The Power—and Proof—Behind Tapping

UNEDITED TRANSCRIPT: The following transcript may contain typographical errors or other mistakes due to inconsistencies in audio quality, background noise, or other factors. We cannot guarantee its precision or completeness. We encourage you to use this as a supplement to your own notes and recollection of the session. 

 

Tami Simon: Hello, friends, my name’s Tami Simon and I’m the founder of Sounds True, and I want to welcome you to the Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge. I also want to take a moment to introduce you to Sounds True’s new membership community and digital platform. It’s called Sounds True One. Sounds True One features original premium transformational docuseries, community events, classes to start your day and relax in the evening, special weekly live shows including a video version of Insights at the Edge with an after-show community question-and-answer session with featured guests. I hope you’ll come join us, explore, come have fun with us and connect with others. You can learn more at join.soundstrue.com. 

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In this episode of Insights at the Edge. I’m here with David Feinstein and Donna Eden. Let me tell you a little bit about David and Donna. David is a clinical psychologist, has served on the faculty of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and is a nine-time national award winner for his books on consciousness and healing. Donna Eden is among the world’s most sought-after and joyous spokespersons for energy medicine, helping millions of people worldwide understand the body as an energy system. Together, David and Donna run the School of Energy Medicine that teaches the Eden Method. They’ve written literally the book on energy medicine called Energy Medicine, they’re the ones who wrote the book, and a new book. It’s called Tapping: Self-Healing with the Transformative Power of Energy Psychology. We’re here, we’ll be talking about the new book, Tapping. David, Donna. Welcome.

 

David Feinstein: Thank you.

 

Donna Eden: Thank you. We’re so happy to be here.

 

TS: One of the things I learned in preparing for this conversation is that, Donna, you’re 81 years old and look 50 and, David, you’re 78, and that together, you look, I don’t know much younger, this energy medicine stuff must work and that you’ve been together now for almost 50 years. And I wanted to start there with just a note of my heartfelt, not just congratulations, but how inspired I am by the two of you and the beautiful work you’re giving to the culture and how continually productive you are. I feel so inspired by that. So I wanted just start there.

 

DF: Thank you.

 

DE: We’re inspired by us too that we made it and it’s so good now. And it wasn’t originally, it was hard and now it’s so easy and it has a lot to do with energy.

 

TS: You mean in your marriage that it was challenge … In your relationship, it was challenging in the beginning?

 

DE: We’re different than each other. We’re so different than each other and the very things that were once a struggle are now part of the ease because we learned to just doing an energy dance with one another and it is just good now. I always say, “Thank God I didn’t leave him when I should have.”

 

TS: That’s a very funny sentence. Okay, here’s where I want to start. We have these terms and people may not actually know exactly what we mean, energy medicine, energy psychology and then a new book on a method called Tapping. Let’s start there and get all of us tracking together. Energy medicine, energy psychology, Tapping. David?

 

DF: Energy medicine is a way of working with the body’s energies, both the energies that we all know about, the electrochemical energies that move through the body, but it’s also working with another level of energy. And this is, Donna mentioned, our differences when we met. I had just finished my first job, which was seven years on the faculty at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. So when she said, “Energy,” I said, “Wait, no energy is the capacity to do work. Energy is very well defined.” She was talking about something very different. She was talking about energies that have memory, energies that have intelligence, energies that work in the body to keep stabilizing the body and maintain homeostasis in ways that I never learned in my education.

And as much as I had doubts about this definition, because I couldn’t see this energy, she’s able to actually see it, but I couldn’t. So I had a lot of questions and you can imagine the dinner table conversations in our early years, but what I had to pay attention to was people were getting healed, people were getting helped and they were coming from all over the world for sessions with her. So I had to pay attention to that, and eventually, we wrote the book together that you refer to Energy Medicine, and for two years, we cut our practices down to half time so that we could really focus on that book and I interviewed her and I would ask tough questions.

When I was at Hopkins, I had studied innovative psychotherapies and I had learned to really separate the parts that are really valid from the parts that are really fluff. And so I would ask these questions and she had answers that really satisfied my scientific mind as well as the part of me that was interested in the clinical aspects of what works. So I got into energy medicine through marriage. But then a number of years ago, about I think 1997 or ’98, I was running a supervision group in Ashland, Oregon where we lived at the time, and in Ashland, this supervision group had about a dozen therapists and I was leading it and one of them had learned one of the tapping therapies, one of the energy psychology therapies. And I’ve never heard of that before.

And she was real excited about it and she was bringing it to the group and I was really irritated because it looks so strange. You’re tapping on the body, what does that have to do with psychological improvement anyway? And there was no research. Psychologists pay attention to research, there was none at the time and there was no explanation of why it works, why there were massive claims that it cures all these different psychological issues very quickly, but there was no research. So I was just … I mean, I wasn’t rude to her, I was professional, but I steered her away from bringing this discussion into my supervision group.

