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Tapping the healer within
Using Thought Field Therapy to Instantly Conquer Your Fears, Anxieties, and Emotional Distress
By Roger J. Callahan, Richard Trubo The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.
Copyright © 2001Roger J. Callahan
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-07-139492-5
Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
THOUGHT FIELD THERAPY: A REVOLUTIONARY WAY OF HEALING
Imagine being in emotional distress, but finding rapid relief in just minutes. Picture yourself overwhelmed by chronic stress, addicted to nicotine, or crippled by a fear of flying—but eradicating these or other kinds of debilitating problems almost instantaneously.
The answer to the negative emotions in your life is a powerful treatment called Thought Field Therapy (TFT). It represents a revolutionary advance in the way psychological disturbances are perceived and managed. Tens of thousands of people worldwide have already used TFT to conquer their fears, eliminate their compulsions, recover from broken relationships, put an end to procrastination, and quiet their anger and grief. It has provided them with emotional renewal, rapidly and safely, without long-term psychotherapy and without medications. There are no risks. There are no side effects.
This program can work for you, too.
WHAT IS TFT?
Thought Field Therapy is different from any other psychological treatment that you've ever used. The therapeutic process itself is completely unique. So is the scientific foundation on which it's based. And so are the unprecedented results it can produce.
TFT is a system that accesses and resolves the essence and the root cause of your problem, whether it is a phobia, anger, a bad habit, trauma, anxiety, guilt, or grief. These negative emotions are condensed information in energy form, bound in what I call a Thought Field (we'll explain the concept of the Thought Field more thoroughly later). The active information in this Thought Field creates distress in your life by disrupting the body's internal energy flow, causing psychological upheaval that sabotages your emotional well- being.
A key to the treatment is influencing the body's bioenergy field by tapping with your fingers on specific points on the body located along energy meridians. In a user-friendly process that you'll learn in detail, you'll think about the particular psychological concern that is troubling you and then quantify the intensity of the emotional upset you're feeling (on a scale from 1 to 10). Next, you will tap on specific points on the body in a particular sequence. As that happens, you will eliminate imbalances in the body's energy system, and in the process, weaken and even eradicate negative emotions and the symptoms of psychological distress. Thanks to new research using technology that can monitor the body's autonomic nervous system, we can now scientifically measure and quantify the systemic changes that TFT produces. Clearly, TFT heals at the most fundamental level—and it happens almost instantaneously.
Over the years, I've created and fine-tuned this definition of TFT:
TFT is a treatment for psychological disturbances which provides a code that, when applied to a psychological problem the individual is attuned to, will eliminate perturbations in the Thought Field, the fundamental cause of all negative emotions. This code is elicited through TFT's causal diagnostic procedure, through which the TFT algorithms were developed.
Of course, there are some components of this definition that you may not understand yet. But by the time you've finished reading this book, it will make sense to you. More important, you'll experience its power in resolving whatever psychological (and even physiological) difficulties you may be experiencing. It can work for you in minutes, as it already has for many thousands of people. In short, it can turn your life around.
A LITTLE BACKGROUND
As I'm sure you've already realized, Thought Field Therapy represents a radical shift in the way psychological distress is treated. For most of this century, talk therapy has been the traditional and accepted path to emotional healing. In fact, until about two decades ago, I was practicing this kind of mainstream psychotherapy. I was also teaching it at the college level. At the same time, however, I was deeply troubled by its shortcomings.
My own background couldn't have been more conventional. After earning a Ph.D. in clinical psychology at Syracuse University, I was Associate Professor and Director of Psychological Services and Research at Eastern Michigan University, and then I taught courses at the University of Michigan before entering private practice. I served as President of the American Academy of Psychologists in Marital and Family Therapy. Back then, my résumé clearly had a traditional bent.
Nevertheless, I've always sought out new approaches to healing. I was a pioneer in cognitive therapy and clinical hypnotherapy, which I hoped could help rescue patients from the failings that I had seen with conventional psychotherapy. Like many psychotherapists, I wanted my clients to get better. I wanted to deliver them from the distress in their lives and help them function normally again. But I felt strongly that, as a profession, modern psychotherapy was letting patients down. Whether we were treating them for depression, phobias, or a shattered relationship, too many clients seem entrapped in years of expensive psychotherapy, talking endlessly about their life circumstances. They'd painfully relive their trauma. They'd often blame something or someone in their past for their current troubles. But at the end of the day—or the year—they had nothing to show for it. They simply weren't being helped. Not only did they continue to spin their wheels, but they also became stuck even deeper in an emotional quagmire. I sometimes felt that my fellow therapists and I were teaching patients only that they could take a hell of a lot more misery than they had thought they could!
I certainly wasn't alone in embracing this bleak perspective of my profession. Some of my fellow psychologists and I often discussed our dismal track records. We agreed that only a small percentage of our patients ever got better. They felt the same frustration I did. They conceded that traditional approaches simply didn't work for most people, and that their own disappointment was exceeded only by the disillusionment and sometimes resentment of their patients. But at the same time, here's what most of them told me: "We're providing our patients with their best chance for healing, whatever the shortcomings of the treatment may be. A small number of success stories is better than none at all." Maybe so. But I was still discouraged, and so were my patients who weren't getting well.
Unlike most of my colleagues, however, I continued to look for something new. I believed there had to be a better way. So I explored innovative therapeutic approaches outside of mainstream psychotherapy. I became passionate about finding a different and more effective therapeutic approach. Through that journey, TFT was born.
MARY'S STORY
Thought Field Therapy grew directly out of my frustration in treating Mary, a patient in her late thirties. Mary was the mother of two, and she had struggled with a severe water phobia since infancy. In fact, she had the most intense fear of water I had seen in my thirty years of practice at that point. It had left her almost paralyzed, incapable of even the most mundane activities. She couldn't take baths in a full tub. She couldn't even bathe her children. Yes, she did take showers, but they were very brief and extremely stressful. Every time it rained, she became absolutely terrified, refusing to set foot outside of her home. She lived in California, but even on the sunniest, most picturesque days, she couldn't drive on Pacific Coast Highway because just the sight of the ocean terrified her. (I remember Mary telling me that she was g
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Excerpted from Tapping the healer within by Roger J. Callahan. Copyright © 2001 by Roger J. Callahan. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc..
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