The Science Behind EFT Tapping - YouTube

In the last 20 years we've developed the tools like biofeedback monitors to see what's

happening to your nervous system when you do this. And then in the last ten years with

human genome project, we've developed the ability to look into the genes that have been

turned on and turned off and see something with your genes. So for example, the genes

that are responsible for the blueprints for building stress hormones like cortisol and

adrenaline shut down. Your breathing, you're relaxed. Our tongues on the floor of your

mouth. You'll find if you're ever angry, if you're ever mad at somebody let your

tongue be on the floor of your mouth. It's impossible to stay mad. Try staying mad at

somebody with your tongue relaxed. (Laugh) You can't do it. So it's just a simple

mechanical thing. If just do that it tells your body you're safe, relaxed.

And that's the crucial thing about EFT. We carry traumas and griefs and stresses with

us all through our lives. They start getting laid down very early. I get asked often, What

causes a big emotional trauma? or What are the roots of things like post-traumatic

stress disorder? and what happened in a person's childhood? Well often it'll

be something horrendous in the person's childhood. It could be being abused by a parent

or by a relative. It could be terrible feelings of separation or abandonment. But sometimes,

for example, one guy that we worked with it turned out his trauma, one trauma from his

childhood was that when his father was putting him in his crib one day when he was about

six months old. His father put him in his crib and misjudged the distance and dropped

him a few inches. And this became a major life trauma for this person 50 years later.

And who'd have thought that something that would seem so small can so traumatize us.

So sometimes it's things that we think are very, very small.

Other times, why for example we know that we have troops coming back from Afghanistan

and Iraq with PTSD. And it's a terrible problem. That it's intriguing that about

two-thirds of them come back from combat without PTSD. So why do those two-thirds not have

PTSD? Why are those two-thirds so resilient but one-third can develop PTSD later on? We

wonder what triggers those traumas. So EFT and relaxation and heart breathing

and all these things, just tell your body you're safe. And what we'll be doing throughout

the course of these two days is telling ourselves over and over and over again in various ways

we're safe. Not telling ourselves with our minds, because if I walk up to you and you

feel uncomfortable and I say, Don't worry. Well maybe you'll buy it ok. But often just

the verbal part of our communication is not that effective because the part of us that

gets traumatized is not the verbal part. It's the pre-verbal parts of our brains. It's

our midbrains and it's our hindbrains. You'll hear me talk over and over and over again

about these three parts of the brain. The Triune Brain Theory.

And one humorous way of looking at this, so one way to remember it, is that these brains

were developed over the course of millions of years of evolution gradually. So the brainstem

and the back of the brain, the hindbrain, is our reptilian brain. Dinosaurs had those

brains. Snakes and lizards today have those brains. Crocodiles have those brains. So think

of this as your inner crocodile. You've got this crocodile in the back there. It ends

about here and then goes down. And it is fabulously good at one thing and that's survival. It

is so good at survival. It makes sure if you're thirsty you drink. It makes sure when you're

hungry you eat. It makes sure that when you need sleep you get sleep. It takes care of

you. When there's danger it gets you out of the way or it jumps up and defends you.

Really, really good. And this part of your brain is roughly 3.4 billion years old. Very,

very old part of your brain. So that's your inner crocodile back there. Okay?

And the drawback is, you can say in a crocodile, calm down. There's no real problem here.

And it doesn't hear you because it has no language. It's not wired for language at

all. It's superbly good at scanning the environment, about four million times per

second. It's getting about four million bits of data per second. It's scanning the

environment for threats and it's ready to act on any threat to your survival. So that's

the old part of the brain. Then on top of that we have this midbrain,

the middle part of our brain. And that is something that came into being with mammals.

And then on top of that layer is our big frontal lobes, which is the thinking part of, the

cognitive part of your brain. So for example, your dog and your cat have a midbrain. They

have those midbrain structures and a little bit of forebrain as well. And your midbrain

has to do with things like feelings. If you look into the eye of a snake you don't see

a warm, fuzzy, (laugh) relational being there. Just this reptilian eye glaring at you. But

I you look in the eye of a dog or a horse, you know there's really something there

you can relate to emotionally. You don't tend to have a deep emotional relationship

with a lizard. (Laugh) But you can have one with a dog or a cat or creatures that have

that midbrain structure. So it has to do with relationship, it has to do with emotion.

