linking it to these already established rituals will make you much less apt to forget the important step of using EFT on a regular basis to allow your life to flow smoothly.

Here are some ways that have been reported to me by readers of my own newsletter who are successfully linking EFT with their regular cleansing rituals.

Using EFT In The Shower

I am receiving reports from people who enthusiastically use EFT while taking their morning shower.  Typically they select a topic to tap on that addresses an unresolved issue from the day before, or an anticipated experience of the coming day.  Their EFT set-up phrase are therefore directed to the immediate past or the immediate future.  Occasionally someone will work on an ongoing issue as they shower.

The effect of doing EFT while showering is quite different from that of ordinary tapping.  You can position your head for example so that the water splashes over your face and shoulders in a way that actually blends with the tapping of the EFT spots.  The effect is that of a double cleansing!  Both your inner and outer beings are washed at the same time.  The symbolism of this is compelling, and I suggest you try it when you next shower and see if it is for you. Anticipatory emotional cleansing with EFT each morning can make for a surprisingly balanced and satisfying day ahead.

EFT While Brushing Your Teeth

While physical tapping is possible under the shower, you may need to just imagine tapping on the various EFT spots and think, rather than say out loud, your phrases when you are combining EFT with other cleansing rituals such as tooth brushing.  You may even decide not to imagine the tapping itself but just think the phrases to yourself in coordination with the brushing – this itself can be very beneficial.  Using “mental EFT” when brushing your teeth can be very satisfying, and if you are using an electric toothbrush, mental thinking your EFT phrase before you move on to the next spot can work nicely.  Beware!  You will probably brush your teeth longer and more thoroughly if you combine this activity with EFT, which is not at all a bad idea for your dental health!  This combination of physical and emotional cleansing can give you an amazingly refreshed feeling afterwards.  It is a natural and easy way of incorporating EFT into a daily routine that you know you will DO because you always have.

There may be a number of other cleansing rituals that you can effectively combine with EFT.  Several people have told me that they do EFT mentally while washing the dishes and that this has an excellent effect upon them.  It is possible for them to repeat the words out loud if they are alone, and they report a satisfying sense of completion when combining EFT with the cleaning of the dishes, and as an added bonus, it makes the dish washing easier and pleasanter for them

What you are doing when you link EFT to a cleansing activity that is already a part of your everyday life is to establish a natural link between external physical cleansing and internal emotional cleansing.  Once established, like any other habit, this can work strongly to your advantage.  I suggest you explore the possibility of using EFT in this manner.  You may be pleasantly surprised, as I was, at how this can enrich your life and leave you feeling lighter and refreshed in spirit.

Patricia Carrington, PhD

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Part 3: How to Use the Computer to Enhance Your EFT Practice

Directly or indirectly computers play a major role in our lives today and this is probably only the tip of the iceberg compared to what we are likely to see in the future.  Futurists predict that the day will come when nanotechnology – the use of tiny computer chips small enough to fit into a single cell -- will revolutionize medicine and eventually allow us to be “computer assisted” in our vital biologic functions.  That day is clearly in the future, but the fact is that today most of us spend an increasing number of hours in front of a computer each day.  How can we use this trend toward computerization of our environment to improve our use of EFT?

I will tell you some of the ways that my clients and myself are doing just this and you can easily make use of our ideas if you wish.

A tactic that we are finding extremely useful is to create a “My EFT” folder on our Desktop where we can store our own personal “EFT documents” on a regular basis.  I advise my clients to create these documents almost daily, as I do myself, and in them put EFT statements that they may devise during the day to address different issues that they would like to tap on but don’t have the time for “RIGHT NOW”.  In these documents my clients and I write notes on our Intensity Levels (estimated on a scale from “0” to “10”) before and after doing EFT, and any comments we may have on a particular issue.  These documents make wonderful records for our review later, and people working with EFT therapists find it extremely valuable to show to those they work with.

Here are the steps to follow if you want to try this process:

Step 1.  Create your own personal EFT document on the spot when something bothers you and store it in a “My EFT” folder on your Desktop.  This means that if you are working at your computer, or browsing, or playing a computer game, and something bothers you –– say it’s an upcoming appointment, or a task you don't think you can fulfill easily, or a phone call that has interrupted you and causes particular concern, –– you think of an EFT statement to deal with it, right on the spot.

 

Step 2.   Open a new document (in Microsoft Word or an equivalent word processor) and write in this document the statement (s) you just created to deal with your issue.

