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Fears And Phobias

Spiders

High-fiving a spider - a skeptical newbie's first case

Important Note: This article was written prior to 2010 and is now outdated. Please use my newest advancement, Optimal EFT. It is more efficient, more powerful and clearly explained in my free e-book, The Unseen Therapist™.  Best wishes, Gary

Note: This article assumes you have a working knowledge of EFT. Newcomers can still learn from it but are advised to peruse our Free Gold Standard (Official) EFT Tutorial™ for a more complete understanding.

Hi Everyone,

You will enjoy this entertaining (and instructive) article by a former EFT skeptic. As the article unfolds he says, "Now it was time for the acid test. Real life. We walked outside to an old shed and found a web. She batted it down, no problem. Then we found a daddy long legs and she got nice and close and looked at it remarking on how cool it was to see its legs moving. I asked her if she'd be interested in touching it. Maybe. I asked if we needed to tap. She thought for a second then said, No not really. So I picked it up and held it out......"

Hugs, Gary


By Zax Dow


I only recently heard about EFT. I bought the videos, watched some of them and read the manual but haven't started doing it myself. I guess you could say I've been looking for the cracks, the tricks, the real dope that showed something that looks too good to be true to be in fact phony baloney. Sure Gary's got videos but editing is a wonderful thing. We might only be looking at the 10% of the cases that worked, not the 80% success rate he claims. All those people might be his personal friends, or paid actors, who knows?

Well, I was at work a few days ago and a co-worker and I were talking about the TV shows on A & E called Hoarders, Obsessed and Intervention. We were discussing how sad it was to see those people in such pain and agony, ruining their families and their lives and not getting much, if any, relief.

The show claims that the methods used by the therapists are the "only effective means of therapy known" and yet every show ends with sad reports like "this person has relapsed" or "this person is still pulling out their hair." A glowing follow up would be something like, "this person still hasn't cluttered up the one room we helped them clean out although the rest of their house is still packed full of rotting junk." And all of this is after a minimum of three months of therapy, sometimes a year.

So I told my co-worker that I'd seen a guy on the web where in video after video he was knocking out obsessions and phobias and aches and pains, over and over and it was only taking him minutes. She said she had a terrible fear of spiders and wouldn't it be cool if that fear could be gone? I said I knew how he did it and asked if she wanted to try. We were on our lunch break so she said sure.

I showed her the tapping points we would be using and then I asked her to imagine a big spider in front of her and to tell me what her level of fear would be. She said a 10. So then we did the setup and the shortcut sequence one time. I stopped for a level check and she said it was now a 4 out of 10.

I actually thought she was kidding me because no more than 15 seconds ago it was a crawl-out-of-your-skin 10. There also wasn't a big change of expression, she just tapped and after one round calmly reported the lower level. However, I knew she wasn't lying about her level 10 spider fear because I had personally witnessed her running out of a room or refusing to sit down at her desk after she spotted a spider.

We continued and one more round and brought it to a 1. So I asked her to imagine that big spider sitting on her leg, she reported a level 3. We did another shortcut round of tapping to get it to a zero. Then I did "creepy crawly fingers" up her arm to her neck and she said it was no problem.

Really, I asked? Even though I was the one leading the process I was still skeptical about whether or not EFT really worked. I was doing this session to test the waters. So I used one of Gary's lines and asked her not to just "go along" with things, that I really wanted her to look at her feelings and if there was even a trace I wanted to know so we could clean it up.

She said that it positively was working because she won't let her own daughter do "creepy crawly fingers" to her because it freaks her out so much. Next I asked her if she'd had a bad spider experience in the past.

She had, and on telling me about it got a rise in anxiety so we did another shortcut round. Then I asked her to image the worst possible spider encounter she could think of. She imagined giant hairy tarantulas crawling all over her face, which was her bad spider experience magnified by 100, but again reported a zero.

Now it was time for the acid test. Real life. We walked outside to an old shed and found a web. She batted it down, no problem. Then we found a daddy long legs and she got nice and close and looked at it remarking on how cool it was to see its legs moving. I asked her if she'd be interested in touching it. Maybe. I asked if we needed to tap. She thought for a second then said, No not really. So I picked it up and held it out.

She put out a finger and slowly reached forward. You could see her checking inwardly wondering why she wasn't running screaming from the shed. And then - you guessed it - she touched it! She looked up at me with a big smile and sighed. How about that? Then she reached out and touched it again. The third time the spider was expecting her so it raised a leg and they touched.

Imagine that, getting High-Fived by a spider.

I was left in a bit of a daze. It had all happened so fast. 15 minutes ago she was terrified of spiders and now she was practically dancing with them. Did I really do that? How could something as simple as tapping have fixed a life-long phobia? And how come nobody figured this out earlier? EFT may be based on acupuncture points but it works an awful lot faster than any acupuncture I've seen.

What she experienced must have been a fluke. It was too easy, too fast. I needed to do another test. She had a friend at work with a similar spider phobia, and suggested we try EFT on them too. The skeptic in me was still holding on, this was a chance to do a back up test, so I said let's do it.

We did the same process on him and I'll be darned if the same thing didn't happen to him too. He of course had different aspects and different spider experiences but the phobia disappeared just as fast. In 10 minutes they were both out in the shed pointing out the graces and beautiful markings of their local spider family.

Following up with my co-worker the next day found that she still wasn't afraid of spiders, and that she had used EFT on herself to overcome a Shopping Craving. She said she gets things stuck in her mind and then can't let them go until she buys them. She had seen a newspaper ad for some shoes and "had to have those shoes." It was all she could think about for hours so she tried EFT on herself and after a few rounds there was no more craving. She threw away the newspaper ad. I asked her if she had to force herself to throw away the newspaper and she said "No. It was just a So what? I don't need another pair of shoes." I complimented her for applying EFT so fast, and to keep me informed about anything else she uses it on.

So that's it for my introductory experiences in giving EFT sessions. I have to say that EFT doesn't conform to common sense, but the effects are obvious and repeatable so something's working. You can't ignore the data. Believe it or not, back in the 1600s, the idea that blood flowed through your body, didn't make common sense either.

GC COMMENT: EFT has made common sense ever since Einstein told us that everything, including our bodies) is made of energy. What does not make sense is why we have waited so long to use simple energetic approaches for our issues.

Thanks Gary, I think I'll be doing a lot more EFT in the future!

Zax

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