Today we’re talking about using EFT tapping in your post-divorce trauma and how it can help women in their healing process and life after divorce. We’ll also discuss the difference between EFT tapping and EMDR.
If you don’t use EFT tapping, this is a game changer for you. By the end of today, you could feel differently than you do right now.
What is EFT Tapping?
EFT stands for Emotional Freedom Technique. It is tapping your fingers in a series of spaces and places on your body that allows your mind and body to balance emotional energy.
How to Do EFT Tapping
EFT tapping works with a series of acupressure points on your body, according to Chinese medicine.
The points that you tap on are very specific and get a wonderful emotional release.
There are also abbreviated versions of tapping, for instance, the karate chop, where you have one hand out like a fin and your other fingers just tapping at the heel of your hand. Also, tapping each of your fingers on the side of your thumb and just working through your fingers provides a little emotional release if you do it for long enough. It helps regulate you if you use it in a tense situation.
When you try EFT, it helps balance your mind and your body in your post-divorce trauma journey.
Brain Tapping EFT
What happens to the brain when we use EFT?
Our brain has four quadrants: top, bottom, left, and right. The bottom half of our brain is our neanderthal section as it’s basic human emotions and our fight, flight freeze response. Rage, fear, desire, etc., very basic, bottom-brain survival stuff. Our right brain is the more emotional side, the left brain is logic, and our top brain is called ‘the smart brain.’
If someone hooked us up to an MRI machine when we’re triggered, or our central nervous system was dysregulated, we would see that the most activation in our brain would be bottom right, and the heavy emotional goings-on would be really lit up. After we tap for a bit, we would see a much more balanced brain use, where our top brain (our prefrontal cortex) and the parts of our brain that are capable of higher reasoning, delayed gratification, making difficult decisions, and having a balanced approach to things, would be far more available to us.
When we’re dysregulated, the brain perceives that its top priority is survival. You know this just from living your life lately—when you feel that intensely, you are not in an open-minded space, and you cannot reason through things how you normally would.
How Long Does EFT Tapping Work?
After doing EFT, you will notice way more balanced brain function and emotional reasoning.
You will see your negative beliefs shifting into positive beliefs, as well as a lot more insight and awareness, and a lot less anxiety.
You hear in trauma speak a lot about the amygdala—the almond-shaped part of the brain. When you’ve experienced a lot of traumas or hard emotional stuff, the amygdala becomes inflamed. If you’ve been doing EFT tapping for several sessions, the amygdala can literally shrink back to its appropriate non-inflamed size. EFT can create such powerful results.
How does EFT tapping work?
Many women struggle with how awkward it is because you’re tapping on your face.
You start by tapping first the karate chop, then in your inner eyebrow, your outer eyebrow, under your eye, top lip, cleft of your chin, your clavicle on your chest, and then your sides—under your armpits—and the top of your head.
Then it starts all over again.
Now, there are so many amazing resources out there for EFT. One of my favorite apps is called The Tapping Solution. One of my favorite EFT Tappers is Brad Yates, and it’s gaining such popularity.
At first, it feels kind of awkward and a little silly. For me, I’ve been doing it for so long. It just has become normal.
Is There Science Behind EFT Tapping?
Let’s talk about the science behind EFT tapping. There are individuals in the scientific community that would call EFT a pseudoscience. We haven’t really studied it enough to know, but it’s based on the Chinese energy principle and not necessarily other structural ways of viewing the body and anatomy. If you knew that EFT tapping could relieve you from having to do as much therapy or take as many prescription medications, would you still go to therapy and use prescription meds?
What Is the Emotional Freedom Technique?
You may read some research out there that says emotional freedom technique tapping is pseudoscience and that there are no definitive benefits. But we know about energy in the body and how our body stores energetic data. Many books discuss this, including The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk.
Our level of mental or physical illness in our body is directly proportional to our genetics, but also the amount of trauma or emotional pain we’ve experienced and not recovered from.
What is Emotional Suffering?
Emotional suffering or distress is a response to an experience that arises from trauma or a series of traumatic events. It can feel incredibly overwhelming and trigger anxiety, panic, and sleeplessness.
Overcoming Mental and Emotional Suffering
The body is the key to unlocking our mental and emotional suffering. We cannot think our way through trauma – no matter how much cognitive-behavioral therapy we do, we can only feel our way through it. EFT tapping is a tool.
We know that to really unlock imbalanced energy, trauma, conflict, and shock, we have to involve the body in the healing process.
EFT Tapping Points
EFT is brilliant because you’re tapping on the acupressure points in the body that engage that energetic, physical component while moving through a storyline.
In the process, it takes you from a low-vibration, painful place up to a higher, more positive vibration.
How to Do EFT Tapping on Yourself
During EFT tapping, we start by acknowledging how much pain you may be in. For instance, in divorce trauma, we would start by acknowledging what you’re feeling right now. “I’m in so much pain, it hurts so badly, and I feel lost.” Then as we move through the storyline, we would discuss that it’s actually not just the grief that you’re feeling but also a negative belief that is driving your suffering, such as fear or shame.
EFT would start exploring what you believe about that pain and what has you stuck there. Then it would start exploring a storyline of how your life would change if there were a different belief: That you will be better, that life can be different, and that you will heal and have a full and rich life.
In the storyline, after purging and balancing all that painful energy out of the mind and body, we would start moving through a storyline where there is at least an opening for a positive thought or emotion. Whether women want to find peace or joy or happiness or abundance, or new love, sleep better, or deal with chronic pain or many things. And so in each EFT tapping session, we would find a very specific storyline that helps you release your specific pain point.
