- If you search “EFT/Tapping + “your problem” on the Internet, you’ll find tapping scripts quickly.
- At first, glance, tapping scripts seems like a good deal.
- Find a script that fits “your problem,” tap along, and “your problem” will be solved.
- A tapping script is a list of phrases made by someone who wants to talk about “your problem” in as many different ways as they can think of.
- You just have to tap along with the text, audio, or video.
- You just have to follow the author’s lead.
- It’s not that simple, though (or useful).
Most people won’t be able to use a tapping script. No matter how skilled or experienced the person who wrote the tapping script is, they don’t know you or why you have the problems you do. Even if your problem is commonplace, you are unique. No one who has never met you will be able to tell what needs to be tapped or what experience the person who wrote the tapping script has because they don’t know you or why you have the problems you do. Even if your problem is commonplace, you are unique. No one who has never met you will be able to tell what needs to be tapped. Even if the topic and wording are right for you and your problem, it’s likely that the script will only deal with the symptoms and not the causes.
Some people might find that a tapping script works “too well.” EFT is very effective and can be used quickly and easily to get to deep emotional states. If you are a vulnerable person with a lot of barely contained distress, you may be triggered by a part of the tapping script that connects you to that underlying distress in a way that could be very hard for you to handle on your own. If the script makes you feel a lot of pain, the author can’t help you get out of it.
Why tapping should be avoided:
There’s nothing to catch you. You can’t stay safe with a script, recording, or video. Some problems need to be worked on in a place where you can feel safe. A trained professional can help you work through your thoughts and feelings in a way that is safe for you. A script can’t help you keep your distress under control.
You can’t change a script. Using a tapping script is like traveling along train tracks. You can’t bring in anything you see or feel that isn’t on the tracks. You can’t change how the problem and solution are written in the script. You follow the tracks, even if they don’t lead anywhere useful.
A script won’t react to what you say. In contrast to a good practitioner, a tapping script doesn’t care about what’s going on with you. It doesn’t care what you say, and it can’t change how it works to fit what you know. From the point of view of the script, you’re not there.
When you follow a script, it can make you lazy. When you follow a script, you give yourself over to someone else, hopefully an expert, who will tell you what to do and make things better. You give up your own ability to look into things and take action. You get better at understanding when someone tells you what’s going on, what it means, and what to do (which is the opposite of what should be happening in good therapy or coaching).
You tell someone else what your experience means to you. When you use a tapping script, you agree with what a stranger says about what you are thinking, feeling, and knowing. Some (or even all) of that might not work for you. We tend to believe what experts say, so it’s easy for us to adopt ideas and explanations that have nothing to do with us (especially in the suggestible state that comes with tapping). These explanations and descriptions may not help us and may even get in the way of us figuring out and fixing what’s really going on in us.
They can stop people from doing their own research. If you agree with what someone else says and how they explain things, you might not look into what’s really going on inside of you. The only way to know yourself is to pay attention to what you do. You can’t “know thyself” if you just do what someone else tells you to do.
They make it seem like hard problems are easy to solve. A tapping script can look like a magic spell: tap here and say this, and everything will be fine. Many problems, especially the hard ones like trauma, anxiety, panic attacks, depression, and self-hatred, are complicated and won’t be solved in five minutes.
Most problems can’t be solved by writing a script. Many of our hard emotional problems come from our childhood or from traumatic events that we haven’t dealt with. No skilled professional would use a simple script to fix problems from childhood or get rid of bad memories. A script might help you get the boat to safety, but it won’t help you find the leak or fix it.
People who aren’t likely to benefit from them may like them. People who are very unhappy want to know what’s wrong and what they should do. If they are that unhappy, it’s because they have deep-seated, complicated problems that a tapping script won’t or can’t solve. Because they are desperate, they are more likely to be attracted to a script and even more likely to be hurt by it.
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