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Teaching Kids to Tap Page 2

ANN CONTINUES: I told Kinney that his problem had a lot of pieces. He would need to tap for a lot of pieces of this problem. We talked about what his pieces might be. I said we also feel our problems physically in our body and when we were thinking about what piece of the puzzle we wanted to work on it helped to check out where we feel that feeling in our body. His hand went straight to his heart.

We talked about how to figure out how much the problem bothers them. I showed them the arms outstretched method, counting from 10 to 0 as I moved my arms in to the prayer position.

Harvey wanders back into the group and sits. Lisa, an old hand at tapping comes to watch and adds her two cents: "I've done this, too."

"Hi, Lisa, yes you have. Does it work?" "Yeah," says Lisa. "I like it."

"Well, you pick a problem you want to work on with us."

"Let's do it," I said to the group. We tapped the side of the hand with simple set ups: "Even though I am sad about my mom/angry about my peer provoking me, I am a good kid." I modeled each point. We used the finger points, too. I skipped the nine gamuts. We repeated the steps.

Harvey tries to tap but gets bored and leaves again. [It takes several times to get a child like Harvey through the entire process.] Lisa says: "You didn't tap the gamut spot." She tells Kinney; "That's a good point for depression." [As a child learns more about the process one of the things I do is to label each point with a feeling. [Dr. John Diamond's thing. Who knows if that is accurate but the kids like it!]

Melanie comes to join us. "You are doing that tapping stuff!"

"Yeah. You used it lately?" "No," Melanie says, "I forgot."

I smiled at her and said "It's great stuff; we'll go over it again." Kris comes up and sits down. I smiled at him as he started tapping the side of his hand - "See," he said.

I asked Ryan if the tapping fixed his being "frustrated at being provoked by my peer." He nods and smiles: "Harvey's just being stupid."

I looked at Kinney: "Did it help any?" "Well," he said, "I am not upset about it right now."

"Tell me again which spot is for depression?" He looked into my eyes with such sadness mixed with hope that I wished I had been able to work with him individually longer.

One of the downsides of being the campus director is that I actually have little time with any one child. I work with a child in need and teach as many as I can. I have classes with the staff once a quarter and work with them to reinforce the children using the process. I teach the children EFT in groups not only because of my time constraints but also because it normalizes the process for the children to see other children tapping.

Ryan asks if I can write the steps down for him. Usually I have to suggest that! Since each child has a journal, I sent them to get their journal from their room. They did. In the six small journals of the six small children we wrote:

1. Think about your problem.

2. Pick one piece you want to work on.

3. Tap the side of your hand. Etc.

I usually end the finger points with tapping the side of the hand again and then the gamut spot. Why? No scientific reason, not even a good clinical reason.

Surprisingly, even Harvey brought his journal and actually sat there as I helped him write the steps. Each child either wrote the steps or asked me to. Ryan said: "What should I call it?"

"What would you like to call it?"

"I'll call it Ryan's Thinking Process," he said.

Update: I saw Kinney at lunch the next day. He told me he had started getting depressed last night so he tried the tapping. "It really works!" He told me with surprise in his voice.

Ann Adams