It’s true: every month, several thousand people read the articles on this site. Some search for the curious term FasterEFT, others are looking up a specific problem and a way to resolve it—especially if they don’t want to take medication for the rest of their life, or they already sense that conventional medicine won’t remove that particular issue.
Here’s what usually happens: people read one of the articles and then send me questions about what to do and how to do it. I’m genuinely happy when people ask—but it surprises me how many don’t actually know what we do or how we do it.
So I decided to write this piece about the core skill. It’s about tapping: how it works, why it works, and how to use it. My hope is that by the end you’ll be clear enough to start using the key part of FasterEFT right away.
How Did Tapping Begin?
Tapping dates back to more than 30 years ago. The origin story comes from the practice of an American therapist, Dr. Roger Callahan, who had long been working with a client suffering from an intense fear of water. Traditional methods weren’t helping.
One day he tried insights from Eastern approaches he had been studying. He suggested the client tap a specific point on the face—and her fear vanished. Intrigued, he experimented further and was able to replicate results with other clients. Over time he discovered what worked and built a system he applied to a wide range of client issues.
His system, originally called TFT (Thought Field Therapy) and later “Callahan Techniques,” proved useful with Vietnam war veterans experiencing post-traumatic stress and worked for many common and uncommon psychological problems as well.
Unexpectedly, it also helped with physical issues: headaches, skin conditions, back and musculoskeletal pain, and even some so-called “incurable” illnesses.
Callahan adopted key ideas from Eastern medicine: that psychological or physical problems reflect blocked energy, and that tapping can release it. He also described “psychological reversal,” a factor he believed could stop techniques from working or make issues return, and he explored ways to correct it.
One of Callahan’s students, Gary Craig, simplified the system into EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques), which spread worldwide. It streamlined the process while keeping Callahan’s core ideas about energy and psychological reversal.
From these roots, other related methods emerged, using similar points on the body to achieve similar results.
One technique I often write about is FasterEFT (created by Robert G. Smith), which differs in an important way. It was one of the first to reject two foundational assumptions of earlier methods: the need for “psychological reversal” and the idea that energy is “blocked” in the body.
Because of this, FasterEFT has become popular not only among spiritually minded people who like to talk about energy, but also among the technically inclined, trained therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, and even medical doctors.
Yes, you’ll even find physicians of various specialties among practitioners—especially in mental health, but also those whose day job is literally cutting people open.
Even though our techniques may describe energy pathways, we don’t need that language. We can explain everything in a different, very practical way.
How Does Tapping Work?
To understand how tapping works, think back to early human (and animal) life—times when survival was the focus and danger lurked everywhere.
When something startles or scares us, the body flips into fight, flight, or freeze. This stress response is natural and likely hard-wired from birth. You can probably recall a time you were truly frightened.
What happens in the body during that moment?
Countless small and large changes occur so the body has every resource it needs to survive.
The problem is that the more we’re startled (or the more we rehearse fear), the more we train ourselves to trigger that response even when it’s not necessary. As a result, processes keep running inside us that interfere with the body’s ability to heal.
Put simply: stress hormones keep us hyper-vigilant—scanning for threats, ready to react. With those hormones circulating, cell repair slows, immunity is suppressed, and we burn more resources than we replenish.
Translation? We age faster, our immune system weakens, we catch colds and other bugs more easily, and we slowly lay the groundwork for more complex, insidious illnesses that can shorten our lifespan.
For this to happen, we have to perceive a situation as a threat (even slightly). You know how some people shrug almost everything off, while others interpret anything as a problem, a reason to be angry, afraid, or irritable.
Why do we read things negatively—and where does tapping fit?
We perceive an event, and the brain evaluates it—based on our personal history—as good or bad. Instantly, it releases hormones and electrical signals that trigger organ-level changes. Those organs speak up—and we notice.
You know the drill: the stomach clenches, heart races, head spins, and so on.
We notice the body’s reaction (our organs’ response) to the brain’s interpretation, and we feel our emotions. That’s when we “know” something is wrong.
Then someone tells us, “You feel like this because you have a block!” In reality, it’s a learned response that produces these uncomfortable sensations.
When we tap, we stimulate the same neural “routes” the old traditions described as energy pathways. By stimulating specific points, we interrupt the signals that would otherwise tell organs how to react.
So rather than “releasing blocks,” you could say tapping creates a helpful interruption. We retrain the system so that the body’s feedback no longer drives us into a survival response for everyday triggers.
What actually shifts during tapping?
