EFT for Teens

By Peta Stapleton

The teenage years hold all the promise of adulthood, as well as being a transition from childhood. Yet they’re also full of challenges, for teens themselves and for their parents, siblings, friends, and communities. A story at Examiner.com calls Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT): "one of the most successful psychology self-help techniques ever developed."
It’s a powerful stress-reduction method that combines elements of proven psychotherapy methods with acupressure, fingertip tapping on acupuncture points. Over 100 scientific studies have shown that EFT is effective for many physical and psychological challenges, including anxiety, depression, and stress. Studies with teens show that just a few minutes of EFT can erase stress related to:
• Taking exams
• Peer pressure
• Family conflicts
• The body changes associated with puberty
• Social phobias
• Sports performance
• Weight management
• Eating disorders… and much more.
For teens needing a quick and simple method of navigating their life challenges, as well as for their parents and siblings, EFT for Teens will be a cherished resource.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Energy Psychology Press
• Release date: Jun 1, 2017
• ISBN: 9781604152654

Book preview

1

So You’re a Teenager

When I asked my then 13-year-old daughter how I should introduce this book to you, she said, Just tell them that tapping really works.

That might get you wondering, What exactly is tapping? We will get to that really soon. But first…

Being a Teenager

Research and decades of expert opinion (sometimes a bit boring) tell us that when you become a teenager, you start to question most things your parents and teachers have taught you—and this is actually pretty normal.

The problem is parents and teachers often forget that they were teenagers once and did the same thing. They wanted to break rules, push the boundaries, sleep a lot, be emotional, and feel bored—all at the same time!

That’s normal.

The problem is that when these things happen and get a bit out of control, an adult might say to you, Just get over it or Don’t think about it. The question is how are you supposed to do that?

Schools, parents, teachers, and everyone in between don’t often teach us how to get over something easily (and quickly). But they expect us to be able to do it.

How to Get Over Stuff

Luckily, there are some quick and easy ways to deal with things like strong feelings (anger, jealousy), no feelings (boredom), and even low feelings (sad, lonely).

This book will show you an easy technique that you can use to deal with feelings and situations (and even people!) that are bothering you. The technique is similar to acupuncture, but with no needles (whew, that could have gotten tricky otherwise). You might have heard of it. It’s called Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), but a lot of people just call it tapping. Though Chapter 2 will tell you all about it, let’s try a little tapping right now so you can get an idea of what it is.

Try Tapping Now

Here’s a very simple way to do EFT for the first time that will give you a sense of what it can do. It’s going to take you less than two minutes. I’m going to keep it as simple as possible, and I’m also going to give you a practical tool to measure whether or not EFT is working for you.

I’d like you to think about a memory or something that has happened in your past that still bothers you a lot. Pick a memory that’s safe to work on, one that you know from past experience won’t send you into a tailspin. Pick an event that took five minutes or less to occur, and one that you can label with a title. If it were a movie, what would the movie title be? Keep the title simple because you are going to have to repeat it. Some examples would be: My Teacher Yelled at Me, My Embarrassing Mistake, or That Scary Bike Ride.

Rate how bad it still makes you feel now from 0 to 10, with 0 being no distress whatsoever and 10 being emotional agony or the worst you could feel! In EFT, we call this rating your SUD or Subjective Units of Distress score.

Write down your movie title and your SUD score.

Movie title: _____________

SUD score before doing EFT: _____

Use the following illustration to locate the first tapping point on the side of your hand, called the side of the hand (SH) point.

Side of the Hand (SH) Point

Lightly but firmly, tap there with the fingertips of the other hand while repeating this phrase:

"Even though I experienced [say your movie title here], I deeply and completely accept myself."

You don’t have to believe this statement, since EFT is not dependent on your level of belief. Simply say the words.

Keep tapping, and repeat that phrase three times.

Then tap on all the points in the following illustration with two fingers of either hand 7 to 10 times, on either side of the body, while repeating the title of your movie. You don’t need to count the number of taps; just say the title of your movie. Tap from top to bottom, beginning with the point by your eyebrow (EB). The points after that are side of the eye (SE), under the eye (UE), under the nose (UN), chin (Ch), collarbone (CB), and under the arm (UA).

EB, SE, UE, UN, Ch, CB and UA Points

After tapping on all these points, tune back in to the event or movie. Rerun it in your mind and see how it feels now. Write down your new SUD level.

