Increasing your effectiveness with EFT, part 227.
One of the interesting things about EFT is that we often do something that seems a bit strange at first: we deliberately think about something that makes us anxious while simultaneously tapping.
Imagine that you’re afraid of public speaking. You picture yourself standing in front of a room full of people, notice the familiar thought that you’re going to freeze or embarrass yourself, and begin tapping while keeping some of your attention on that scenario. Or perhaps you’re working with a memory. You bring to mind the moment when somebody criticized you, notice that it still has some emotional charge, and tap while thinking about what happened.
Why might combining those two things be helpful?
In a 2009 paper called The Neurochemistry of Counterconditioning: Acupressure Desensitization in Psychotherapy, psychologist James R. Lane explores one possible explanation. His paper draws heavily on a concept from behavioral psychology called counterconditioning, along with research available at the time on acupuncture, the nervous system, and the brain’s response to threat. You can read the original paper here: https://www.efttappingtraining.com/wp-content/uploads/Neurochemistry-of-Counterconditioning-James-Lane.pdf
Some of the neurobiological explanations in the paper should be read with appropriate caution, particularly since it was published more than 15 years ago. Still, I think the basic idea of counterconditioning provides a useful way of thinking about something that we regularly do in EFT.
How Our Brains Learn That Something Is Dangerous
To understand counterconditioning, it helps to first think about ordinary conditioning.
Suppose you’re driving one afternoon and another car crashes into you while you’re making a left turn. Your body immediately responds to the danger. Your heart may race, your muscles tense, and you may experience a rush of fear.
Weeks later, your injuries have healed and you’re driving again. You approach an intersection and need to make a left turn. There is no car speeding toward you this time, but you suddenly notice your body becoming tense and anxious.
Something that was previously neutral has become associated with danger.
This is the example Lane uses to explain classical conditioning. After the accident, making a left turn can become a trigger for the alarm response that originally occurred during the crash. Eventually, even thinking about making a left turn might produce anxiety.
We can see versions of this in many areas of life. Someone who was humiliated while giving a presentation may later become anxious when speaking in front of a group. Someone who experienced a painful breakup may feel their stomach drop when a new partner takes longer than usual to answer a text. A child who was frequently criticized for making mistakes may grow into an adult who feels disproportionately anxious when their boss says, “Can I talk to you for a minute?”
Our nervous system can learn associations even when our rational mind knows that the present situation isn’t identical to what happened before.
So What Is Counterconditioning?
Counterconditioning involves learning a different response to something that has previously triggered anxiety.
Long before EFT was developed, psychiatrist Joseph Wolpe used this principle in his work with anxiety. A person would gradually bring an anxiety-provoking situation to mind while practicing deep muscle relaxation. The idea was that, over time, the previously threatening stimulus could become associated with a calmer response. Lane describes this as replacing an established anxiety response with a new conditioned response to the same stimulus.
This gives us a useful way of looking at EFT.
When we tap, we generally aren’t distracting ourselves from the problem. We might deliberately think about the embarrassing presentation, the painful breakup, the upcoming flight, or the comment our boss made yesterday. At the same time, we are tapping on acupoints while paying attention to what happens internally.
Lane proposes that acupoint stimulation helps produce a physiological calming response. If that happens while the anxiety-provoking thought or memory is active, the old trigger is being experienced under different conditions. Instead of repeatedly pairing “thinking about the presentation” with an escalating alarm response, we may begin experiencing “thinking about the presentation while my body is relatively calm”. In Lane’s model, repeatedly pairing the trigger with this calmer state can gradually weaken the old association.
Why We Need to Tune Into the Problem
This also helps explain something that can initially seem counterintuitive about EFT: we usually need some connection to the problem we’re working on.
If I’m afraid of an upcoming job interview but spend the entire tapping session thinking about what I’m going to have for dinner, the relevant fear isn’t really part of the experience. There is nothing for the nervous system to relearn in relation to the interview.
On the other hand, we don’t need to become completely overwhelmed by the fear either.
Lane describes the earlier behavioral approach of starting with stimuli that produce relatively low levels of anxiety and gradually working toward more difficult material. The purpose was to allow new learning without overwhelming the person. This is very compatible with how I tend to think about EFT.
I’ve written before about the Cup of Tea analogy. We want the tea warm enough that we can taste it, while being careful that it doesn’t become boiling hot. If there is absolutely no emotional connection to what we’re tapping on, we may need to zoom in a little. If we’re becoming overwhelmed, we can zoom out, slow down, tap silently, or approach the issue from a safer distance.
More emotional intensity isn’t necessarily better.
The Trigger Can Be a Memory, a Thought, or Something Happening Right Now
Another useful part of this model is that conditioning doesn’t only apply to obvious external dangers.
A trigger might be seeing a particular person. It could also be remembering someone’s facial expression, imagining an upcoming conversation, hearing a certain tone of voice, or thinking, “I’m going to mess this up”.
For example, perhaps your boss once criticized you harshly in front of your coworkers. Months later, you receive an email saying, “Could you stop by my office this afternoon?” Before you know what the meeting is about, your mind starts racing.
While tapping, you might say:
“When I read that email and imagine walking into her office this afternoon, I immediately think I’m in trouble. I can feel how much I don’t want to have that conversation, and I have this feeling of dread in my gut when I think about it. And this is where I’m at right now”.
The boss’s email, your prediction about what will happen, and perhaps older experiences of being criticized may all carry an unpleasant emotional charge. EFT gives us a way to work with those associations one piece at a time.
Why Specificity Can Help
This is also one reason I often encourage people to get specific when tapping.
“I’m anxious about work” contains an enormous amount of information. There may be dozens of situations, people, memories, predictions, and beliefs underneath that sentence.