And it turns out that, when you really judge something really hard like that, it comes back to bite you, so here I am talking to you as an advocate of this method. And the journey to get there was very interesting because as a psychologist, I was really interested in aspects of it that were different from what Donna was interested in. And after we wrote our book, we started doing the workshop circuit and about 15% of the people that come to Donna’s classes are psychotherapists and they started asking me about energy psychology. And I really did not know anything. And so you have a choice, you can admit it, you can fake it or you can learn something.

And just as life would happen, we did a weekend workshop that ended on Sunday at noon. And one of the participants was a psychologist who said, “My psychology group meets once a month in our city and tonight is when they’re meeting and they’re going to be introducing these tapping therapies. Would you like to come?” And I felt like, “Well, okay, this is my opportunity to learn something about it, and if psychologists are paying that much attention to it, maybe it’s worth it to move forward on it.” And so I attended and it was a career changing evening for me. Can I tell about it? It’s a little-

 

TS: Please, please.

 

DF: So there’s about a dozen psychologists meeting in someone’s living room. And the way it was set up was that the therapist that was just learning this tapping method, he was learning what’s called thought field therapy, which was the original form of energy psychology. And he had invited his colleagues to present a client that they were having difficulty with. So the therapist doing the demonstration and the client are sitting in the room facing one another in chairs and the other psychologists are all in a circle around them. So he starts to ask some questions and I’m feeling very skeptical and I was put at ease by the questions he asked. They were the same kind of questions I would’ve asked. I asked about the history of her issue and it turns out that she was terrified of being in closed spaces. She had severe claustrophobia. And so that was where we started.

And then he asked her about her attempts to overcome it and she’d actually worked with a couple of therapists to no avail. It still wasn’t working. And so that seemed like a really reasonable way to go. And then he had her give a rating, “Imagine you’re in an elevator and give a rating of zero to 10 of the amount of distress you feel and 10 is extreme, zero is none at all.” And I was familiar with that. It’s called the subjective units of distress and it’s using a lot of different therapies and I used it with systematic desensitization. So I was really comfortable.

But then the next part, he starts doing these incantations where she is tapping on these points on her skin and saying “Fear of elevators, fear of elevators, fear of elevators, fear of elevators, fear of elevators,” and I’m thinking, “Oh my God, he’s giving her these post-hypnotic suggestions to just deepen this fear into her.” And so I’m not expecting anything to come of it, but after about two minutes of that and these other strange things he had her do with her eyes and counting, this does not look like what I studied in graduate school. But after just about a couple of minutes, he has her give it another rating. So the first time it was a 10, now it was a seven. So I’m thinking, “Well, that’s interesting.”

And then they do another round, a couple more minutes and another rating of what it feels like to be in an elevator and it’s down to a five. And I’m just not believing my eye. So I’m thinking, “Well, this is maybe some sort of Stockholm syndrome where she’s developed some affection for him and she’s just playing along, so it’s not to embarrass him in front of his colleagues.” Then another round of tapping and she’s back up to a seven and I’m thinking, “I knew it wouldn’t work. It’s just the fluctuations you get when you’re doing it in front of a group.” But he asked her, “Well, what was going on in your thoughts when it went up to a seven?”

And she said, “I had a memory I haven’t had for decades. When I was about eight years old, me and my older brothers and their friends were playing with a big appliance carton, like a refrigerator might come in and one of us would get in and the rest of us would push it. And it was great fun. And when it was my turn though, they pushed it up against a wall and the only end that was open was pushed against the wall and I couldn’t get out. And they left and they made fun of me as they left with some remarks. And there I am in this dark space and I am trapped. And I screamed and screamed and screamed and I don’t remember how long it was, but I was terrified.” And so you see her going into a 10, she’s getting really scared. And I’m thinking, “Okay, so something good came out of this. Now the therapist that’s working with her every week, he can work with talk therapy, and maybe after a year, she will have reduced her fear of closed spaces and maybe she have worked with her anger towards her brother, all the things that a therapist would do with that kind of a memory.”

But he didn’t stop there. He started having her tap on her terror of being in that space. And as he taps after a few rounds, it goes all the way down to zero. And then he focuses on the sensations in her body and taps on those. That goes down to zero. And then he taps on her sense of betrayal with her brothers. That goes down to zero. Aspect after aspect until everything he can think of that might be related to that memory is down to zero. So at that point he goes back to the elevator and now it’s down to a three. And that very quickly goes down to a zero as they tap.

And so everybody’s looking at this and impressed because usually you just don’t see results that fast. Even with systematic desensitization and other behavioral methods which are very effective, it doesn’t happen that quickly. And so one of the psychologists … Psychologists like to test things. So he pointed out that there’s a hall closet, a coat closet in this living room right off the living room. He said, “What if she gets in that and we see what happens?” So the therapist was very sensitive. He said, “You’re not trying to prove anything to anyone. We don’t want to retraumatize you. If you feel at all anxious, just open the door and step out.”