Step 3.  Name this document by date.  For example: “EFT – 4-17-20__”.

Step 4.  Save this EFT document in your “My EFT” Folder on the Desktop.

Step 5.  Later, when you have some spare time, OPEN this folder and document and use EFT to clear your issue.  Do this by tapping down your Intensity Level on the issue until your rating is as close to being a “1” or “0” as you can get, and indicate your starting and end point Intensity Ratings.

Step 5.  Add any relevant comments that come to you during or after tapping, such as, for example, “It feels entirely different to me now – actually who cares whether X doesn’t approve of this?” or “I feel much easier now, but I’d better come back to this statement later –– there’s more there to tap on.”

Step 6.  Review your documents in your “My EFT” folder periodically. 

I find that just the sight of the EFT folder on my Desktop acts as a reminder to me that EFT is always there to help me and others have reported a similar response.  To make this reminder even more effective, my brother Robert Carrington has created an icon of the EFT dove-and-world logo from Gary Craig’s site (with Gary’s permission), and now I notice that icon every time I sit down at the computer!  Its presence serves as a constant reminder to me to open my “My EFT” folder and work on any issue that I may have already stored in there, or add new ones as needed.   When I have free moments during the day I will often work on an issue that otherwise would have gone “untapped-on” and therefore have remained uncleared.

So that you too can use this EFT Logo-Icon if you would like to, to call attention to the “My EFT” folder on your desktop, I have arranged it so that you can now download my Logo-Icon free of charge from my website.  It is downloadable as part of a small computer program that creates the icon and folder for you right where you want it (see downloading instructions at end of this article). This can be a very pleasant and effective way of reminding yourself to DO EFT!

 

Another way of using the computer to support your EFT practice is available through a computer program I recently launched which allows you to enter your own EFT statements (ones that address your own personal issues) and then be led through an EFT sequence by animated screen prompts that remind you of the tapping sequence and display your own words in front of you on your monitor.  This unusual software has an interesting history indeed.

It started when, to address the problem of emotional overeating, which is one of the major stumbling blocks to effective dieting, Carol Look, Sandra Radomski and myself wrote an e-Book showing how to use EFT for this difficulty.  Following the completion of the book, I then began working with computer programmers to create a full-fledged computer program to help with this process.  The feedback from users of this program was informative.

I discovered that although the program worked excellently for those with emotional overeating problems, many users also wanted to create their own EFT statements for issues that had nothing to do with weight loss.  They wanted the computer to lead them through those too.  Accordingly, we introduced a custom feature into the program that allowed them to do exactly this, and the outcome was a surprise because we hadn’t anticipated the impact that the computer can have on EFT practice.

I began receiving reports from many users saying that they felt far less “alone” while doing EFT when they watched the screen figure on their monitor, and when they were helped to remember their Reminder Phrases by the screen prompts.  These factors seemed to make them more likely to do EFT on a regular basis, a response which is similar to the effect of the “EFT Partnerships” that can be so useful to a person for his or her regular practice of EFT (see discussion of this topic in Part 1 of this Series). 

Another benefit of using a computerized approach to EFT was that users could rate their emotional intensity on any issue by use of the computer.  Watching the colors change on the Intensity Gauge as their tension over a particular issue lessened with EFT then served as a reward for the user, making the intensity rating process easier, and keeping them going until their ratings really did come down to a “1” or a “0”.   Many people seemed to react to this process as if they were playing a computer game where the goal was to beat their own previous score! Computerized EFT has turned out to be such a help for many people in fact that we plan to address many other issues with the use of similar EFT software in the near future. 

To sum up the current state of EFT with respect to the computers in our lives, it seems that since these machines are here to stay, the obvious thing for people interested in using EFT to their best advantage is to partner with them.  If they are misused, computers could actually cut down on your use of EFT by distracting you from tapping as you became absorbed in them to the exclusion of anything else.  However, used in a constructive manner, all evidence suggests that they can help you blend EFT into your life in such a way that you will be tapping more often and with increased effect than you ever have before.

Patricia Carrington, PhD

PS: To download the EFT logo described in the above article visit Pat’s website.  This can be found on her listing as an EFT Master on our website

 

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Part 4: How to Use EFT While You Wait

One of the most frequent comments I hear from those who value EFT is, “EFT is wonderful and I should do it more often, but I don’t have the time."

