Other Ways to Tap

Once you’re feeling comfortable with the shortcut routine and have started to see results in your own life, you’ll probably be keen to share what you’ve learnt with friends and family. Or you might want to use EFT at times when you can’t openly tap.

Some people will be interested in learning themselves, while others won’t want to know. But there are a few extra techniques you can use, which can be a way to use EFT with other people, and expand the ways you can use it yourself.

  • Complain and Tap
  • Chasing the pain
  • Moving between emotional and physical symptoms
  • The Choices Method
  • Touch and Breathe
  • Imaginary Tapping
  • Surrogate Tapping

Complain and Tap

This is a very simple technique, but it can be used in a variety of ways.

Sometimes you don’t feel like tapping, you just feel like complaining to someone. So – complain! The only catch is, you tap while you’re complaining. Don’t worry about setups, and getting the words right, just bitch away, while tapping continuously through the points, including the karate chop. This works best when you have someone to complain to, so you’re saying the words out loud.

The first time you try it out, you might ring a friend to moan, so you don’t need to feel awkward about tapping. But later, as people get to know about your new weird habit, you can sit across the kitchen table from your friend and feel comfortable tapping.

When your friend wants her turn at offloading, suggest that you tap on her while she talks. Let her tell the story all the way through, then ask some questions to see if she’s still upset, eg. “Tell me exactly what he said again”. Encourage her to keep talking about it till she feels OK about it. This will happen a lot sooner than if you weren’t tapping!

Or you might have a friend who regularly rings you up to moan about her life. Afterwards, you feel like you’ve been run over by a bus. So, at first, play with tapping yourself while she talks. That will stop you from taking on her emotional baggage.

Later, when you’ve introduced her to tapping, and she’s used it herself, you might feel comfortable suggesting she taps on herself while she tells her story.

The idea for this originally came from Rick Wilkes.
Here’s his article on the technique he calls Tap While You Gripe.

Chasing the pain

When you’re tapping on a physical issue, you might find that it moves round your body. You start with a pain in your right temple. After a couple of rounds of tapping, you notice that pain has gone, but there’s a throbbing at the front of your head. You tap a few rounds on that, and it goes, but now there’s a tightness in the back of your neck. After that comes a stabbing pain in your shoulder.

All you need to do here is be aware of the changing pain in your body. Tap each pain down to zero, then see what else has come up. Continue till the pain has completely gone.

If you had some other pain to start with, that was totally unrelated, it may not be cleared in this session. If that’s the case, you can always work on that next time. What you are looking to clear is any new pains that came up during the session.

Moving between emotional and physical symptoms

Sometimes you might be working on an emotion and not getting very far, or finding it too painful. Instead focus on what you’re feeling in your body, and use Chasing The Pain on that. Afterwards, check in again with the emotion, and chances are it will have gone.

Similarly, if you have a physical issue, working on the underlying emotional issues will often resolve it.

The Choices Method

This method was formulated by Pat Carrington. Once you’ve tapped down most of the intensity of the original issue, you can add in a positive affirmation as the self acceptance phrase. Using “I choose” as part of the affirmation bypasses the part of your system that would react with “oh no that’s not true” by giving it an instruction.

Visit Pat’s website to learn how to use the Choices method

Touch and Breathe

For a variety of reasons, sometimes tapping isn’t appropriate. A person may be old, or frail, or ill, or have an easily tired arm. Or you’re in a public place and you want to be unobtrusive. Touch two fingers to each tapping point, and think your setup or reminder phrase, while taking a deep breath in, and releasing it.

Imaginary Tapping

It’s only a short step now to Imaginary Tapping. But do wait till you’re experienced at tapping and your body is familiar with how it works. This can work nicely if you’re in a public place, or for some other reason you can’t tap. Maybe you’re in the dentist’s chair or doctor’s office.

I once used it during an acupuncture session when I couldn’t move my arms to tap, but the room was cold and my feet felt frozen. A few rounds of imaginary tapping and they felt much better.

It’s also nice if you want to tap in bed, and don’t want to wake your partner, or don’t want to get too alert yourself.

It’s exactly what it sounds like – just imagine that you’re tapping on yourself. Say the setup and reminder phrases in your head while vividly imagining tapping each spot. This works because energy moves with our intention.

Surrogate Tapping

Intent also comes into play with surrogate tapping. There may be times when you want to help another person, but you can’t tap on them for some reason.

So what you do, is tap on yourself AS IF you’re the other person. Say your brother rings up and says he has a terrible headache. In this case, you might ask if you can do some tapping for him.

Your setup might be “Even though, I, John, have a headache, I fully and deeply accept myself” or “Even though John has a headache…” then tap through the points saying “John’s headache”. There are no right or wrong words, just say what feels comfortable for you.

Another way some people do surrogate tapping is to combine imaginary tapping, and imagine that they are tapping on the person. This opens up all sorts of possibilities. There are many stories of people tapping for people on aeroplanes who are sick or look scared, or for children screaming in supermarkets, or babies crying on buses.

You can also surrogate tap for animals.

There are some ethics involved with surrogate tapping. People have many different beliefs on this, but here’s my take.

If you’re doing an “anonymous good deed” to someone in distress, start by having the intention that any tapping is for their best interest, and you can’t go too far wrong.

But when we tap for people we know, we do need to be aware of our own vested interest. For example, if your husband has a habit you hate, to me, it would be wrong to tap on it for him. Much better to tap on your own feelings about it.

If you can ask permission for someone you want to tap for, do so. If the person is ill or absent and can’t give permission, again, have the intention that only EFT that is in their highest interest is to be effective.

After doing any surrogate tapping, it’s good to tap on your karate chop point, and say three times “I am (your own name)”. This helps to remove any surrogacy that might still be in place, as you don’t want to continue “being” the other person.

For some other perspectives, here’s an article by Gary Craig

While EFT has produced remarkable clinical results, it is still be considered to be in the experimental stage and each user must take complete responsibility for their own use of it.