And so she goes in and a minute goes by. And imagine a dozen psychologists all hovering around this coat closet and another minute goes by and it really feels like a long time. And then after three minutes or so, it seemed to me, he knocks on the door and says, “Are you okay?” And she comes out and she’s exuberant. She couldn’t imagine feeling really calm and safe in that situation. And so she is happy and everybody is impressed and starts to congratulate her and congratulate the therapist, except me. I’m looking back and saying, “Okay, I think I see what’s going on. I think that this is a social psychology experiment to see how gullible psychologists can be,” but it wasn’t. I’ve now had that happen so many times where very quickly are able to overcome a problem that has been lifelong, particularly phobias are very, very responsive to this and although it works with PTSD or really severe issues.

So to go back to your question, the difference between energy medicine and energy psychology is that energy psychology uses a fraction of the systems that energy medicine works with. Energy medicine in Donna’s version works with nine different systems, ones you’ve heard of like the meridians, the aura, the chakras, nine systems. And energy psychology, you work with only one system, which is the acupuncture meridians. You’re working with about a dozen acupuncture points and tapping on them. And the purpose is for working with psychological issues.

In Donna’s work, you are working with both psychological and mostly physical issues because you’re balancing the energies and it helps with all of that. With energy psychology, you’re lasering in on psychological issues and you’re using just one set of techniques. The techniques are so much easier to learn than with Donna’s system. Donna has a two-year certification program before people can practice in her name. In energy psychology, it’s a very brief program. You’re much more skilled at it if you’re already trained as a therapist, but a lot of people are using it effectively even though they have no background as psychotherapists.

And the other question you asked is, what’s the difference between energy psychology and tapping? Energy psychology in its most well-known form, in the forms that have really been researched the most, are thought field therapy and thought field therapy’s derivative, which is emotional freedom techniques or EFT. And both of those, their main procedure is to tap on acupuncture points while talking about the issue. So the woman was saying, “Fear of elevators, fear of elevators,” but pretty soon she’s talking about her terror of being this dark space and then she’s talking, tapping on her anger towards her brothers. And so you keep on changing the wording and that really focuses in. You change it as the distress decreases.

So energy medicine is the overall field. Energy psychology is a derivative in the way that psychiatry is a derivative of general medicine. General medicine is much broader. Psychiatry focuses on mental health issues. Energy medicine is much broader. Energy psychology focuses on mental health issues.

 

TS: David, what a thorough explanation. Thank you so much. One of the interesting things I learned in reading the new book Tapping is that now there are something like 150+ studies that are considered quite credible, that show that tapping really works. And yet when I picked up the book Tapping, and I’m sure some people who are tuning in here, still carry with them some level of skepticism about what you’re talking about. They heard the whole story that you said and they have their own arms crossed, hanging back saying, “Well, what about the placebo effect?” or, “She liked the therapist. He was kind. That kind of relational kindness can heal anything.”

And I’d be curious though, this is a slight podcast intervention, for those of us who tend towards skepticism, is there some kind of energy medicine move we could make to help us be more open in general and as we carry on this conversation? Donna, do you have something you could offer us?

 

DE: Let’s see. Well, gosh, there’s a lot of different techniques. Nobody’s ever asked me that before, but a way of just releasing and letting go some of your skepticism. Let’s see, what would I do? Would I do-

 

DF: Well, one of the things that happens when people go into that skepticism is they go into their left brain and they’re just judging it and they’re not as much open to something that doesn’t make sense to the left brain, so if you could do something that helps balance the right and left hemispheres.

 

DE: Well, one simple little thing you can do is take your hand and put it on your right hand on your left shoulder, okay? And just push your fingers in and drag them across and then come all the way down to your opposite hip and then come on the other side on the left hand, on the right shoulder and pull it all the way across and do several of those and help the energies cross over so that you’re not just stuck on one side of your brain. I’m going to give another one right now, okay? Everybody, rub your hands together and shake them off. Lay your fingers over your closed eyelids.

Now this first movement, it deals with a regulator flow. So you’re going to take a deep breath in. As you let your breath out, drag your fingers to your temples. Now right here where you are, these temples govern, fight, flight, freeze, but also your control in your left brain. So just take one deep breath there. Now you’re going to go up over your ears, down around behind your ears and then drag down your neck and hang on your shoulders and you just trace the meridian backwards called triple warmer that keeps you in control and thinking skeptically and judgmentally. And then you came down your vagus nerve, which governs your parasympathetic nervous system, which just helps you let go.

And now drag them across and just put your hands on your heart chakra. It’s just coming home to yourself and just feeling safe and trusting something, maybe something new you’ll be able to see.

 

TS: Wonderful, thank you. Okay, so here we are with our balanced left and right brains. We hear 150 peer-reviewed scientific studies. This is very impressive. How come there’s so much questioning about the validity, the pseudoscience of something like tapping when there are this whole body of scientific evidence that someone can look up and reference. David, do you have some understanding of that?