“When I remember my boss looking at me and saying, ‘We expected better from you’, I feel embarrassed” gives us something much more precise to work with.
Lane describes energy psychology approaches as repeatedly returning to the distressing material and working with different aspects of it as they emerge. From a counterconditioning perspective, this makes sense because different aspects may have acquired their own associations.
Perhaps the words “We expected better from you” no longer bother you after tapping, but then you notice that what really gets to you is remembering the disappointed expression on your boss’s face. Or the memory suddenly reminds you of your father giving you the same look when you brought home a bad grade.
Now we have another aspect to work with.
What Happens When the Alarm Response Comes Down?
Lane also proposes that reducing the alarm response may make it easier to think differently about what happened.
This is something I frequently notice in EFT sessions. Someone begins tapping on a memory while thinking, “I was such an idiot. I can’t believe I did that”. After the emotional intensity decreases, they might spontaneously say something like, “Actually, I was doing the best I could”, or “I was 15 years old. Of course I didn’t know how to handle that”.
I generally prefer to allow those shifts to emerge rather than rushing to introduce a positive reframe while someone is still very upset.
Lane describes a similar process. In his model, as physiological arousal decreases, we may have greater access to the kind of thinking that allows us to reconsider what happened, see the situation from a broader perspective, and imagine different ways of responding in the future.
This doesn’t mean we need to convince ourselves that something painful was actually okay. If someone treated us badly, reducing our emotional reaction doesn’t require deciding that their behavior was acceptable. We may simply find that we can remember what happened without our entire system responding as though the danger were happening again right now.
What Does the Tapping Add?
This is where Lane’s paper becomes more speculative.
He draws on acupuncture research available at the time and proposes that stimulating acupoints affects several neurochemical systems involved in stress and relaxation, including cortisol, endogenous opioids, serotonin, and GABA. He argues that these changes help reduce sympathetic nervous system activation and facilitate a calmer physiological state.
Lane then extends this research to acupressure and tapping, proposing that tapping while activating an anxiety-provoking thought or memory provides a particularly efficient form of counterconditioning.
I think it’s important to distinguish the broader idea from the more specific biological explanation. Counterconditioning is a well-established learning principle. The claim that tapping produces a particular sequence of neurochemical changes that explains EFT’s effects is a more specific hypothesis, and this paper was published in 2009. Our understanding of both the brain and EFT has continued to develop since then.
So I wouldn’t read the paper as giving us a final answer to what happens in the brain when we tap. I find it more useful as one possible model for understanding an experience that EFT practitioners and clients often observe: we can bring something distressing to mind, tap while staying connected to it at a manageable level, and sometimes discover that the same thought, memory, or trigger no longer produces the reaction it did before.
We Don’t Have to Start With the Biggest Thing
There is one final point from Lane’s paper that I think is particularly important in practice.
If counterconditioning requires us to activate some degree of the old response while remaining sufficiently regulated to experience something different, deliberately starting with our most overwhelming memory isn’t necessarily helpful. Lane recommends beginning with lower-intensity triggers and gradually approaching more difficult material. He also cautions against working on major historical trauma when someone is already overwhelmed by current circumstances.
For example, if someone has a long history of social anxiety, they don’t necessarily need to begin with the most humiliating experience of their childhood. They might start with something that happened yesterday: a coworker didn’t respond when they said hello, and for the next hour they worried that the coworker disliked them.
That small event may contain plenty to work with. Perhaps after a few rounds, another aspect emerges. Perhaps it reminds them of something else. Or perhaps that particular interaction simply becomes less upsetting.
We can follow the emotional charge from there.
A Different Response to the Same Trigger
The idea of counterconditioning gives us a fairly simple way of thinking about one part of what may happen during EFT. Something in the present or past has become associated with an alarm response. We bring that particular trigger into awareness at a manageable level and tap while paying attention to what happens. If the emotional and physiological response begins to settle, we are now experiencing the same trigger under different internal conditions.
Over time, the person who once felt panic when imagining a presentation may be able to picture the same room without the familiar rush of fear. Someone who couldn’t think about a breakup without crying may eventually remember what happened and notice sadness without becoming overwhelmed by it. The memory hasn’t disappeared, and the presentation may still feel challenging. What has changed is how strongly the old trigger pulls the nervous system into the response it learned before.
That is the basic process Lane was trying to describe with the language of counterconditioning. And although some of the neurochemical details he proposed in 2009 should be treated as hypotheses rather than settled explanations, I think the broader idea gives us a useful lens for understanding why EFT so often involves this particular combination: bringing something difficult to mind, staying within a manageable level of activation, and tapping while we do it.
If you read my previous article about the theoretical model recently proposed by Robert Schwarz and Peta Stapleton, you may notice some overlap here. Their paper offers a broader framework involving several possible mechanisms that may contribute to EFT, while Lane’s earlier paper focuses more specifically on a closely related idea: what might happen when we bring an emotionally charged trigger to mind while simultaneously doing something that helps reduce our level of arousal.
In that sense, counterconditioning gives us another way of understanding why the combination of tuning in and tapping may be so important.
That said, when we’re tapping by ourselves, it isn’t always easy to find that middle ground between being connected enough to an issue to work with it and becoming too emotionally overwhelmed. It can also be difficult to know which aspects of a memory or trigger to focus on as they emerge. If you’d like some support exploring what’s coming up for you, you can learn more about my approach at brunosade.com.
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I’m Bruno Sade, a clinical psychologist and Accredited Certified Advanced EFT Practitioner. I work online with people around the world, helping them reduce the emotional charge behind difficult thoughts, memories, and triggers.
If you’re curious about experiencing EFT in a guided session, I occasionally offer a free EFT tapping session in exchange for a brief market research interview. You can sign up here.
