Teaching EFT to Children

After studying EFT (beginning in 1999) for months and practicing on all sorts of willing folks, I began teaching EFT to the kids at the residential treatment program where I worked as Campus Director until 2005 when I left to run Gary’s EFT Master Program. The program accepted children who were unable to be managed in the community in school or at home (or foster homes). We treated children with severe emotional problems ages 7 – 17, with IQ from 60 to 130, mostly on the lower end of the scale. I did modify EFT a little bit for use with this population.

I taught the children to call the karate point the “friendly spot” as that is where your fingers touch to shake hands to show you are friendly. For the younger children I used out-stretched arms rather than using the 0-10 intensity scale. Hands in a prayer position indicated no upset.

Kids, and some adults as well, seem to have a hard time with the eyebrow point so I have the children use three fingers between their eyebrows.

GC COMMENT: Good idea! This covers both eyebrow points–you might even want to use 4 fingers to make sure.

The under the arm point I labeled the monkey spot which they got a kick out of too! I used tapping with all fingers on the chest to make sure they covered the collarbone spot.

GC COMMENT: This refers to mildly thumping with one’s fist at the top of the breastbone about where a man would knot his tie. This gets both collarbone points at once.

First I showed them the points to use with EFT. The children all seemed to “get it” easily.  We then addressed whatever they wanted to work on. Often, when there was time, I asked them to then teach the EFT process to their primary staff person. (Sort of an empowerment thing, an empathy builder and self esteem as they could then be useful to someone else. Plus it was a good review for staff.)

One of our most self absorbed children, Nancy, a beautiful 10 year old with long lovely hair, had serious communication problems, no empathy for others and severe emotional outbursts.

After we worked to resolve her issue – an upset at our special on campus school we maintained for these kids – was working on her primary staff’s problem of frustration with losing her keys.

Sometimes EFT is so easy and works so beautifully. This was one such case. I wish I’d had a video of this very traumatized little girl with significant coping problems leading her primary staff person through the process perfectly. We had been working with very slow progress to help this child develop empathy. When the staff finally put her hands together the girl was delighted. “I did it!” She said. (Meaningful to this story, in spite of her narcissism, she feels she can’t do anything right.) I asked her how it felt to help someone else. She just glowed as she said it felt WONDERFUL!

This article was first published on Gary Craig’s web site emofree.com in 2001. His comments were left intact. Reedited 12/2014 for use on this blog.  NOTE: Nancy is not her real name and the picture is from 123rf.com)

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