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Applying EFT in Clinical Practice

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Multiple Phobias Treated with EFT – 10-Year Follow-Up

By Patricia Carrington

Gary Craig's Introduction:

Dr. Patricia Carrington has made many fine contributions in the past.  Some of you know her as the Research Chairperson for ACEP, while others have had contact with her through the EFT Certificate of Completion (EFT-CC) program.  She is also one of the luminaries in this energy psychology field, having been around it much longer than most of us (myself included).

Now, here is Pat's message--written in her thorough, narrative style.  It depicts the lasting power of EFT and, along the way, visits (1) numerous client reactions (2) multiple aspects, (3) the Apex problem (4) the value of persistence.  You will also appreciate the crescendo type of ending wherein the quality of this multiple phobia relief was put to a series of real-world demanding tests.

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There are times when nature seems to help us out by testing our EFT work to see whether it’s “for real.”  My experience with “Louise” is a prime example of this and also demonstrates the extraordinary lasting power of this approach.

When Louise originally consulted me it was for problems she had “leaving home.”  She was a highly competent executive in a major corporation, a large, rangy young woman with startlingly blue eyes, a pretty face, and the ways of an exuberant child.  She would often burst into my office like a whirlwind and start talking long before she was seated.

At the age of 32, Louise was still living with her parents and almost daily had verbal battles with her mother, on whom she was nevertheless very dependent.  She couldn’t drive 40 miles from her home to my office because she was afraid of driving on highways and over bridges (she had to cross the Hudson River to arrive at my office), so on the few occasions when she came to see me in person, her mother had to drive her there.  The rest of the time we worked over the telephone.

Strange as it may seem, Louise’s therapy took place more than ten years ago.  This was in the days when “formal EFT” had not yet been devised, so at the time it didn’t occur to me that I could use a tapping procedure to handle Louise’s dependency problems, and I confined its use to dealing with her fears.  Today I would immediately apply EFT to the kind of deep personality problems she was displaying.  Had I been able to do so with her it would probably have enabled us to get to much deeper layers of her problem sooner and with greater effectiveness.

In these “frontier days” of the energy psychology movement all I was using was a rudimentary, single algorithm method which I had developed from Roger Callahan’s then “Callahan Techniques,” the name which he used to refer to his method.  I called my approach “Acutap,” and as it turned out, it was remarkably similar in many respects to Gary Craig’s EFT method (which by the way was developed entirely independently – neither of us knew each other or the other’s work).  Even though it didn’t have what I consider to be some of the most powerful attributes of EFT, such as the introduction of the Reminder Phrase, the subtle delineation of multiple aspects of a tapped-on problem, and the clinical variations of the method known as the Art of Delivery -- my basic single algorithm was surprisingly effective for many purposes.  When I became acquainted with EFT, I collapsed my Acutap method into it and EFT has been my energy psychology ever since.

At the time I was seeing Louise, I was still somewhat timid about using a tapping method because in “those days” (it seems an eternity ago) most psychotherapists weren’t using such methods and many colleagues resisted my efforts to tell them about it.

Before I had started to use tapping with Louise we were already making progress by talking about her problems and helping her “grow up” a bit emotionally.  She had also learned my Clinically Standardized Meditation (CSM) method which was serving to calm her fiery temperament somewhat.  As a consequence of these interventions she had begun dating a man in whom she was genuinely interested.  Then, to everyone’s surprise (including the man’s!) “Ted” was suddenly transferred to Australia. He and Louise found themselves on opposite sides of the earth.

But it was when Ted phoned her to tell her that he was going to have a week’s vacation from his job there that the challenge occurred which led to my use of tapping with Louise.  Ted couldn’t fly home for his vacation because he had to handle some duties in Australia, but he offered to pay for Louise’s plane fare if she would join him for that week.  Would she fly over?

Louise was thrown into conflict.  Not surprisingly, this young woman who feared highways and bridges was absolutely terrified of plane travel.  However, in her usual precipitous fashion, Louise announced to me that she was determined to join Ted for that week in Australia even though she was terribly afraid of being in strange places and “petrified of plane travel.”  Could I “fix” her fears for her?

That was a pretty tall order.  “I” (notice that Louise didn’t say “we,” I was supposed to do it for her) had only three weeks to accomplish this miracle.  The multiple fears that Louise displayed, embedded as they were in a context of deep personality problems revolving around her dependency on her mother (and on other mother figures, including this therapist!) and her obvious immaturity on certain levels, would ordinarily have required a long course of psychotherapy to resolve.  Did I dare tackle them in three weeks with a relatively unheard of procedure?

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