Our organs stop receiving the same level of “panic orders,” and we also change the way we perceive incoming events—we change our perception itself. Tapping leverages the fact that the brain cannot sustain two opposing emotional states at the same time. We soften the negative and overlay it with the neutral, rhythmic sensation of tapping.
That disrupts the whole loop of how we interpret problems—and they start to fade. Tapping can change how you feel right now about a situation you’re in; next time it arises, your response will likely be different.
You can also revisit a past event (problem), change how you encode it, and if it comes up again, it won’t hit as hard—or at all.
Sound unbelievable or complicated?
Let’s simplify—try it right now:
Recall an unpleasant event.
Imagine it’s happening right now. Notice how you know it’s unpleasant. Feel the sensations in your body—in specific organs, limbs, anywhere. Notice the emotions.
What images, sounds, or voices run in your mind? Any smells or tastes?
Feel it—and even amplify it for a moment.
Feel it fully, one last time.
Now use two fingers and tap the points shown “in the picture below” (or the common sequence you know).
As you tap, you can say: “I’m letting this go,” or “I release this now.” At the end of each round, hold your wrist, take a deep breath in, exhale the negativity, and say, “Peace.”
Next, bring up a pleasant memory—something that reliably makes you feel good.
Then return to the original issue and notice what changed. Often the intensity drops—sometimes a lot, sometimes a little—but something will likely be different.
What matters most?
Create a little distance from the current sensations and emotions. You can do this by focusing on the feeling of your fingers tapping the points, or even by consciously blinking. These tricks help your system release the reaction more quickly.
Why Do This at All?
If you’ve read closely, you already know: as we release negative reactions, our perception changes—and the body responds differently to the world.
That means less stress in daily life, and more capacity for the body to heal.
You stop cultivating an inner environment where illness thrives; your immune system steadies and strengthens.
Fears, anxieties, and various health complaints begin to fade.
How to Ask the Right Question Before Tapping
Before each session, ask: “How do I know I have this problem?” or “How do I know this is a problem for me?”
How Never to Ask
Never ask “Why?”—as in “Why do I have this problem?”
When we chase “why,” we often generate more reasons to keep the problem. The mind doesn’t work the way we think. If we want to be free of an issue, we must know how we’re doing it. (For deeper background, see the article “How It All Works, Part 2”—search it on the site.)
How often should I tap—and how long until my problem is gone?
Here’s the big one: many people try something once, don’t get an instant miracle, and declare it “doesn’t work.” Some issues resolve fast; others take a little time.
Yes, you can sometimes clear a headache or fear in three minutes—and it never returns. But that isn’t every case.
If you’ve lived with depression for years, it will take work. There may be several layers to resolve. That’s okay.
So tap as often as you like—even dozens of times a day. Use spare moments to work through your list. That’s how you see the fastest, most genuine changes.
And do explore more articles on this topic—there’s a lot that will help you get better and better.
If it currently feels like other people “cause” your problems, don’t worry that you’ll clear your reactions and they’ll just do it to you again. When you change, the world around you changes—and you’ll see options that weren’t visible before.
Trust that what you invest in yourself here will pay off.
What if your issues feel too big to handle alone?
Remember, you can always ask for help. There are plenty of practitioners who will gladly support you—often remotely, without travel.
FasterEFT is simple enough to work beautifully over phone or video—book a session and your life can start improving quickly!
Can Tapping Harm You?
“My doctor says it won’t help and might even hurt.”
No—tapping won’t harm you. There’s no mechanism by which it could. What does happen is a deep-level shift: you begin freeing yourself from the past and the patterns that kept you stuck.
What Is Tapping Good For?
Tapping can be used for physical and emotional challenges of many kinds—for pains and even illnesses.
As a general rule: try it on everything.
Worldwide, there are reports of long-standing pain resolving, chronic and “incurable” conditions improving, ovarian cysts disappearing—and yes, a Romanian psychiatrist even reported bringing her father back to life via tapping when he showed no signs of life.
Common applications include stress, grief, loss, headaches, back and limb pain, and emotional concerns such as panic attacks, anxiety, depression, PTSD, and OCD.
Tapping can also help you show up better at work, communicate more effectively with clients, and even improve your results with money. Some things we may never fully explain—but they still happen.
Countless people around the world have improved thanks to methods like FasterEFT—even when nothing else helped and the prognosis was bleak. You truly can be next.
What Next?
Have something you want to resolve? Start by trying the technique and experiencing it for yourself. If you want more, you can get the FasterEFT book, join a seminar, and begin reshaping your life from the inside out.