SUD score after first EFT round: _____

The chances are good that your SUD level is much lower than it was before. It may not be at a 0 yet, however, so let’s apply EFT once more.

While tapping your side of the hand (SH) point, say, Even though I still have some distress about [movie title], I deeply and completely accept myself. Repeat this two more times while tapping that same point. Then, repeat your movie title while tapping on every point with two fingertips. Really tune in to the details of your movie while you do this.

When you’re finished, write down your new SUD level.

SUD score after second EFT round: _____

The likelihood is that your SUD is now much lower than before. Perhaps it’s even down to 0. If it’s not entirely gone, no problem, since you’ve just tried the most basic form of EFT. As you tap more and more, you’ll get better and better at applying it.

What Does This Book Cover?

To show you the types of things tapping can be used for, every chapter in this book has a different topic. I will cover things like feelings, school and family issues, achieving goals, and good old problems like sleeping.

Every chapter will also give you some real-life cases of teens who have used tapping and what happened. It will make it more interesting to read!

This very next chapter is going to outline more details of EFT and how it can be changed to suit your problem, feeling, or thought. It is really flexible as a technique and you will read all about how you can change the words you say, how to tune in to what is going on, and, most important, how to take charge of how you feel.

I have included this next chapter in case you want to read about EFT in depth. If you want to just read the section on how to do EFT, that’s okay. It may not all be relevant to you right now. All the chapters from Chapter 3 onward show you how to use tapping for specific worries that many teens experience.

2

How to Do EFT: The Basic Recipe by Dawson Church, PhD

Over the past decade, EFT has been the focus of a great deal of research. This has resulted in more than 20 clinical trials, in which EFT has been demonstrated to reduce a wide variety of symptoms. These include pain, skin rashes, fibromyalgia, depression, anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Most of these studies have used the standardized form of EFT found in The EFT Manual. In this chapter, my goal is to show you how to unlock EFT’s healing benefits in whatever physical or psychological problems you’re facing. I have a passionate interest in relieving human suffering. When you study EFT, you quickly realize how much suffering can be alleviated with the help of this extraordinary healing tool. I’d like to place the full power of that tool in your hands, so that you can live the happiest, healthiest, and most abundant life possible.

If you go on YouTube or do a Google search, you will find thousands of websites and videos about EFT. The quality of the EFT information you’ll find through these sources varies widely, however. Certified practitioners trained in EFT provide a small portion of the information. Most of it consists of personal testimonials by untrained enthusiasts. It’s great that EFT works to some degree for virtually anyone. To get the most out of EFT and unlock its full potential, however, it’s essential that you learn the form of EFT that’s been proven in so many clinical trials: Clinical EFT.

Every year in EFT Universe workshops, we get many people who tell us variations of the same story: I saw a video on YouTube, tapped along, and got amazing results the first few times. Then it seemed to stop working. The reason for this is that a superficial application of EFT can indeed work wonders. To unleash the full power of EFT, however, requires learning the standardized form we call Clinical EFT, which has been validated, over and over again, by high-quality research, and is taught systematically, step by step, by top experts, in EFT workshops.

Why is EFT able to produce beneficial results with so many problems, both psychological and physical? The reason for its effectiveness is that it reduces stress, and stress is a component of many problems. In EFT research on pain, for instance, we find that pain decreases by an average of 68% with EFT (Church & Brooks, 2010). That’s an impressive two-thirds drop. Now ask yourself, if EFT can produce a two-thirds drop in pain, why can’t it produce a 100% drop? I pondered this question myself, and I asked many therapists and doctors for their theories as to why this might be so.

The consensus is that the two thirds of pain reduced by EFT is due largely to emotional causes, while the remaining one third of the pain has a physical derivation. A man I’ll call John volunteered for a demonstration at an EFT introductory evening at which I presented. He was on crutches, and told us he had a broken leg as a result of a car accident. On a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 being no pain, and 10 being maximum pain, he rated his pain as an 8. The accident had occurred 2 weeks earlier. My logical scientific brain didn’t think EFT would work for John, because his pain was purely physical. I tapped with him anyway. At the end of our session, which lasted less than 15 minutes, his pain was down to a 2. I hadn’t tapped on the actual pain with