A report by Gary Craig, inventor of EFT
I had never seen anything close to this… anywhere.
I still didn’t see the connection between emotions and the body’s energy system, but it did have a scientific ring to me. Perhaps I was about to find a truly scientific approach to psychology. Indeed, that is what I found. The true cause of negative emotions, it turns out, is not where everyone thinks it is. It is not where psychologists have been looking. That’s why they haven’t found it. They have been looking in the wrong place. The cause of all negative emotions is connected to the body’s energy system. This is indisputably so… even though it sounds a bit strange.
But the proof is in the results. For me, the only laboratory that counts is the real world and that is where these techniques excel. You will see that repeatedly throughout this course. The speed, efficiency and long lasting nature of these techniques is far beyond anything I have come across in 30 years of intensive searching.
This discovery is the engine that runs EFT. Without it, this course wouldn’t exist. So to better build your understanding we need to focus a bit on that vital energy system.
The body’s energy system
Our bodies have a profound electrical nature. Any beginning course in anatomy covers this. Shuffle your feet across a carpet and then touch an item made of metal. Sometimes you can see the static electricity that is discharged from your fingertip. This wouldn’t be possible unless your body had an electrical nature to it.
If you touch a hot stove you will feel the pain instantly because it is electrochemically transmitted along the nerves to your brain. The pain is transmitted almost instantaneously and that is why you feel pain so quickly. Electrochemical messages are constantly sent throughout your body to keep it informed of what is going on. Without this energy flow, you would not be able to see, hear, feel, taste or smell.
Another obvious bit of evidence regarding the existence of electricity (energy) in the body are the electroencephalograph (EEG) and electrocardiograph (EKG). The EEG records the electrical activity of the brain and the EKG records the electrical activity of the heart. These devices have been used by medical science for decades and are the ones you see in TV hospital dramas hooked up to dying patients. When the screen stops “blipping”, the patient is dead.
Our electrical systems are vital to our physical health. What could be more obvious? When the energy stops flowing… we die. Ask your doctor about this. No one disputes it. 
In fact, civilization has known about this for millenniums. About 5,000 years ago, the Chinese discovered a complex system of energy circuits that run throughout the body. These energy circuits… or meridians as they are called…are the centerpiece of Eastern health practices and form the basis for modern day acupuncture, acupressure and a wide variety of other healing techniques.
This energy courses through the body and is invisible to the eye. It cannot be seen without high tech equipment. By analogy, you do not see the energy flowing through a TV set either. You know it is there, however, by its effects. The sounds and pictures are your ever-present evidence that the energy flow exists.
In the same way, EFT gives you striking evidence of that energy flow within your body because it provides the effects that let you know it is there. By simply tapping near the end points of your energy meridians, you can experience some profound changes in your emotional and physical health. These changes would not occur it there was no energy system.
Western medical science tends to focus on the chemical nature of the body and has not paid much attention to these subtle, but powerful, energy flows until recent years. No one denies their existence, however, even though they have been given very little weight in medicine and no weight whatsoever in psychology. But they do exist and are attracting an expanding group of researchers. Read the following for more details:
Becker, Robert O. and Selden, Gary. The Body Electric. Morrow, NY, 1985 Becker, Robert O. Crosscurrents. Tarcher, NY, 1992 Burr, H.S. Blueprint for immortality: the electric patterns of life. Neville Spearman, London, 1972 Nordenstrom, B. Biologically closed electric circuits: clinical, experimental and theoretical evidence for an additional circulatory system. Nordic, Stockholm, 1983.
A growing number of health practitioners are finding ways to use this vital energy system to help physical healing. Acupuncture, massage therapy and chiropractic are but a few of them. Bookstore shelves are loaded with books on energy meridian techniques to promote good physical health.
Dr. Callahan’s first experience
The science behind EFT was not developed like many other discoveries. That is, it was not created in a laboratory and then tested in the real world. Instead, a stunning turn of events in the real world pointed the way first. Here’s the story. In 1980 Dr. Callahan was working with a patient, Mary, for an intense water phobia. She suffered from frequent headaches and terrifying nightmares, both of which were related to her fear of water. To seek help, she had been going from therapist to therapist for years… with no material improvement.
Dr. Callahan tried to help her by conventional means for a year and a half. He didn’t make much headway either.
Then one day he stepped outside the normal “boundaries” of psychotherapy. Out of curiosity, he had been studying the body’s energy system and decided to tap with his fingertips under her eyes (an end point of the stomach meridian). This was prompted by her complaint of some stomach discomfort.
To his astonishment, she announced immediately that her phobia was gone and she raced down to a nearby swimming pool and began throwing water in her face. No fear. No headaches. It all went away… including the nightmares. And it has never returned. She is totally free of her water phobia. Results like that are rare in the field of psychotherapy… but commonplace with EFT.
A first hand description. Here’s how Dr. Callahan describes it in his 1990 book, “The Rapid Treatment of Panic, Agoraphobia and Anxiety.”
I was totally unprepared for what happened. As I tapped under her eyes, Mary said, “It’s gone!.””What’s gone?”, I asked. “My fear of water, it’s gone, I don’t have those awful feelings in my stomach any more!”
We were working in my home office and I said, with a somewhat challenging and skeptical tone, “Let’s go down to the pool and see.”
I fully expected her to resist as usual, but, to my surprise, I had to hurry to keep up with her on the way to the pool. For the first time, she looked at the water, put her head near it and splashed water in her face, from the shallow end. I watched in amazement, as she joyfully shouted, “It’s gone, it’s gone!” Mary’s next move frightened me. She suddenly ran toward the deep end of the pool, and this sudden total absence of fear around the pool was so unusual for her that I shouted, “Mary, be careful!” I was afraid that she might jump into the pool and drown. She laughed when she saw my alarm and reassured me: “Don’t worry Doctor Callahan, I know I can’t swim.” Ten years experience with the treatment has since taught me that the treatment does not cause sudden stupidity. Respect for reality, I have learned, is not diminished by successful treatment. All Mary needed was that tap under the eyes. Later, I learned that most people need more. In any case, I started trying the treatments on some of my other… phobic clients, and found that I got similar results in about one of five. The discovery of psychological reversal and other refinements in the treatments have now boosted our success rate to about 98%.
The first question I usually get is, “Does the treatment last?” The implicit assumption is that if something is done quickly, it can’t last. This is pure prejudice against the “quick fix”; the answer is; it usually does
last; in a small number of cases if might have to be repeated. Of course, it is easy to repeat Usually, in such cases, the person is cured and after ten years Mary has no trace of this problem. Interestingly, there have been no nightmares about water since that first treatment…”
This, of course, got Dr. Callahan’s attention. He has since refined and expanded his findings to a series of related routines. They encompass nearly every area of emotional improvement imaginable… from phobias to panic disorders to sports performance. And, along the way, he has also applied these techniques to physical problems and addictive cravings with notable success. EFT is based on all these procedures. It reduces years of diligent research and endless trial and error to one practical course that you can master in your living room. It is like having your own private guide to a workable version of the most stunning personal improvement findings in the last 100 years.
The Discovery Statement
Now, with this in mind, here’s the essence behind EFT. We will refer to it henceforth as the “Discovery Statement”: “The cause of all negative emotions is a disruption in the body’s energy system”