 

DF: I have a lot of understanding of that because I started off there, and because it looks so strange because there was in the early days when this was first introduced in the 1980s and there was no research, there was no really good explanations, certainly not explanations that fit the scientific model. The explanations drew from acupuncture. They talked about thought fields, things that scientists don’t know how to measure. And to make it much worse, they were getting a lot of publicity, a lot of … They were on radio shows which were more popular at the time, they were on TV, they were in magazines claiming extraordinary results with no research backing.

Psychologists consider themselves gatekeepers of the pseudoscientists that entered because so many people have different theories, different methods that they claim are going to help people live better lives. And so the psychology community came down very strong against this method for reasons that in my mind are totally understandable. Some people say the reason the therapists are against it is because it’s faster and so they’re protecting their turf. I don’t think that’s the main factor. I think that what happened is that it made such a negative first impression on the professional community and it’s true that you never get a second chance to make a first impression.

And that impression has just held, it’s just held for so many people. And then it’s not only the people that were around the 1980s, it’s that those opinion setters set the opinions of people that have come after it. So in the field, it is still very suspect. Now that is changing, as you mentioned, those 150 studies that are all in peer-reviewed journals and some of them in really excellent journals, topic, American Psychological Association Journal, for instance, are now showing that, in 98% of those, it’s now 176 is the latest count. Those 176 studies, 98% of them showed that, in standard psychological measures beforehand, like measures of anxiety, measures of depression, measures of addiction taken before treatment and then there’s a treatment, then they take it afterwards, that 98% showed statistically significant improvement on at least one targeted issue that was being worked on in the therapy. So there’s that.

There’s also other studies that show that it is the tapping. It’s not just the caring therapist. It’s not just that he uses methods that also are used by cognitive behavioral therapy because it does challenge incorrect beliefs. It does a lot of things that other therapies do, but the tapping is a critical part for the speed that we see. So it is changing. There was just a study where psychological science influences public policy and there were 396 instances where some form of energy psychology was referenced in either the public policy itself or in the ways that the public policy was reached.

So that’s an extraordinary thing. So you have things in the Veterans Administration, you have things in Kaiser Hospital System, you have things really showing up now more and more. So it’s still outside the norm, but it’s getting more and more acceptance. And in terms of popularity with the general public, it’s probably the most popular method ever. There’s half a million people every year watch the Tapping Summit that Nick Ortner and the Tapping Solution sponsor. So you really have a lot. There’s an app that’s used that’s massively popular and so you really are seeing it take root now in the culture.

 

TS: One question I have, Donna, for you, when David spoke about your differences that started in your relationship and how you see energy, this is something that you perceive, how do you perceive what’s happening when people are tapping? What does it look like to you?

 

DE: It is quite amazing. I see, for instance, if somebody was tapping right there, can you see?

 

TS: Yes, on David’s hand, on the back of David’s hand.

 

DE: Right, on the back of David’s hand, what I see is a pulsing, a pulsing that goes right up the arm. And it’s an amazing thing that takes off. Energy is always moving. This is different. It’s a pulsing that’s with the heart and it goes all the way up into the head. And I see that all over. I watch people. I watch a person’s aura go out further. I watch different colors. It often depends on what the person is going through that they’re trying to tap themselves out of, but it is very fascinating. And once in a while, I’m going to throw something in, okay? Once in a while, I see a really resistance in someone and that’s where I see that energy medicine could come in like if the energy isn’t crossing over.

Energy is meant to cross over from the right hemisphere to the left side of the body and the left hemisphere to the right side of the body. And if it is not, there is more resistance in the person for changing. So sometimes just to get out of that situation, suddenly the energy starts pulsing again. And it is very fascinating and you know it’s going to work because you watch it.

 

TS: But let me just ask you a more general question about seeing energy and what it’s like for you, Donna, because pulsing is like a rhythmic quality, colors are different. What are you seeing right now as we’re having this conversation? There’s so many different types of color, form, sparkles. What do you see?

 

DE: Looking at you, I see-

 

TS: Oh, somehow we got to that. I wasn’t necessarily going there, but we got there.

 

DE: I see lots of violet around you, a lot of violet color around you. And there are other colors too, but the violet is the strongest one. I see a lot of movement. You have a lot of movement in your energy, and some people look, they don’t move as much, the energy doesn’t move as much, but if they start moving their own energy, it will move more and more and people get healthier and healthier the more the energy moves. And so let’s see. A different thing that I see when I look through electronically, it doesn’t look as strong or as full, but I still see it.

 

TS: Let me ask a question. When you meet someone in the flesh, who to you looks really healthy, really vibrant, really gorgeous, glorious, you just want to go up and give them a hug, what does their energy look like to you?

 

DE: Their auras are big in at least seven bands around their body. They’re colorful and they have distinct edges to each band and they have a lot of figure eights between the different bands. I can see their streaming meridians. I can see their chakras that are … And with every person, different chakras will be louder than others because that’s an individual you sort of thing. And all of these things … I would like to say something because that’s always a little bit difficult because I don’t want people to think that I’m special because I can see energy. I really believe all babies see energy when they’re born. They see energy and they sense a lot of things, but if the parents or whoever the caretakers are, if they don’t talk about it in that first year of life, it tends to go dormant and it’s in there somewhere, but it goes dormant.

