Tall for his age of 9 and very lanky, Gary preferred pajamas to clothes. He got his bath and had his pajamas on by the earliest time permitted on his cottage. It was not unusual to walk onto his cottage at 6:30 p.m. and see him “ready for bed.” But, for Gary, putting on his pajamas is NOT synonymous with going to bed!

Gary was one of the younger residents at the facility for Severely Emotionally Disturbed children where I worked as Director for 6 years. He was given to very long lasting screaming fits whenever something upset him – which was frequent.

One evening when I came to the cottage I found him lying on the floor of the Time-Out room screaming at the top of his lungs. I walked over to the new staff person who was monitoring Gary in Time Out and asked how long he had been screaming. “Twenty minutes,” she said with a sigh.

About a week before that Thursday evening I’d taught Gary the short version of EFT. My strategy was to teach the child the sequence and have him or her practice it with me several times. I then guided him through teaching it to someone else using the philosophy that the best way to learn something is to teach it. Whenever possible, I had him teach it to his “primary” staff person. (Each child is assigned one cottage staff as his or her primary contact staff.) The child and his primary staff then play with the exercise awhile. That way I got to teach two people to tap!

Most children learned it quickly. The goal was for the staff to help the child remember to use the exercise the next time the child simply started to become upset. It is important that staff intervene early. Once a child “goes off” there is very little chance for calm interventions – and the time span between calm and “going off” was very short. As one of our staff put it, these children have a short circuit between calm and the fight-or-flight response. Or, as another put it, these kids can go from 0 to 60 on 2 seconds.

When teaching the children EFT I explained that this is a relaxation exercise that can help them calm down quickly. None of the children in our intermediate treatment facility came to us knowing how to effectively self-calm. The residential program also taught traditional relaxation techniques and used every behavioral tactic to help the children learn to control and modify their behavior. But, until EFT, too many left our facility still not doing a very good job of self-calming.

So there was Gary. On the floor. One leg in the Time Out room. One leg out. Screaming at the top of his lungs. I walked within his sight. He glared up at me – still screaming. I glared back, mimicking his face as best I could and tapped on the side of my hand, not really expecting a response. To my surprise, he lifted his hand and began tapping – still screaming. I tapped the points and he followed – still screaming. I tapped the side of my hand again and he followed me through a second sequence – still screaming, but not so loud this time. So I dared a little smile and we tapped through the sequence again. The third time was the charm and Gary stopped screaming and smiled back at me. We had not spoken to each other.

The new staff person looked at me and said, “HOW did you do that?”

This article was first published on Gary Craig’s old emofree.com newsletter as  Using EFT to Self-Calm an Intense Anger Tantrum