[Music] hi Dr Bob Schwarz here welcome to the third video of our miniseries in the first video we discussed how at ASAP we treat EFT as a mindbody approach that's trauma informed I described EFT and how it can be used as either a paliative approach to reduce symptoms or as a specific method to heal stressful and traumatic memories and we briefly reviewed the literature that makes EFT an evidence-based approach for treating trauma anxiety and depression in video two we went deeper into the research and covered some information that you need to know about how recent
findings in Neuroscience help us expand our understanding of energy iology and emotional Freedom techniques I talked about interpersonal neurobiology the amydala poly vagal Theory and memory reconsolidation there's a lot of great information in those videos if you haven't checked them out it's well worth your time now let's talk about how you can integrate EFT with your current practice one of the beautiful powerful things about EFT is that it easily integrates with many other approaches you can combine it with everything from psychodynamic therapy to CBT to mindfulness EMDR to narrative approaches and it can be used
with virtually most types of problems how is that possible any problem you see on this list contains patterns of information and energy that are dysfunctional we call these fixed patterns symptoms emotional disregulation dysfunctional habits and of course limiting or negative beliefs EFT allows you to systematically dismantle all of them so how do you dismantle a belief with EFT it's relatively straightforward let's say a person has a belief that he or she isn't lovable in EFT we call this a tabletop we go through a procedure of finding out specific stressful events that support that belief we
call those table legs for example when one of my clients was 7 years old she overheard her parents fighting and her father said to her mother you know you've never been the same since we had Caroline sometimes I wish we never had her yikes as it turned out dad did love Caroline very deeply he never knew she heard that comment the comment only took a few seconds but it was a littl te trauma that shifted the flow of information and energy in Caroline 7-year-old mind and just like a river over time it cut a deep
Canyon when I saw 43-year-old Caroline who had a belief that she wasn't lovable I asked her how much that memory bothered her she welled up with tears and said a nine so we used EFT to treat that memory and as you and your client find and treat other specific events that act as table legs that hold up the belief or the tabletop the belief collapses and just like Caroline your client's natural inclination for growth takes over usually there are a limited number of events that form a belief for people with really challenging childhoods there are
event clusters that can be treated for instance if someone was sexually abused from the age of 8 to 12 you don't need to work on every specific time it happened the experiences will cluster around specific beliefs and generally you only need to treat one or two or three events for each cluster to release the pattern can you feel the power of this this leads to two other very important points first deconstructing beliefs into specific events can be turned into incredibly powerful and meaningful treatment planning as I mentioned in the first video I'm co- teing asap's
online eftt level one course and I'll talk more about that at the end of this one for now let's segue to a brief section of the actual course about treatment planning that's taught by my colleague Michael De Molina Michael has been asap's lead EFT trainer since 2010 Michael is describing one of the EFT techniques called the personal peace procedure here we ask the client to write down a list of up to 10 specific events tied to a limiting belief or a symptom these are often adverse experiences from childhood and we have them give a sudge
rating for each event and then we systematically go through each one let's hear what Michael has to say so there's a couple of choices here with personal peace procedure one is you can work with your client in session and develop the list in the session itself and then make a copy for yourself make a copy for the client and wow if you think about it you have an individualized treatment plan in your hand not only is that something that you could scan into your EMR or your paper chart and say that this is exactly the
target goals that we'll be working on for the next several sessions but it also gives your client an opportunity to know exactly where the Arc of treatment is going for the next several months and they're going to have a far higher amount of chance of having a successful uh streak of sessions because they know exactly where they're going creating meaningful treatment planning is one of the benefits of systematically neutralizing the effects of adverse childhood experiences but there are even more powerful benefits from treating difficult childhood events namely reducing heart disease diabetes and other medical conditions
saving hundreds of billions of dollars and potentially revolutionizing the Health Care system is this hyperbole am I just being dramatic no this is not Hyperbole and yes I am being a bit tramatic but what I'm about to tell you is also true have you heard of the ace study the adverse childhood experiences study it's actually mind-blowing in the mid 90s a team of intrepid explorers in the United States began to investigate the possibility that negative or Adverse Events in childhood might actually have some effects later in life and in 1998 the results of the study
were published the adverse childhood experiences study evaluated over 177,000 adults and asked them about their history of exposure to what they called adverse childhood experiences or Aces they asked 10 questions about emotional physical or sexual abuse divorce domestic violence household use of drugs alcohol and incarceration for every yes response the person received one point on their a score so what did they find they found that there was a dose response relationship between Aces scores and health outcomes the higher your Ace score the worse your health outcome let me repeat that the the higher your Ace