And I simply had a mother who saw energy, so she always kept it alive. She’s always saying, “What do you see around that person? Do you see that purple? Do you see that blue?” Whatever it was, she kept it alive. And so my brother, my sister and I all saw energy and we all felt sorry for my father because he didn’t and we couldn’t understand since I thought everybody in the world saw energy except for this strange man who was my father who couldn’t see and I worried about him a lot. But one of the things that I think is so interesting is that I see a lot of people who have been studying with me for years have suddenly without planning on it started seeing energy. It’s like your senses open and it may open to seeing. Most people open to feeling the energy a lot, but I’ve known people who open to hearing the energy. So you just start opening to individual ways of relating to energy.

 

TS: Well, I have to say, I think you’re very special, Donna. I’ve met a lot of people and I’ve never met anyone quite like you. Okay, now back to the Tapping book here. In the foreword, Jean Houston writes, “The practice of tapping sets in motion an activation and a deactivation within the intricate landscape of the human brain.” And I wanted to understand more, what’s being activated and what’s being deactivated when we do the tapping protocol.

 

DF: Great question. So here’s how it basically works. And it’s really interesting to me to hear how Donna sees [inaudible 00:35:32] because it corresponds with my understanding, but it’s also different. So when you tap on an acupuncture point, acupuncture points have different electrical properties to points that are nearby. And when you tap on them, what happens is that electricity is generated because these cells, there’s a kind of cell that, when you apply pressure to it, it turns the pressure into an electrical signal. And that is not just from energy psychology. That’s known in physics. It has its own name and it’s called piezoelectricity. And so that is established, so you tap, it generates an electrical impulse.

Now how does that impulse get through the body? It goes through the tissues that go all around the body and that tissue has the connective tissue that’s all around your body, is made up largely of collagen. Collagen is a semiconductor. So collagen can take that impulse and bring it to anywhere in the body very quickly. Whereas if it’s just going through the nervous system, then it has to go from neuron to synapse to neuron to synapse. It’s much slower with … It’s still fast, but it’s almost instant with tapping. Now the next question is, well, where does it go? And what’s very interesting is it gets attracted to the parts of the brain that are activated by what the person is doing.

So when the woman that was tapping on the fear of elevators was thinking about elevators, she was from that really triggering vision, was making her limbic system go into arousal. So her limbic system is going into arousal because of the thoughts and words that she’s using. But the tapping is attracted. Attracts signals to that part of the brain and signals that bring it down, bring down the arousal. And so the brain is getting opposing messages. It’s getting the message to be in threat response by her imagery, but it’s also getting the message directly from the tapping to reduce that. So there, you have the reduction of the response. So that’s why the person is able to talk about the issue without being retraumatized.

So that’s half of what Jean was saying, is that’s the part of deactivating. The part of activating is that’s supposing that the person is thinking about something that’s very stressful. Now a part of the brain that also gets activated in the thought is the prefrontal cortex. So that’s the part that has to do with logic. That’s the part that has to do with managing distress. And that attracts signals that increase activity. So you have some parts of the brain get activated and some parts get deactivated. So that’s basically what Jean was talking about with that sentence.

 

TS: And in the way that you put forward the tapping protocol, it seems very important right from the beginning to add in a statement of acceptance for yourself with whatever painful memory or situation you might be working with. Why is that acceptance statement so important right from the jump?

 

DF: Right. I think that’s important for any psychotherapy, that when a person is working, trying to overcome something they can’t accept in themselves, that there is more and more resistance. Whereas if I can accept my anxiety, if I can accept my anger, then I can get into some teamwork with my whole psyche. So I am working rather … I’m working with an appreciation that there’s a reason for that anger, there’s a reason for that anxiety. I’m not just pretending like it’s crazy or shouldn’t be there. I’m just working with it and working to overcome it in ways that aren’t fighting it, but more like an Aikido of working in harmony with it.

And I think that most therapies recognize that, but energy psychologist just starts there. They start with accepting where the person … Whatever the symptom is that you’re working on, you begin by accepting it and you really … Because people often judge themselves about what they want to change, that, “Yeah, I have this addiction and I’m a terrible person because I have this addiction,” but if you begin with really energetically building in acceptance, it’s more than just saying, “I accept it,” it’s energetically building it in, then it paves the way for the next steps to be much more effective.

 

TS: Maybe you can give us an example of an acceptance statement, because throughout the book, you emphasized the different ways these acceptance statements can be powerful and you can also adjust them so they’re really accurate for where you’re at.

