Inconspicuous EFT Tapping

Certainly, Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) is an out of the ordinary activity that can draw considerable attention while in the presence of other people. While working at making EFT a part of daily your life, you may be concerned about doing it in public.

Should You Do EFT in Public?

While there are several ways to use EFT in public without being conspicuous, should you be concerned about the impact of doing EFT in public at all? Is it important what other people think if they see you tapping in public?

Personally, it never bothered me, and I often encouraged my clients to tap on their “over concern” about what others might think if they did it in public. Then one day, something happened that made me reconsider the advisability of tapping in public.

Some years ago, I was working with a man who had developed a severe phobia of driving his car. As part the counseling, I asked him to take his cell phone with him in the car so we could talk as he was applying EFT to this problem. The plan was working well. At my request, he would stop and pull off to the side of the road, after driving several blocks successfully, to assess his stress level. If necessary, he tapped it down right then and there until his intensity was close to zero.

Once his distress level, on the 0 to 10 point scale, decreased he would being driving again. As he resumed driving. After a brief driving sojourn, we soon discovered that his distress level became elevated again from a 2 to a 5.  I suggested that he stop and tap using the EFT statement we had created:

“Even though I’m scared of driving in traffic, I choose to be as comfortable as I was when I was driving through a lovely wooded back-road in the autumn.”

He chose this memory to represent a time when he had thoroughly enjoyed driving in the past, before his phobia set in. (This is an example of using “Personal Resource States” to formulate effective ending Choices statements).

As he began tapping to bring his intensity level down further, I suddenly heard a police siren in the background and my client say, “Officer, I’m fine! I’m just doing a stress reduction technique that my psychologist has told me to do.” A discussion followed  in the background.  When he resumed speaking with me, he explained that had had parked in the driveway of a house. A person inside the house had apparently looked out of the window, saw him tapping, and called the police. The resident reported that “a person in a car was engaging in odd behavior by repeatedly hitting his head.”

The police officer arrived to see whether my client needed assistance and was only reassured when he learned that my client’s behavior was occurring for a legitimate reason. Understandably, my client moved his car to a less conspicuous location before continuing EFT!

How to do EFT Inconspicuously

Since my client’s experience, I became hesitant to recommend that people tap nonchalantly in surroundings where strangers might misinterpret what they are doing. Therefore, under certain circumstances, when tapping might be misinterpreted, I advise that you do one or more of the following alternatives:

1. Use Dr.John Diepold’s “Touch and Breathe” method instead of regular tapping. This is simple to do and gives the impression of being much less “out of control” and odd than tapping. Here is how it works:

Touch each tapping spot (but do not tap on it), holding your fingers long enough at each spot to have time to repeat your EFT phrase. Then take a deep easy breath –– no forcing, just a comfortable breath ––and move on to the next spot. This technique can be very soothing and it gives a very natural appearance.

2. Tap only on the Karate Chop Spot the entire time your are saying (or thinking) your EFT statement as though you were moving from spot to spot. If you have a good visual imagination, picture your EFT sequence (the various spots) as you keep repeating the phrases to yourself.. This action is inconspicuous and can be done under almost any circumstances. If you happen to be sitting at a table or behind a desk at a meeting, for example, you can keep your hands underneath the table while you tap on this spot, even while others are talking, and they will never notice.

3. Excuse yourself from the situation at hand, with any reasonable excuse, and return only after you have tapped down some or all of the negative emotion surrounding the situation. You can make any excuse for leaving momentarily –– to make an urgent phone call, put money in a parking meter, or use the restroom, etc. The point is to GET AWAY from the situation and give yourself time to tap down your emotional intensity about it. When you return, you will handle it entirely differently, and are likely to achieve a much better outcome.

4. Only imagine tapping on each spot and hear your voice in your mind as you silently repeat your EFT statements. This option, called “mental EFT,” can be extremely satisfactory. Not everyone can easily engage in “imagining” something so specific, but some people find it even more effective than physical tapping. Often, it can be just as effective to do EFT mentally as to do the physical tapping.

Interestingly, when there is a great urgency to a situation, it can be more effective to do the physical tapping, while in other instances, such as using EFT for sleep, I suggest mental EFT because the physical act of tapping may make you more alert, rather than drowsy. Mental EFT can help enable you to drift off to sleep as soon as during the first or second round.

Determining whether mental EFT is an option for you can only be done by experimentation. I suggest you first try this when you are alone and under no particular pressure. If you find it effective, this can be an excellent way to use EFT when you are in a public place.

In short, there are many ways to use EFT comfortably in public, and being able to do so can greatly increase the usefulness of EFT for you.

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