score the worse your health outcome the link between childhood trauma and adult medical and mental health problems was striking let's look at just some of the findings people with an a score of four were seven times more likely to be alcoholics as adults than people with an a score of zero people with an a score of six or more were 30 times more likely to have attempted suicide among students with an a score of four or higher 51% had learning or behavioral problems in school in contrast only 3% of students with an a score of
Zero have those problems and look at these medical findings people with an a score of four or more were much more likely to have these medical problems than people with a score of zero chronic obstructive pulmonary disease a 250% increase in the likelihood diabetes 160% increase cancer 190% increase in the likelihood heart disease 220% increase and lung disease 390 increase the a study empirically shows a dose related correlation between Early Childhood stress and Trauma and a vast array of medical and psychological problems in adulthood what are the financial impacts of this correlation in 2012 the
US Center for Disease Control released a study showing that the total lifetime estimated Financial costs associated with just one year of confirmed cases of child Mal treatment is about $124 billion but that's only for one year over 10 years it's $1.24 trillion you know with so much at stake you'd think that we'd have healthc care policies that take this data into account right wrong as Monumental as the a study is and as impressive as the CDC study is little has been done to implement changes based on these findings why well I'm sure there are many
reasons but I believe the most important is that the people involved don't know how to take this data and create an effective intervention the Asus folks tend to focus on prevention which is great but prevention alone simply isn't going to be enough what do we do with everyone for the last 50 years who've already had adverse experiences you know where I'm about to go with this don't you imagine this you walk into your Physician's office she gives you the ases test if you get a score of four or higher she sits you down and explains
that you're now at risk for all these emotional and medical conditions and she tells you hey there's something you can do to massive reduce that risk and it will make you feel less stressed and much better about yourself and then she refers you for 5 to 10 sessions of EFT which focus on the very things that gave you a score of four more or think of it this way what if you work with people already diagnosed with heart disease diabetes or cancer and you simply give them the Asis test and based on their responses you
then suggest that they use EFT to reduce the stress that they're carrying in their bodies so that their bodies can focus more energy on healing I mean this is the power of a mindbody approach that's why we made this video series and why we have a more in-depth online training for those of you who want to learn how to use EFT effectively in your practice so this brings me to the final thing I want to talk with you about how can you comfortably integrate EFT or other energy psychology methods into your practice I've just suggested
one way you could do this if you're a physician nurse or a mental health professional working with medical conditions let's discuss some other situations over the years I've done a lot of work with couples using EFT with couples is super easy and effective sooner or later a couple will describe how they trigger each other or they just actually do it in the room and when this occurs I explain that when we're activated it's virtually impossible for things to go well and each person needs to get back to a better emotional place before continuing and then
usually I ask them what they do now and at best they talk about taking a timeout I mean timeouts are better than nothing but taking the time to do some down regulation using EFT is a lot faster and it leads to a much more regulated place so I introduced the idea and showed them how to do it for themselves and this paliative mode the setup statement focuses more on things like you know even though I feel hurt or even though I feel scared or maybe even though I'm angry I deeply and completely accept myself and
so on this is a great self-regulation tool and a fantastic first step of course the real issue is what's being triggered from the past so in session when someone gets upset or brings up an issue I ask them what that issue reminds them of in childhood and then I do an EFT session with one person while the other person is a witness can you imagine how powerful that can be then I often do an EFT session with whatever gets triggered in the witnessing partner can you see how this would weave an entirely different flow of
information and energy in their shared Mind Body field let's switch to a different application of EFT suppose that you work with social anxiety from a c BT point of view how can you include EFT in your work I work with Brian a 25-year-old man with a lot of social anxiety he had problems with groups and dating women he always expected to be rejected Brian catastrophized about what would happen if he did get rejected I taught him deep breathing we looked at his cognitions and how they made him feel worse I remember his comment he said
I get it Dr Bob but even though I understand and I can't stop the feelings from happening they just override my brain that's where EFT is so useful I asked him to tell me some examples from his childhood that seemed to prove his negative beliefs he talked about some serious bullying incidents from middle school so we did EFT on each of those incidents before we worked on them his subcores ranged from 5 to 8 how did I introduce EFT to Brian once Brian told me the experiences from his childhood I said to him wow no
wonder you have those negative beliefs what if we could make it so that those experiences simply no longer bothered you you know he leaned forward and said really how can you do that needless to say he was very motivated I explained that he had an entire neurological pattern that had been going on for years so no wonder he couldn't shift those beliefs but I had something that would help I was going to ask him to think about those events and then tap on some acupuncture points and this would change the way his body and mind