Aside from the fact that “not having time” to do something that is beneficial for us can be a way of fooling ourselves and actually reflect an inner resistance to doing that thing –– a reluctance often unknown even by ourselves –– there is the reality that our lives today are often very crowded, and the fact that people tend to think of EFT as a time-consuming occupation which they have to have sufficient leisure to pursue.

This is not necessarily the case, however.  This series of articles is dedicated to helping you discover the many unrecognized opportunities there may be during an ordinary day to use EFT.  Today I want to talk about a concept you may not have thought about before but which can be remarkably helpful.  It is the often unnoticed fact that enforced “waiting time" actually takes up a substantial amount of our time each day and because of this offers us unrecognized opportunities for doing EFT.

Waiting time is special because it is unscheduled time and not assigned to any specific task because we can’t know beforehand when it will occur or how long it will last.  While some people try to fill this unscheduled time by multi-tasking, there are a substantial number of times when this is not easy to do or may even be impossible.  So here are some ways you can use your inevitable periods of waiting time to the advantage of your EFT practice.

While Waiting On the Phone

In the familiar experience of making phone calls to large organizations, you are often asked to “wait for the next available representative” and of course this wait can extend indefinitely.  You might hear music being played to you during an extended pause, or hear commercials for the company or dead silence interrupted by repetitive taped message telling you to be patient and that someone will be with you soon –– but whatever fills this space it is pretty much dead time for you unless you do something constructive.  Why not use it to advance your practice of EFT?

As you wait on the telephone for the system to accommodate you , it can be extremely helpful  to use an EFT statement such as, "Even though I’m annoyed (angry, furious, discouraged etc.) at this waiting, I deeply and completely accept myself “ or, using the EFT Choices Method where you insert a positive intention at the end of your EFT statement, you might say something like, "Even though I’m annoyed (etc.) at this wait, I choose to see it as a welcome pause in a rushed day."  By introducing this positive reframe into EFT you are giving yourself an opportunity to bring a peaceful note into your day that would not have been there otherwise.

Or you can do something quite different.  You can plan ahead of time to tap when you have time,on a current problem using an EFT statement that you have previously created for this purpose.  In Part 3 of this series I suggested you use a “My EFT” folder on your  Desktop to store EFT statements in that you want to work on.  These statements are created on the spot at the time when something is troubling you but you don’t have time to deal with it right then with EFT, and they make a valuable collection of tapping subjects for your inevitable waiting times during the day.  As you sit at the computer holding the phone, just open the My EFT folder and start tapping on a statement you see there, or if you are going out , just copy down one or two of your EFT statements from the folder onto 3” by 5” index cards, and take these cards with you for use during your waiting-times during the day.

While Waiting for Traffic

Being stuck in traffic, or waiting at an exceptionally long traffic light, can be a great opportunity for EFT.  Suppose the traffic is bumper-to-bumper on the highway when you’re coming home from a hard day's work, you can tap on EFT statements such as, “Even though I’m so frustrated (angry, etc.) that this is happening, I deeply and complete accept myself”, or “Even though I'm so frustrated (angry, etc.) that this is happening, I choose to use this as a great opportunity to do EFT”.   Or you might pull out your EFT Reminder Card and tap on a current issue in your life and make considerable progress on it before the traffic pattern changes.

While Waiting in General

There are many moments of the day when enforced waiting time presents us with opportunities to use EFT.  In the next article in this series I will suggest some ways that you can use EFT even when in public places and not be conspicuous, something that opens up even more opportunities to use waiting time for EFT. For example, you can do EFT while waiting in a doctor’s office, for a bus or subway, in an airport terminal or even while waiting for an elevator to reach your floor in a high building.  All these situations present opportunities to use EFT for the issue at hand (your frustration or worry about the delay etc.) or for a current problem that you have been wanting to address with EFT.

When you start using this method you will discover a surprising of amount of waiting time during your day when EFT can be used to your advantage.  This can benefit you not only in terms of handling your immediate issues, but in general.  Just as a groove in any material is deepened through repeated use, when you make it a habit of to use EFT at waiting times during the day you will be much more apt to remember to use it at times when you may need it urgently.  Repeated use of EFT can also lower your general tension level during the day so that you experience your days as lighter, easier, and more peaceful.

Patricia Carrington, PhD

 

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Part 5: How To Use EFT In Public Without Attracting Attention

When I suggest that people use EFT extensively in their daily lives, they will often ask me how that can be done because EFT is an out of the ordinary activity that can draw considerable attention to us when we are doing it –– and we spend much of our lives in the presence of other people.

