How did this ‘strange’ looking technique come about?

Whilst still a relatively new technique, and not widely known about, tapping has been around since the 1970s. Dr Roger Callahan’s Thought Field Therapy (TFT) was one of the first ‘Energy Psychology’ methods to be developed in the 1980s.

Dissatisfied with the traditional psychotherapeutic models available to him, Dr Callahan (a psychologist) studied Kinesiology alongside other Eastern health practices including those that involved tapping on meridian points.

In 1980 Dr Callahan was working with a patient called Mary who had a severe water phobia.  Having shown no real improvement  with her phobia using conventional psychological techniques, he decided to experiment with tapping on a particular acupressure point related to fear and worry.  To his astonishment, after tapping on that point, Mary announced her phobia was gone and rushed down to his swimming pool to splash water on her face and her phobia never returned.

Dr Callahan spent the next 10 years developing TFT creating a series of different algorithms for specific issues.

In the 1990s, EFT was later developed by Gary Craig, a Stanford trained engineer based on his study of TFT.  Gary simplified the process of TFT to a universal tapping process now known as EFT.

As Dr Peta Stapleton explains in her TED talk on Tapping, psychological therapies have progressed through 4 waves over the years and EFT Tapping may well become part of the up and coming new movement of body-based therapies  

1st Wave - Freud’s psychoanalytic approaches (lying on the couch)

2nd Wave - Behavioural approaches (Skinner’s operant conditioning using positive and negative reinforcers)

3rd Wave - Cognitive approaches including CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) and Mindfulness (more recently)

4th Wave now emerging - Somatic (body based) therapies such as EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) and EFT may well become part of this exciting 4th wave!