This EFT thing – it all sounds a bit ‘woo woo’ doesn’t it? Is it something to do with tapping?
You’d be forgiven for thinking so, but after two decades of testing and more than 325 published studies, the evidence supporting that clinical EFT works, and how it works, is so strong that it compares well with Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.
Dr Peta Stapleton1, Clinical & Health Psychologist & Associate Professor at Bond University, Queensland has been leading the way with gold standard randomised clinical trials2. Peta turned to EFT when she found that talking therapies were not working for eating disorders.
There are also 29 meta-analyses & systematic reviews. A meta-analysis can take place when there is enough data from a number of independent studies on the same subject, in order to determine overall trends.
These studies have used EEGs (to measure brain activity), tested cortisol levels3 blood pressure changes and used fMRIs to detect brain changes after EFT sessions.
So what are the results?
Excitingly, EFT has been shown to have a significant impact on a range of issues, such as depression, anxiety, PTSD, phobias, pain & food cravings, as shown below:
Research also shows that EFT affects the body’s physiology & biochemistry. For example, one study4 showed that one hour of EFT changed the expression of 72 genes, and after a six month follow up those genes had not reverted back.
What does the tapping part do?
Recent studies5 by Korean scientists have shown, using injected dye, that what we know as the meridian system in the body is actually a primo vascular system. It is a network of tiny thread like vessels & nodes with multiple independent and interconnected paths. The network is separate to the blood & lymphatic circulation systems. These threads are seen to be denser at acupuncture points. By sending electrical signals via this system, with tapping, we reduce activation of the brain’s stress response3 and calm the body’s nervous system.
So it’s just tapping?
No, inevitably given the complexity of how our brains and bodies work, it is more complicated. EFT is deeply somatic – psychologist Bessel Van der Kolk’s research shows that there are physiological changes to the brain and body after trauma, which are encoded & held in the viscera (the soft internal organs of the body).
The good news is that David Feinstein’s6 work has demonstrated the brain’s capacity to reprogramme itself. With EFT we work with clients to access events & memories. We then work with both the body and the brain to release, calm and resolve the emotions that are associated. We work with the client to resolve the unhelpful beliefs that were created as a result of those experiences & help the brain to update its learning.
The results can be powerful – you can read some personal testimonies here.
What’s next?
The American Psychology Association is currently evaluating clinical EFT7, and the supporting science, and wrote in the ‘Review of General Psychology’:
“A literature search identified 50 peer-reviewed papers that report or investigate clinical outcomes following the tapping of acupuncture points to address psychological issues. The 17 randomized controlled trials in this sample were critically evaluated for design quality, leading to the conclusion that they consistently demonstrated strong effect sizes and other positive statistical results that far exceed chance after relatively few treatment sessions.”
If you are curious to find out more about how EFT could help you, contact me here.
Sources:
- https://www.petastapleton.com
- https://www.petastapleton.com/science-of-tapping-2022
- https://s3.amazonaws.com/kajabi-storefronts-production/sites/2147553144/themes/2150257157/downloads/etPfLGSnQsGjtqagpVm0_Cortisol_Replication_Study.pdf
- https://s3.amazonaws.com/kajabi-storefronts-production/sites/2147553144/themes/2150257157/downloads/aZTojIiRVqWH1Kz7pMlB_Maharaj.pdf
- https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.7556/jaoa.2016.002/html
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1550830718303513
- https://eftuniverse.com/american-psychological-association-standards-and-eft/