And the trouble with trauma is that when we get emotions encoded, like if you abuse or

beat a dog repeatedly then those emotions get or trauma get encoded in the dogs midbrain.

And then all that survival stuff in the crocodile brain gets activated by bad emotional experiences.

And that happened to most of us, growing up. Again the dog doesn't have language. There's

a cartoon I saw once of this man saying to his dog, Rover, you were a bad dog. You

should not have eaten my shoe. Rover, don't eat shoes again. You're not allowed to eat

shoes. And Rover's sitting looking up at his master, wagging his tail, and then

you see what Rover is hearing. And Rover's hearing, blah, blah, blah, blah. Rover.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Rover. Blah. (Laugh) So if you try and convince a traumatized

midbrain that you're okay, again, no language there.

The language part of your brain is only 100,000 years old. It's very, it's a very, very

recent evolutionary development. It wasn't there with the dinosaurs. It only popped up

around the Great Lakes of Africa about 100,000 years ago. And the story of why it popped

up there and what happened there is very interesting. I won't tell it today. But suddenly there

was this massive explosion of brain growth 100,000 years ago with early hominids learning

to walk upright, learning to use tools, developing language, developing symbolic abilities, developing

art. This enormous shift in evolution occurred very, very recently. If you took a clock and

began with the creation of the earth and you took that whole cycle evolution and reduced

it just to say twelve hours. Okay. Then the dinosaurs start only around here and die out

around there. And we human beings start at something like, and if midnight is now, we

started something like 11:58. That's where we start on the evolutionary spiral. We're

very, very novel and recently evolved species. And so we have this overlay of these cognitive

parts of ourselves. So here we feel emotional trauma. We've

had experiences as children that have hurt us and become encoded as trauma in our midbrain

and hindbrain. What we don't have is the ability to talk to those parts and tell them

they're safe verbally because the safe message only mean has been into your forebrain, to your

cognitive abilities not to those back ones. But what does have meaning to them, what has

meaning to that traumatized midbrain and hindbrain is touch. If you say, Rover, calm down.

And stroke Rover, Rover gets the message that he's safe and there's no threat. If your

cat has been traumatized by a dog you stroke the cat. Then the cat can calm down and quickly

get out of its traumatized state. So what EFT is and what letting your tongue

settle on the floor of your mouth is and what belly breathing is, is just physiological

ways of telling your body you're safe. And so with the tapping we use with EFT, we have

people tap in various acupuncture points on their bodies, this tapping just says to your

body, oh. There's no real threat. There's no real trauma going on here. You don't

have to worry. And when reports began coming into me about

three or four years ago of coaches and therapists working with veterans coming back from Iraq

and they would say, Dawson, you won't believe this but I had this veteran show up

in my office with high levels of PTSD. Flashbacks, nightmares, all kinds of physical problems.

I did EFT with them. We did a few hours of EFT and they were fine. They were testing

negative for PTSD on these PTSD screens. I'm thinking, Wow. Could that really

be true? But I just got many of these reports from various people. So I began a research

project to see if this really was true and it really is true. That if, that the best

of attempts to convince these people who are traumatized that they're safe with the forebrain

and telling them they're safe, don't work too well. But if you actually just introduce

a little bit of physical stimulation, telling Rover you're safe, telling your midbrain

you're safe while you recall a trauma suddenly the whole body calms down. And this conditioned

response loop of remembering a trauma, remembering your childhood trauma, remembering a combat

trauma, and going into that tense state you break that cycle, you break that conditioned

response one time and it stays broken. And it's quite remarkable. That people can then

be talking about the same incident that so traumatized them and triggered them earlier,

now they talk about the same incident and it's like, Okay. It happened and I have

perspective on it. I don't have the same sense of emotional arousal when I think about

that trauma. So that's how these very simple mechanical

interventions work. They combine the best of our cognitive therapies, the best of our

exposure therapies, and then add this element of stimulating these acupressure points and

that's what really helps us stay calm at all levels. And we'll do tons and tons of

EFT, tapping, over the course of the next couple of days as we experience this ourselves

and use it on some of our own issues. And you will be amazed that things that have bothered

you sometimes for years will just lose their emotional impact. It's quite startling to

see how fast that can happen.