I usually explain that there are many ways we can use EFT in public without being conspicuous.  However, the question often comes up of whether we need to be concerned about the impact of doing EFT in public at all.  Is it important what other people think about us when we tap?

I used to think it was not important because it had never bothered me personally, so I encouraged my clients to tap on their own sensitivity to what others might think if they used EFT in public –– particularly if they found EFT to be beneficial for them.  Recently however something occurred that has made me reconsider the advisability of tapping in public without taking reasonable precautions to ensure that you are not too conspicuous.  Here is the experience that made me rethink this matter:

I was working with a client, “Ed”, who had developed a severe phobia of driving a car and had asked him to take his cell phone with him in his car so that we could talk as he was applying EFT to this problem.  This plan was working well on a particular day as Ed pulled to the side of the road after having driven several blocks successfully.  He had stopped at my request because he needed to assess his stress level and if necessary tap it down right then and there until his intensity was near zero. 

When he checked his distress level on a 0 to 10 point scale, we discovered that it had become elevated again after his brief driving sojourn, up to a 5 after having come down to a 2 when he had started driving, so I suggested he tap using the EFT statement we had created, “Even though I’m scared of driving in traffic, I choose to be as comfortable as I was when driving through Elmwood in the autumn.” Ed had chosen his memory of Elmwood in the autumn as representing a time when he had thoroughly enjoyed driving in the past before his phobia set in (I often use personal resource states in this manner to help a client formulate effective Choices for the end of their EFT statement).

As he began tapping to bring his intensity level down further, even though I was far away at the other end of the phone I heard a siren that I easily identified as a police car and heard Ed say, “Officer, I'm fine! I am just doing a stress reduction technique that my psychologist has told me to do.” and there followed discussion in the background  When Ed resumed speaking with me he explained that a person in the house he was parked in front of had apparently looked out of the window, seen him tapping and called the police to report that a person in a car was engaging in odd behavior by repeatedly hitting his head. The police officer had come to see whether Ed needed assistance and was reassured only when he discovered that Ed’s behavior was for a legitimate reason.  Ed subsequently decided to move the car to a less conspicuous location before continuing EFT, and the incident was over.

However, this experience has made me hesitate to recommend that people tap nonchalantly in surroundings where strangers might misinterpret what they are doing.  While I myself have tapped publicly during plane flights and even used EFT phrases out loud then, and as far as I know no one paid any attention whatsoever to what I was doing, and I have seen a number of other EFT’ers do this, I now realize that under certain circumstances tapping can be misinterpreted.  I therefore advise you to do one of the following things when tapping in public:

            1.  Use Dr.John Diepold’s “Touch and Breathe” method instead of regular staccato tapping.  This is simple to do and gives the impression of being much less deliberate and less "out of control" than tapping.  Here is how it works:

            Touch each tapping spot (but do not tap at all).  Hold your fingers long enough at each spot to have time to repeat your EFT phrase, then take a deep easy breath –– no forcing, just a comfortable breath ––and move on to the next spot.  This technique can be very soothing and give a very natural appearance.

2.      Tap only on the Karate Chop Spot the whole time while saying (or thinking) your EFT statement as though you were moving from spot to spot.  If you have a good visual imagination, picture your EFT sequence (the various spots) as you keep repeating the phrases to yourself, all the while tapping just on the Karate Chop Spot.  This action is inconspicuous and can be done under almost any circumstances.  If you happen to be sitting at a table or behind a desk at a meeting, you can keep your hands underneath the table while you tap on that spot, even while others are talking and they will never notice.

3.      Excuse yourself from the situation at hand using any reasonable excuse and return only after you have tapped down some or all of the intensity surrounding the situation.  You can make any excuse you want to for leaving momentarily –– you need to make an urgent phone call, or put money in a parking meter, or go to the restroom, etc.  The point is to GET AWAY from the situation at hand and give yourself time to tap down your emotional intensity about it.  When you return you will handle it entirely differently, and are likely to achieve a much more effective outcome.

4.      Only imagine tapping on each spot and hear your voice in your mind as you repeat your EFT statements.  This option, “mental EFT”, can be extremely satisfactory if you are one of those who do not have difficulty imagining. Not all people can do this (although many more can than realize it). However some people I have known find it even more effective than physical tapping.  I myself find it to be just as effective to do EFT mentally in this manner as to do the physical tapping in most instances.  Interestingly, when there is a real urgency to the situation I find it more effective to do the physical tapping, and when I occasionally use EFT to help myself get to sleep, I much prefer mental EFT because the physical act of tapping tends to wake me up again while with mental EFT I will usually drift off during the first or second round. 