 

DF: “Even though my daughter is really angry at me because I come home drunk so often, I deeply love and accept myself,” can be that simple. Just naming what happens that is negative and pairing it with acceptance. What that does is it begins to make it so that when the person has that awareness of the bad things they’re doing and it brings up the acceptance, so you’re making a pairing. Carl Rogers was one of my mentors, one of the really great psychotherapists back from the ’50s, ’60s said, “Until I accept who I am, I cannot change.” And so by really building in energetically, so it’s not just, “I’m going to accept myself.” It’s, “Okay, energetically, there’s an acceptance that’s created,” then you’re able to move forward with that simplest statement.

The second part, “I deeply love and accept myself,” that can change. It can make it all kinds of it, but as long as you’re pairing it with something that’s positive and empowering.

 

TS: And, Donna, do you see that a certain way when someone is bringing acceptance to their situation, it shows up and you perceive it a certain way versus when they’re judging themselves?

 

DE: Yes. Oh, very much so. One of the things, there’s a certain type of person who constantly … It’s like that inner judgment is constantly there and you can see it energetically like an energy that spirals back in, just spirals back in and it stops them from improving or getting any better at all because they’re in a loop of negativity and just lifting them out of the judgment against change.

 

TS: So I came to the Tapping book with both a level of openness and even excitement, but also some questions. I had some questions. I’ve not been historically a tapper myself, but I went at it and I was like, “Okay, I’m going to do it.” And I started tapping and working with it and I was like, “God, this is really interesting. And not only that, this is real work.” That’s what I discovered early on, “This is real work.” I thought I was just going to tap a few points and it is either going to work or it wasn’t going to work. But David, the way that you teach it, you’re like, “Okay, now if it’s not working at the level that you’re really looking for in terms of this reduction of your subjective units of distress, you have to go on a detective journey to figure out what’s actually happening.”

And then I was like, “Oh my God, this is serious soul archaeological investigation here,” which I didn’t realize. I didn’t realize that was part of the method. And you go into the various reasons why it’s possible that the first few rounds of tapping on an issue don’t give you the results you want because there’s a lot more going on. So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about that, what you’ve found are those obstacles and what it means to start sniffing them out.

 

DF: That’s where the art comes in. But what’s really interesting and very hopeful about this field is that there’s so much that just the superficial, just tapping on the symptom, tapping on what you want to deal with will really help it. If you’re, say, coming into a tele seminar like this and you’re nervous about it. If I do, if I’m nervous about it … I knew it was you, so I wasn’t, but I can just … There are some webinars I’m giving out with people that are really quite skeptical and not real open to what it is that I’m talking about. And I just go in and saying, “I’m feeling anxious about this. This is really a little scary.” And then from there, from tapping on that, I can go into, “I’ve been doing this for 20 years. I know a lot about this. I’m going to be able to answer any question that comes my way.”

So I can start with the fearful parts, the difficult parts and very quickly move into self-affirming parts that are really empowering. But it isn’t always that simple. So if I start out at a, say, level six in the SUD, subjective units of distress, and after a few rounds, I’m still at a six, that’s when you look deeper. And so at that point, I might ask, I might say, “Okay, what am I feeling my body right now? What am I … Okay, I am feeling some tension in my stomach and I’m feeling a tightness in my throat. Okay. When have I felt this before?” And you write it back in time. It’s called an affect bridge. You write it back in time to an earlier time that you had this feeling.

And it’s amazing how quickly, if you start with the body sensations, how quickly you are back there to maybe age five or age 10 where there was some incident where maybe you were speaking to a teacher that was skeptical of what you were saying, who didn’t take you in, who maybe made fun of you or ridiculed you. And so then you start working with that on the tapping and you find that’s the detective work, that that needed to get resolved before you’re going to be comfortable talking to this interviewer that you’re about to talk with. So that’s just a rough idea of how that goes, but it can be very complex. Donna? Yeah.

 

DE: No, I was just thinking. Not too long or a couple of years ago, I had difficulty going up to my daughter’s house because she had two cats and I knew that I was allergic to long-hair cats. And so before getting up there … No, once I was there, that was how it happened, I was very allergic once I was there and I found myself tapping on not just to make the allergy go away, but I don’t want to upset my daughter that I’m allergic to her cats. And just tapping all over, and boy, right in front of the cats, my allergy went away. And since then, I’ve never had allergies One time, before we got there, we tapped before I got there and I had no allergies. And now my other daughter has two cats, so it’s very good thing.

 

TS: Now I want to talk more about when tapping doesn’t work, but before we get there, I just want to say to those people who hear this and still have, it’s not just a skeptical mind, but it’s this negative judgment. I was saying to my wife, “Why do you think it is? Why do you think I’ve been judgmental about tapping and what do you think, you see people touch it?” And she said, “I think some of it is we live in a culture where we go to healers and we let them do things to us, like the acupuncturist sticks the needles in or the energy healer even works on us, but now we’re doing this to ourselves and we’re not used to caring for ourselves. We think it’s weird for people to massage themselves.” And I thought, “That’s a very interesting observation that we don’t have this cultural acceptance of, ‘I’m going to attend to myself in this way.'” I wonder if you have a comment about that.

 

DF: Well, your whole career is about that.

