Re: The thoughts of a recovering new-ager - everything is a cult
Posted by:
NotEnlightened
()
Date: November 16, 2010 11:22AM
@Sunshine
Hey Sunshine, I had a few things I wanted to say to you. I don't want to discourage anyone from using a tool that could help them, that is certainly the last thing I want. So if EFT is something you find useful, I'd encourage you to continue to explore it. My problem with EFT lies much more in the way it is marketed, and the way it is explained (which is pure pseudoscience). In my opinion, if it seems to work and we don't know why it works, we needn't make up a pseudoscientific rationale and pretend that we know why it works. Furthermore, the marketing for EFT is highly questionable. It is touted as a panacea.
My take is that EFT may offer help, but it is not due to the mechanisms that its creator has laid out. So on one hand we can say if something works for someone then it works for someone and who cares why. But on the other I do think it's important to distinguish how things work - what about the people who EFT doesn't work for? What if EFT truly is not suited for some problems? If we just accept the marketing at face value we can't address these questions in meaningful ways.
I was talking to someone last night about homeopathy. I said I can't find any evidence that it works. Not to say that it doesn't work - just that there is no evidence. Her response was that it "worked for her." To me that is not evidence. Sugar pills often "work." Could it be the dynamic between her and her homeopath, the subconscious beliefs that he would heal her and knew how? It's perfectly possible her good results are placebo. Its perfectly possible her success was the result of another factor. This is why we have controlled experiments, to find out things like this.
I say, if EFT has this much potential, let's really examine it and get it out of the fringes and into the hands of the people who need it and understand it in a real way that will allow it to be applied most effectively. Don't come up with a psuedoscientific explanation for it and assume we know things we don't. As an aside, a lot of what I was tapping with the therapist was essentially tapping away my thoughts that were critical of the process. There are people out there that do EFT nothing less than compulsively. In my opinion, the ability to be present in one's body and allow feelings to exist as they are with awareness is a key to emotional healing (and that is an OPINION). Perhaps tapping on one's body while holding certain emotions in consciousness keeps you aware of feelings that would otherwise remain hidden, allowing them to heal. That sounds plausible to me, but it's a far cry from Gary Craig's theory set forth on EFT. Even acupuncturists I have talked to who deal far more in depth with the cosmology that EFT is purported to be based on find its theory very questionable. EFT theory is a sort of bastardization of acupuncture theory, which I have studied quite a bit.
If doing tapping helps, I'd encourage you to continue to explore the area. There's a lot we don't know! My caution is to not get wrapped up in thinking that doing EFT on everything is the final answer to life's problems. I don't think you can tap your way to perfection. That is what I started to get caught up in. I knew people for whom doing EFT seemed to turn into an almost obsessive compulsive disorder - Oh, I feel something I don't like..... TAP, TAP, TAP.... Oh no, something else I don't like..... TAP, TAP, TAP, for hours a day..... And for all the tapping, they didn't seem like they were in a very happy place. Thanks for asking by the way, I hope that helps you see why I included EFT without discouraging you from exploring creative avenues of healing and change. Take care.