          Finding out whether mental EFT is an option for you can only be done by experimenting. I suggest you first try it when you are alone and under no particular pressure.  If you find it effective this can be an excellent way to use EFT when in a public place.

In short, there are many ways to use EFT comfortably in public, and being able to do so can greatly increase the usefulness of EFT in your life.

Patricia Carrington, PhD

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Part 6: How Do You Know When You Need EFT?

This series has been about using EFT in your daily life. I have made a number of suggestions about ways you can build it comfortably into your daily schedule.  But this still leaves a question unanswered.  This is how to know when it is particularly important to DO EFT.

This is a tricky question because during crises or when making urgent decisions or at any other moment of heightened stress, we are the most apt to forget to do EFT!  Because this series addresses the use of EFT in daily life, I want to propose a preventive measure which I consider an excellent way to prepare yourself for the day ahead and whatever it may bring.

I strongly recommend that for this purpose you do a “Stress Check” regularly each morning, reasonably soon after waking up.  I like to do it when brushing my teeth because that's something I'm sure to do each morning.  However, it can be linked to eating breakfast, getting into your car or public transportation to go to work (on weekdays) or to anything else that you do on a regular basis early in the morning.

A Stress Check is easy to do and effectively calls your attention to problems that are currently bothering you, ones which can benefit from EFT.  The Stress Check consists of asking yourself this question and using EFT right on the spot to clear any issues that turn up.  The question is:

“What is uppermost in my mind right now that is causing me at least some tension/stress?  HOW distressed do I feel about it (on a 0 to 10 point scale)?”

The issues that you identify in answering thIs question may be almost anything ––something that is going wrong with your plans, physical distress, a deadline which must be met, or whatever else may cause tension.  The point is to stop when you identify this issue and create an EFT statement to deal with it immediately.  Here are some examples of this in action:

Suppose some important plans of yours have gone awry and your situation isn't going to pan out the way you expected it to.  A useful EFT statement for this might be:

“Even though my plans are upset, I choose to be calm and confident and aware of the things that are going right in my life.”

Or if you are annoyed at another person or situation, you might use:

“Even though this problem (or person) is bothering me, I choose to know exactly how to handle (him/her/it).”

Or if you are not feeling up to par you might use:,

“Even though I have this pain (physical distress etc.) I choose to know that it will pass (or –– I choose to obtain treatment from a health professional that will be rapid and successful)."

Such statements as the above put a positive Choice at the end of the EFT statement (this is the EFT Choices Method), however you can easily use the EFT default statement at the end of the statement instead (e.g. “I deeply and completely accept myself”) or the Choices Method default statement, “I choose to be clam and confident”. 

The point of your Stress Check is to a bring your stress level down to as close to a 0 or 1 as you can by using EFT, and then ask yourself “What else is bothering me somewhat (or a lot) today?”?

This second question usually brings up other issues to tap on.  If you don’t have time to tap right away I suggest you write your EFT statement on a 3” by 5” index card and put it into your pocket or purse to use later in the day.  Or, you may want to use the helpful method of setting up a “My EFT” folder on your computer’s desktop in which you store EFT statements you want to tap on at a later time (see Part  3 of this series for instructions on creating such a desktop folder).

You can also use an all-purpose EFT phrase at the time you do your Stress Check.  This can be useful when you don’t tune into anything that is particularly disturbing to you, because it can prepare you to cope particularly well during the day ahead.  Here are two all-purpose preparatory statements that I especially like:

"Even though I don't know what today will bring, I choose to be calm and confident and handle whatever happens very effectively.”

Or,

"Even though I don't know what today will bring, I choose to use EFT successfully to handle whatever comes up.”

Your Stress Check does not need to be done only at the beginning of your day.  It is very helpful to conduct a Stress Check just before you go to bed at night to clear lingering issues from the day, and doing a Stress Check one or more times during the day can be an excellent way to bring down your stress build-up during a typical day.  When you do this you will tend to become more effective in all aspects of your life.

Actually, if there were one single thing that I would advise you to do to ensure that you use EFT with maximum benefit on a daily basis, I would recommend that you institute a Stress Check.  This simple activity can be extremely effective in calling your attention to your need for EFT in a particular instance, and will probably help you use EFT in a much more effective manner than you have done before.

Patricia Carrington, PhD