 

DE: Yeah, that’s what my whole career is about, is about teaching people how to heal themselves and not be dependent on somebody outside of you to do it. I actually think it works better after a while. Your body learns to receive it from your yourself and it is empowering and it changes your life forever if you know that you don’t have to be stuck with whatever it is you’ve come to. Yeah, it just changes everything. And I think that children in kindergarten should be taught how to heal themselves or how to get over a painful experience with a teacher or another kid in class, how to do it right then and help themselves and make it acceptable in the culture. So that’s where I’m at.

 

DF: Well-

 

TS: I think it’s so important. I guess what I’m trying to say is I think it does go against a cultural status quo in a certain way.

 

DF: It does. And Donna, in these last 15, 16 years, her organization has trained about 1,800 certified Eden Energy Medicine practitioners and one of their biggest problems is that people want the practitioner to do it to them, so they won’t do the homework, even though we know that the homework really can shift these deep patterns in their physiology, but you have to do it regularly and you do it on yourself. And so convincing people to do it when they just want it done to them is really a large challenge in Donna’s work and somewhat with the tapping too.

 

DE: Yeah, I just like to say that, if you go to have somebody work on you, sometimes that can be wonderful, but it doesn’t change that sense of empowerment that you get when you start seeing, “Oh my God, look at what I just shifted. Look at what … Oh my God.” You want to do it once you’ve crossed over that hump. It changes you because you want to affect yourself. And I’ve seen children, really young kids being able to change something and then to go all the way through school being empowered to know that they’re not stuck with whatever’s come their way is really an important thing that each culture needs to take on and help themselves with.

 

TS: When tapping doesn’t work. One of the interesting detective work-type inquiries that I took from the book was to see, “Do you have some kind of,” I think you call them, David, “psychological reversals?” I would call them kind of unconscious loyalties, like a reason you don’t want to change. “Actually, I say I want to change, but I don’t want to change because if I did, XYZ would happen.” And I thought, this is a good question for David and Donna because maybe you see this, Donna, also when people come to you with a physical issue and you’re able to sniff out why they don’t want to actually go through the healing process they say they want to go through. So I wonder if you could each talk about that and how we can find our own, I guess you would call them obstacles, our own psychological reversals inside.

 

DF: Well, some of them are obvious like if they’re secondary gains. So if I’m totally depressed and I can’t really take care of myself, then people have to cook for me and have to do things for me or I don’t have to go to work. So those are really obvious ones, but a lot of them are much more subtle. So somebody might have whatever the symptom is, there might be a part of them that feels, “I don’t deserve to get over this symptom. I don’t deserve to get over this problem,” or they might have a belief that, “It’s impossible to get over this problem,” or they might have a belief that, “It’s not safe to get over this problem.” A lot of people with phobias have that, that, “If I get over my fear of heights, then I will be in real danger.”

The truth is that no one who has gotten cured of a fear of heights has ever jumped off a tall building. It just does not happen. But there is that sense that, “I have to hold onto this fear, because if I let go of it, I’m not going to be safe.” And that particularly happens in the interpersonal realm where, “If I let go of my shyness, I’m going to get judged.” So you have a lot of kinds of … So the main ones are, “It’s not possible to overcome,” “It’s not safe to overcome it,” “I don’t deserve to overcome it,” I won’t still be me if I overcome this issue.” So those are some of the main psychological reversals that people have.

 

DE: Yeah, when I had my private practice, I’d often, not often, but quite a bit, deal with somebody who would admit that they saw energy when they were a child, but they were either scolded by their parents or a teacher or someone else for even saying that as if they were liars, that they absolutely can’t go there again. They’d come to me because they’d hoped that I could help them move out of that terror of letting somebody think that there’s something cuckoo or crazy about them that they would see. One of the interesting things is, have you ever thrown your hand up to your forehead and said, “Oh my God”? People tend to do that.

 

TS: For sure.

 

DE: Yeah, they take their hands away. Well, if you have something like that going on and you think about it and think about it in the same way of tapping, you think about exactly what’s going on, when you think about this and either you or somebody else holds these points right on the forehead, and I can’t tell you how long it’ll take, but what happens is you draw the blood back up into your forebrain and move things, move things in your brain and you’re lifted up out of that fear. And I used to do that a lot with people, so that they would be lifted out. And even recently at a class we were just at, somebody came up to me and said that she was stopped. She couldn’t go any further in it, even though she felt very capable and very successful in her private practice. She couldn’t teach it because it makes her look like a weirdo or a crazy person.

And so that’s what we worked on and I had her … First, I held her points, but then she held her own and held her own until she just felt lifted up out of it. And there are so many simple things a person can do energetically, but because we have a big no-no in our culture, people have just been really reluctant, but I see a change. I see a change in the world, and it’s really good.