responded so that those events were no longer upsetting was he up for that experience you bet he was and when we were done he raided the suds for those incidents is zero later Brian came in and said that he'd been to a party he actually talked to several strangers including two women something he would normally not do he said you know was strange I was a little anxious but I just wasn't worried that they would ridicule me to which I replied good for you that's awesome I bet this is a new version of yourself that
you can really enjoy getting used to a big smile slowly spread across his face he took a deep breath and his eyes sort of unfocused a bit and he said yeah I can get used to this you know I don't know about you but as a therapist that's one of those moments you just treasure let me give you one more example suppose you use mindfulness in meditation approaches as part of working with performance enhancement this could be in the context of business school or Sports I was working with an executive named Thomas whose Chief complaint
was he would often get super stressed out and sometimes he take his anger out on his staff Thomas had heard that mindful this might help him so I taught him some basic techniques and after a few weeks Thomas reported that sometimes he felt better but other times the breathing and the mindfulness didn't seem to have much effect I asked him to notice what was going on in his mind during those times with as little judgment as possible at the next session Thomas reported you know whenever I'm having those bad moments when I can't relax or
calm down I realize that I hear my father's voice in my head saying second place is for losers my father was a sports nut and he was always driving me you know I I thought this was kind of a good thing and part of what made me so successful but now I'm thinking you know this is what makes me Relentless with myself and my staff this was a great insight and becoming aware of this could really help Thomas but with EFT we can go a little further we can actually dismantle that inner critic so I
I asked Thomas if he could remember specific times when his father talked to him in this way he told me of a specific event from when he was 15 Thomas ran track and had taken third place at the state level he'd actually beaten his own time but instead of his father being proud or happy well you can imagine what happened Thomas said that this scene bothered him at an eight on the sud scale for Thomas the EFT setup phrase was even though I didn't take first place and I hear my father saying second place is
for losers I deeply and completely accept myself at least that was the first one we spent 30 minutes going through every nook and cranny of this event tapping every little piece of it out when Thomas came back for his next visit he reported that he was amazed at how much calmer he was he'd experienced only one incident and in the middle of it he did EFT on himself calming down almost immediately are you beginning to see how easy it can be to integrate EFT into your practice during the first video I talked a great deal
about how to use EFT with trauma and post-traumatic stress I should also mentioned that EFT can be incredibly useful for two of the most important public health issues today chronic pain and addictions I've seen more than a few chronic pain doctors amazed at how our mutual patient has reduced their opiate use to either zero or far below what the doctor had prescribed but I'm going to have to talk more about that in another venue 40 years ago I never could have imagined that I'd be here talking to you about a well researched mindbody energy psychology
method that rapidly and effectively removes the negative effects of stress and Trauma that impede human potential and guess what you can learn it from your home or office thousands of therapists have learned EFT already you can still use other methods you can still talk to people I do but do you really want to be without this kind of mindbody tool at ASAP we're offering you a revolutionary training experience that provides the best aspects of online learning with the live small group practice you get within an in-person Workshop you can learn much more about it by
clicking on the course tab at the top of this page do you remember the question questions I asked back in video one for me the most important question was this one if a client is about to tell you a horrible event that causes them tremendous emotional pain are you absolutely confident that you can stay totally present with them and can help them resolve that event so that they feel whole and without pain I have total confidence that with energy psychology and EFT I have tools that can help my clients elicit powerful self-healing I get the
privilege of being a witness to that I get the privilege of making a difference and I'm here to invite you to have the same kind of experience that I get again and again imagine yourself helping your clients rapidly heal stress and Trauma and then teaching them simple techniques they can use themselves imagine yourself helping clients calm their bodies and emotions rapidly imagine yourself being able to easily integrate these techniques with your other treatment modalities I invite you to learn more about our EFT course by clicking the course tab on the top of this page you
can take it from anywhere in the world so you'll save a lot of money on travel expenses you'll have a virtual support team to help you you'll get plenty of actual practice and remember as is an International Association of practitioners who use energy psychology approaches that include EFT there's actually an entire world of energy psychology to explore so what questions or thoughts do you have about using EFT in your practice there's a comment section below and we do read and answer your comments and questions it's been my pleasure to spend this time with you I
hope it's been valuable for you thank you so much for listening and and I look forward to seeing you in the course [Music]
