Emotional Freedom Techniques: Tapping

Emotional Freedom Techniques, or EFT, is an experiential approach that combines psychological processing with the stimulation of acupuncture points through tapping.

It draws on the traditional Chinese medicine understanding that emotional experience and the body’s energetic system are interconnected. Instead of using needles, as in acupuncture, EFT stimulates specific acupoints by tapping on them while emotionally relevant material is active.

One useful way of understanding what we are working with is through internal models.

Psychology has many names for these inner structures: schemas, internal working models, implicit representations, relational templates, life scripts, organizing beliefs, personal mythologies.

They carry what we have learned from the past, shape how we navigate the present, and influence what we expect from the future.

And an internal model is not one thing. It is a constellation:

beliefs
memories
images
emotions
bodily sensations
expectations
values
intentions
habitual responses
ways of perceiving ourselves and others

This is why tapping often unfolds like peeling an onion.

We may begin with a fear. As its intensity changes, a memory emerges. Then another aspect of the experience comes forward. Then something underneath that.

EFT calls these different pieces “aspects.” As one aspect settles, another may become more noticeable. There is no fixed order. We follow what remains emotionally alive.

There is an interesting parallel with EMDR. EMDR understands distressing experiences as existing within broader, associatively linked memory networks. Activating one part of the network can bring other memories, emotions, beliefs, images, and bodily responses into awareness.

EFT can unfold in a similarly associative way.

Layer by layer, we follow what emerges.

Until what belongs to the past no longer has to organize the present.