How EFT Tapping Coaches Work
There are EFT Tapping coaches out there that really have fused EFT tapping with therapy. It’s an incredibly effective tool, and there is a lot of value to working with someone who knows EFT inside and out. These individuals can help deliver it in a very specialized way for you. Why? Because nuance and context matter.
EFT Tapping for Limiting Beliefs
Last week, I realized that there is this negative belief that I’m holding on to that had something to do with pleasure. And it definitely came from very early childhood programming to do with religion and Good Girl syndrome.
Most of the subconscious beliefs that we have were installed from ages zero to seven before our top brain (or our ‘Smart Brain’) is developed. From zero to seven, we rely so much on internalizing the things that were just taught and the things that are mirrored for us, and we do that without consciously choosing. We just believe it because it’s handed to us.
For me, it manifests in guilt that comes up when I eat certain foods or when my cleaning crew is here—I feel guilty if I’m not working as hard as them.
EFT Tapping Script
When I was tapping, I went into this whole idea around unlocking my internal permission to feel good as much as possible. Too often, I hide my light, and I snuff out my flame because I feel like I don’t deserve it. So that’s how I stumbled across this fancy new way to use EFT in my life last week.
If you’re on the Brad Yates YouTube channel looking for the right video, you might Google ‘releasing emotional pain’ or ‘tapping for anxiety,’ but we should start searching by benefit.
Reframe your thinking to, “I want to feel joy, I want to feel free, I want to feel abundance, I want to attract love.” This allows your brain to function in a balanced way so that it does not perceive that it is threatened.
When we are actively experiencing trauma or our brain thinks we’re experiencing a trauma, the brain feels threatened.
Transforming Negative Beliefs
When we women have used EFT for a while, our brain becomes open to adaptive information, and that is where we transform our internalized negative beliefs and embrace new beliefs about worth. EFT, EMDR, and journaling are tools we use to transform those negative beliefs, generate self-love and manifest with intention.
Are EMDR and EFT Tapping Similar?
Let’s talk about the difference between EFT and EMDR, as they are both fantastic tools that can create very similar (if not identical) outcomes in your life after divorce, depending on how they’re used.
EFT and EMDR activate the mind and body slightly differently, as EFT relies on acupressure points in the body to balance the energy in the mind. EMDR uses bilateral—just left and right—as a simplified metronomy stimulation. It’s also sometimes called a butterfly tap.
They are two different ways of stimulating the mind and body. We’re using a thought-based technique and a physical sensory stimulation that allows us to process and reprocess emotion, memory, and old beliefs and to transmute those into positive beliefs.
Both tools allow your brain to access adaptive information that helps you function differently.
You can now take in new ideas, new thoughts, and new beliefs about this old experience. EFT is something you can use on your own, at home, with yourself, and you don’t need a facilitator for it.
How to Heal from Divorce Trauma
I want you to be in charge of your own wellness and life after divorce, and I don’t want you to feel you have to depend on healers to do it. Yes, we women all need healers because we need somebody to hold a mirror up for us so we can see what we couldn’t see.
We are designed to live in cooperation with each other and to be together. We are meant to commune and collaborate in love and connection.
It’s how we’re biologically wired for love and belonging, as Brene Brown would say.
I want you to claim this for yourself, so see EFT and EMDR as take-home DIY tools.
How Often Can You Do EFT Tapping?
EFT has a cumulative effect, so it is something I love to use on a very consistent basis when I’m working to shift a specific negative belief. If I do it once a day, I will get significant results. If I do it once a week, I’m going to get mediocre results. So keep that in mind.
What would keep somebody from using a tool like this? Why isn’t it more popular? Why are people still suffering?
Does EFT Tapping Work for Anxiety?
The mind likes the path of least resistance and what is familiar. If I’m feeling anxious, and I know I can go have a glass of wine, take a pill, scroll Instagram, and shut that feeling down—I know that will work, and I know what I’m going to get because of it. If you tell me to tap all over my body and not use those tools that I am used to and that I will feel bigger feelings first before they get better, I will feel afraid and uncertain. Not knowing what exactly is happening is dysregulating.
Then the brain gets hooked into survival. When you access your traumas and your pains, your brain says, “No!” EFT can be difficult because it involves getting in there and feeling all the things. It’s popular to numb everything down rather than deal with it. When this is happening in your therapist’s office, you have someone there to ground you and support you. However, using this tool at home, there’s a certain fear that you can’t trust yourself, and you panic.
How to Create Positive Beliefs?
EFT and EMDR are the ladders to your success. As you climb up toward having a really positive internalized belief about yourself, these tools help you move toward peace, freedom, self-acceptance, and connection with people around you and attracting and manifesting all the things that you desire.
We, women, can use the tools so that we can have awareness and make more insightful choices so that we can live differently.
Does EFT Tapping Really Work?
Does this stuff really work? Is it really worth it? While healing from our traumas, we’re reaching for self-love, self-acceptance, moving on from divorce, and trusting ourselves. That is what peace feels like.
EFT tapping is a ladder that can help you climb to everything that you want.
However, it will not keep you from never feeling pain again. In fact, it’s going to feel worse before it feels better, and you have to be consistent with it. But I would love nothing more than for you to say, “Oh my gosh, I started tapping, and my life completely changed!”
There are a lot of different personalities or people out there that can teach you how to tap. And ultimately, I want you to learn the pattern so that when you have a moment to yourself, it’s something you naturally start doing. I am so excited for us women to do this.
