TEMPLE, Texas — Emotional freedom technique, also known as EFT or tapping, is a holistic treatment used to decrease physical pain and emotional distress.
Angela Collier is a licensed professional counselor in Waco who offers EFT to her clients.
“It uses the combined principle of Chinese acupressure, and also modern talk therapy. And what it does is it works on the emotions that are surrounding those troublesome memories," Collier said.
Collier said she has seen amazing results with herself and her clients.
"Tapping helps us tune into different patterns, negative patterns of thoughts and feelings and emotions," she said.
Tapping involves just that, tapping. You tap on different parts of the body to rebalance energy and relax. Collier said anyone can benefit from it.
"Our bodies give off electromagnetic fields and sometimes they get out of alignment, especially when we're feeling down, sad, blue, or in pain. And so the tapping actually taps along the meridian lines to help us get realigned so that we could start getting back to our normal self," she said.
According to Collier, it's especially great for people suffering from anxiety, depression, stress, phobias, insomnia, chronic pain, ADHD, even low self-esteem. She even uses it on herself daily.
"It's really good for relaxing, reducing anxiety. I especially like to use it at the end of a long day, when I'm trying to relax and get to sleep," Collier said.
There are two portions to EFT - the actual tapping and a repeated phrase Collier said helps reprogram your brain. There are nine pressure points Collier teaches clients to tap on: the top of the head, above the eyebrow, the temple, under your eye, under the nose, at your chin, where your collarbones meet, under your arm, and the karate chop point -- which is the fleshy part of your palm. You can do either side, and you only need to tap hard enough to get your attention.
The second part is the repeated phrase. Collier uses two different ones and she said you can alter them to fit whatever you're dealing with.
"The phrase is, ‘Even though I used to have anxiety I deeply love and care for myself.’ So where I placed ‘anxiety’ you can place anything in there. And that's the long one that you start off with, when you're tapping the top of your head. And the second phrase is just a shorter one. ‘I used to have anxiety.’ And we use that phrase all the way down on the rest of them."
Collier said keeping it simple means you can use tapping wherever you are, whenever you need it. If you're interested in trying it for yourself, Collier said you can find videos for free online thanks to platforms like YouTube and Pinterest.