Tapping their way to feeling better

A procedure, the emotional freedom technique, has proponents in the area.

Lori Taylor was suffering from back pain.

The Sellersville woman consulted a doctor who suggested pain medication, but Taylor said she wasn’t interested in just covering up the pain with drugs.

“I wanted to get to an answer that would fix the problem,” Taylor said.

In looking for an alternative to traditional medicine, she found Heidi Garis, a Sellersville specialist in a procedure known as the emotional freedom technique.

With EFT, a person repeats a stock phrase, focusing on the specific pain or problem, while tapping gently on various parts of the body, or meridian points: the side of the hand, the top of the head, the side of the eyes, below the nose, on the chin, the collarbone – many of the same points used in acupuncture. The therapy was developed by a Stanford-educated engineer and is used by a number of natural healing centers and practitioners in the area.

Many people describe EFT and “tapping” as “emotional acupuncture” without the needles, said Garis, a licensed massage therapist with a master’s degree in clinical social work.

“It looks silly and feels silly at first, but the effects are just jaw-droppingly profound,” Garis said.

Critics of the alternative therapy say its effectiveness is more likely due to the placebo effect, or that the act of tapping various body parts in a sequence serves to distract a person from the pain or anxiety they are feeling, and thus appear to have cured it.

A 2003 study published in The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice found that “the reported effectiveness of EFT is attributable to characteristics it shares with more traditional therapies,” rather than the benefits being “uniquely dependent on the ‘tapping of meridians.’ ”

Still, whatever the root cause of relief, proponents of the technique are convinced of its effectiveness. Taylor, for example, said that after only a few sessions with Garis, she felt a “pretty dramatic reduction” in her pain.

She also was able to connect the back pain to emotional issues: the stress she carries as a social worker, “trying to help too many people at once.”

“It seems like you kind of carry that in your body,” she said of the stress.

Such results are part of what attracted Garis to tapping in the first place. The 45-year-old woman started her career as a psychotherapist, but was frustrated by how slow change was for her clients.

“Sometimes psychotherapy is great,” she said. “Sometimes you get stuck in a hamster wheel.”

Instead of pursuing a doctorate in psychology as she had once planned, Garis took a friend’s suggestion that she teach English as a second language in Japan. What was supposed to be a short hiatus turned into a decade-long detour.

Garis learned to speak and write Japanese and opened her own translating and consulting business in the country.

In Japan, Garis was also introduced to “a holistic way of living,” she said.

“My mind was opened there,” she said.

When she returned to Bucks County in 1999, she became a massage therapist and later added EFT to her repertoire.

Garis says the concept behind tapping is that our physical symptoms are often connected to our emotions, anxieties and stresses.

“The body wants to balance, the mind wants to heal,” she said. “It’s our natural state.”

With EFT, clients focus on the negatives first in order to clear them away.

“It’s not like going to a therapist where you talk about how you feel and happy places,” said Brina Sweet of Doylestown, another of Garis’ clients. “You do the opposite of what psychiatrists ask you to do.”

Sweet said that at first the treatment seems like “rubbish,” but one of the things that convinced her was her mother’s experience with tapping.

Three years ago, Sweet’s mother had cancer and was undergoing chemotherapy, but because her white blood cell count was down, she wasn’t able to finish her treatment.

After a few tapping sessions, her blood cell count bounced back and she was able to finish chemotherapy, Sweet said of her mother who is now cancer-free.

“I really believe she helped me cure my mom’s cancer,” Sweet said.

Sweet herself has monthly appointments with Garis.

“We tap on everything from laundry piles to major life issues +She’s definitely my life coach,” Sweet said. “Some months we do EFT; other months, you just get a good massage.”

Theresa Hegel can be reached at 215-538-6381 or thegel@phillyburbs.com. Follow Theresa on Twitter at twitter.com/theresahegel.

January 02, 2010 02:18 AM