Making a Quantum Leap in Emotional Healing

By Betty Moore-Hafter

I have always been one of those people who doesn't have emotions - emotions have me! My personal emotional climate is often volatile, with all too many storms and persistent cloudy days if something is bothering me. I consider sensitivity and emotional richness to be a gift, but I have often wished I had more choice with regard to my intense feelings.

Two years ago, I heard about the Emotional Freedom Technique - E.F.T. I was told that this powerful energy technique could relieve negative emotions in minutes through a system of tapping on various meridian points on the body while focusing on the problem and verbalizing. I was skeptical. In my belief system, negative emotions are multifaceted and complex. Present situations often trigger wounds deeply rooted in childhood or even in past lives. How could a quick and simple tapping process make any difference? I don't trust quick fixes. But I was getting intrigued.

I learned that E.F.T. is one of a number of energy or meridian therapies that have grown out of the discoveries of Dr. Roger Callahan. In 1980, Dr. Callahan discovered quite by accident that tapping meridian points could relieve phobias and other emotional issues. He was in session with a client named Mary whose major problem was a severe fear of water. They had been working for over a year with little success. In the session, Mary spoke of the sick feeling in her stomach that came with this fear, and Callahan, who had been studying the meridians, had her tap under her eye, the end-point of the stomach meridian, to see if this would relieve her discomfort. The astonishing result was that Mary suddenly felt freed of her water phobia.

They were working at Callahan's home office, with a swimming pool nearby and, to Callahan's amazement, Mary ran right to the pool and splashed water on her face, thrilled that she was no longer terrified of water. The related nightmares and headaches stopped as well and, even more amazingly, the transformation was permanent.

Dr. Callahan went on to develop Thought Field Therapy, a highly refined system. E.F.T., developed by Gary Craig, is a simplified system based on Callahan's work, and is quick to learn and easy to use.

In my E.F.T. trainings, I saw amazing things. A woman who had been haunted all her life by an incest incident experienced great relief in just a few rounds of tapping. She could then talk about the incident with no painful emotional charge, and she said she felt 'light as a feather.'

As another woman worked with her grief from a broken relationship, what came up for her was the root of her pain in a childhood abandonment. This often happens as E.F.T. 'peels the layers of the onion,' giving relief for the emotions held at each level. This woman felt all of her emotional heaviness lift.

In training videos I saw Vietnam vets with severe P.T.S.D. from multiple traumatic memories being led through a number of rounds of the tapping technique as they described what haunted them. Afterwards, they could tell their stories matter-of-factly. The horrors held no further emotional charge for them.

Follow-through several days later found them sleeping well for the first time in decades, their nightmares gone.

The greatest resistance most people have to such 'quantum leaps' in healing is disbelief. Don't we need to talk more, to process more, to take days and weeks, months and years to heal such things? What I have found is that the insight, understandings and learnings from the experience can and do unfold, and they come more easily when the emotional charge is released through E.F.T.

It is the hallmark of quantum physics and 'the new paradigm' to challenge existing beliefs. What if everything is energy, and everything is deeply connected? What if 'the flapping of a butterfly's wing in Beijing, China, affects the weather in North America,' the so-called butterfly effect? What if the combination of healing intent, the verbalization of the issue, and the simultaneous tapping on the meridian points can actually free us from the hold of negative emotion? Gary Craig believes that the mechanism of emotional triggering is a "disruption" of the energy system, and that the tapping technique dissolves the trigger and restores balance.

All I know is that something is working here, and I am very grateful to have such an effective tool for myself and my clients. One client has had such results with her anger problem that she rarely uses the tapping now - she's not getting angry anymore. Another has had relief from "winter depression" for the first time. Another was able to go through a challenging confrontation calmly because she tapped to clear her anxiety ahead of time.

Maybe we don't know what is going on here and wonder, how can such difficult and deep-seated emotional problems shift so quickly? Yet, as someone has said, it doesn't matter how long a room has been dark - when you turn on the light, the darkness is gone. If this and other innovative new energy techniques can help us bring light into the "dark rooms" of emotional pain within ourselves and others, then it doesn't matter whether we understand how they work. Let there be light!