 

TS: One final thing I want to talk to you about, because in the book Tapping: Self-Healing with the Transformative Power of Energy Psychology, you cover a lot of different applications. The whole two-third, second, first-third of the book, you introduced the basic technique and this detective work and psychological reversals and you explained it in quite some detail. That’s when I came to the conclusion it was real work. I was like, “Wow, it’s a lot to work with here.” Then the rest of the book, you look at worry, anxiety, PTSD, sadness and depression, habit change and addiction, peak performance and sports performance, more harmonious relationships.

And then a section that really got my attention, which was on disaster recovery and responding when there are crises. And you have a quote in the beginning of that section from the chair of the Veterans Administration Committee that first named PTSD, a gentleman named Charles Figley. And the quote is, “Energy psychology is rapidly proving itself to be among the most powerful psychological interventions available to disaster relief workers for helping the survivors as well as the workers themselves.” And this really got my attention at a time, I think when we’re aware so much of crises all around the world, people who are suffering from various kinds of serious traumatic impacts, how tapping could actually be tremendously helpful for relief workers and for people who are suffering. And I wonder if you can speak some to that and if you have a vision for that, David.

 

DF: It’s very effective because what you’re doing is, when people are in overwhelm, they’ve been traumatized, they’re overwhelmed and you have a way that you can send deactivating signals to the parts of the brain that are in overwhelm, it calms it down. It lets them begin to find other ways of coping, they may be under tremendous stress to find a new place to live and if they can really be more centered as they take on those tasks. So it has been used now in more than 30 countries. And I’ll tell a vignette that that’s really interesting, I think, is that a woman who had worked in Rwanda and had worked in Rwanda after the genocide, there were so many orphans, so many kids who had actually seen their parents killed. And now in orphanages, they were having PTSD 10 years later and they were having flashbacks. They were having nightmares.

And these weren’t just mild flashbacks. They were going back to watching their parents be killed 10 years later, now they’re 13 instead of three. And because Rwanda’s a poor country, a lot of these orphans were not in orphanages. They were in what’s called orphan heads of households. So they were just put together with other orphans and the oldest one became the head of the household and a woman named Lori Leyden, a psychologist who’s done a lot of work with the kind of work we’re talking about, had worked with a lot of these orphan heads of household with the tapping, taught that to them. They then taught it to their households.

And so it really, really made a difference and it was so successful that she got a group of them into what she called what were basically people who had really overcome their PTSD through tapping. And she called them ambassadors and she would hook them up because she was called from all over the world to come in after disasters and she would get them to talk on Zoom to kids that had just gone through something. And so her name was Lori Leyden and she was called into the aftermath of Sandy Hook. And she got a team together of many tapping therapists and they made a real difference in the recovery of that community.

One story that really touches me deeply is that there was a boy who was 12 and his six-year-old brother was murdered during the shooting. And for two months, he was so angry he would not go back to school. He was not interested in the tapping. His mother was really helped by it, but he just was just so angry and just wouldn’t go back to school. And so she put him together with two of the ambassadors from Rwanda over the internet and they talked for a couple of hours, had a long talk. They showed him how to tap. They really spoke his language. They were about his age. They knew what he had gone through and he tapped and it really made a difference for him, so much so that the next day he went back to school and he gave everybody a speech about how important it is not only to be healing within your own community, but to be aware of the suffering of people in other communities that have been traumatized.

And that shifted everything in terms of his healing and he then created a foundation to raise money so that these ambassadors from Rwanda could go to college. And they put some of them through college. And then in a wonderful ending to this story, he got to Rwanda and met the ambassadors in person. So that just, for me, epitomizes the power of this work in situations that are just unspeakably horrible, but you still have to do as much healing as you can. You still have to empower people to cope and move forward with their lives.

 

TS: I’m so glad the science is there in this north of 150 studies to confirm this so that funds can flow in this direction in a powerful way. As we come to a close, Donna, I have one final question for you. One of the most joyous, not just spokespersons for energy medicine, but joyous people I’ve ever met in my whole life, what’s the source of your joy?

 

DE: Oh, whoa. The source of my joy? First of all, it’s inside of me. I love the things outside of me, but I think energy is part of it. Knowing that energy is flowing everywhere and the trees and the birds and the humans and all of us, that it makes me feel at one with it all and that there is a reason and a purpose and it’s beautiful. And so I have a lot of … I feel in awe of it a lot and that brings a lot of joy just to be in awe. And since wonder-

 

DF: And you have to disclose something, which is that, according to family lore, Donna was born laughing.

 

TS: I believe it. I believe it. And to end, David, I want to just take a deep bow of respect to you because you contacted me, maybe it was three, four years ago, something like that and you had this notion of a Tapping book, but you knew it would take a lot of energy when I shared with you that just like you and Donna wrote the book on energy medicine, there could be a book on tapping that would be so definitive, such a tremendous resource, so strong that it would last for decades and decades. And you were like, “That’s going to take a lot, Tami, for me to put my life force into a project like that,” and you did it. And I just want to bow to you and thank you for pouring your intelligence and your heart and your soul force into the book Tapping. Thank you so much.

 

DF: Thank you, Tami.

 

DE: Thank you.

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