The Science Behind EFT Tapping by Award-Winning Author

SUMMARY

In this post, I interview award-winning author Dawson Church, PhD on the science behind energy psychology and the link between emotions and genetics. Dr. Church is the author of the best-selling book “The Genie in Your Genes” and has done groundbreaking research and published studies of post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, depression and anxiety.

In this interview we go into great detail on the science behind EFT Tapping to heal your traumas and you’re your potential.

Here is some of what we discuss:

Key piece of evidence he recommends for the EFT and Energy Psychology Skeptics.
How social anxiety can actually propel you to change you’re struggling to take action.
Many examples of the science behind healing.
How to use science to stop repeating the patterns created by your limiting beliefs.
How to hard-wire positive shifts in your energy, emotions, and way of being in the world.
How to stop having a reactive life.
A new line of research showing how you can work on healing one event in great detail for your brain to heal many related events.
The results of many studies about EFT being highly effective for anxiety.
We discuss Wikipedia’s take on alternative medicine and where to get the facts.
We talk about why Energy Psychology and EFT are not yet mainstream when they’re so effective.
What you can do to overcome your limitations and maximize your potential.

FULL TRANSCRIPTION

Sebastiaan: Welcome to Social Anxiety Solutions – Your journey to social confidence. My name is Sebastiaan van der Schrier and I’m an ex-social anxiety disorder sufferer and I’ve been able to overcome my social anxiety thanks to Energy Psychology and the help of some brilliant therapists.

Now on this on this show I interview experts. I used to be every week now it’s once a month. And I interview these experts on their best social anxiety solutions. And it’s both from Western traditional psychology as well as Eastern Energy Psychology.

Now today I’m interviewing Dr. Dawson Church on the science behind Energy Psychology. Here’s a bit about Dawson. Dawson Church, PhD is an award-winning author whose best-selling book – “The Genie in Your Genes” has been hailed by reviewers as a breakthrough in our understanding of the link between emotions and genetics. He founded the National Institute of Integrative, integrative healthcare, the “NIIH” – niih.org. The study and implement promising evidence-based psychological and medical techniques.

He has published many scientific papers in peer-reviewed journals, collaborating with scholars at various Universities and outcome studies of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), depression and anxiety. His groundbreaking research has been published in prestigious scientific journals. He’s the editor, he’s the editor of Energy Psychology theory research and treatment which is a peer reviewed professional journal. He’s a blogger for the Huffington Post and he shares how to apply to breakthroughs of Energy Psychology to health and athletic performance through the EFT universe website. Which is one of the largest alternative medicine sites on the web. Dawson thank you very much for being on the show.

Dr. Dawson Church: Sebastiaan thank you not only for having me but also for your mission to help people who have social anxiety to get over it. So, I’m so grateful to you for doing that.

Sebastiaan: Nice. Thank you. Yeah, as I said earlier I’d like to talk first a little bit and share my story of how I found energy, Energy Psychology. And because I think it is met with skepticism when you fear first hurt hear about it and that is definitely how it was for me. Like I… you know, when I had severe social anxiety, we’re talking about 15 years ago now and I realized that there was something I could do about it, I started doing the typical things. You know, affirmations, visualizations, facing my fears, listening to hypnosis tracks, anything I could get my hands on. And I would only get some temporary boosts of confidence especially after I faced my fears, but it was temporary. I won’t go into all the weird things I did but I did quite a bunch of weird things.

And so, I kept searching and eventually I found EFT. I found that online and this guy was on a video, he’s like, “Yeah, it often works where nothing else works and blah blah blah, just tap here on your face and think about this…” You know like, “Yeah, right”. But I was you know, curious enough to look into it more. When you’re desperate enough that’s, that’s probably another way of saying it. And I remember looking onto a couple of forums and typing in, “Hey, is this the real deal or what?” And I got a lot of people commenting on it and then I you know, the more research I did the more stuff I found of people raving about it and it actually didn’t work very well for me initially because I couldn’t chew into any emotions. But I read so many testimonials that I’m like, “Alright, I’m going to order this”. So, I ordered all the DVDs from Gary Craig, you know, the original founder. And there I saw these EFT experts working with people with a wide variety of issues.

Yeah, and if I remember correctly also people with PTSD. I’m not sure if I remember that correctly but anyway like I saw these people transform on screen. I think it’s like 40 or 60 hours of content. And I would see it happened over and over and over again, so I was starting to build a confidence that this method could really work. And all the while I was trying myself sitting in my room tapping on my face and you know, saying these phrases and focusing on affirmations and I wasn’t doing it very effectively. I wasn’t doing it very accurately either. But that’s a different story.

Anyway, eventually, maybe three or six months later when I was in the Netherlands because this happens when I… what happened to be in South Africa. I contacted this EFT practitioner. I’m like, “Hey, I’ve got this problem with blushing and I feel really anxious around people and you know, I think that this EFT thing works but I’m not sure if it actually works for me. So, what do you think?” It’s like, “Well, maybe just come to an EFT workshop and we’ll, we’ll see how things go there”. And I’m like “Okay, good”. And then when I showed up in the workshop they first teach you the tapping and then eventually it was practice time and then when it was practice time, I was the practitioner and I worked with a client and she had I think a fear or sadness and we, you know, it started out seven out of ten strong, we did the tapping and you know, it was gone.

And then I observed that happen with other people. Great. And I was amazing to see but then when it was my turn, they couldn’t get anything with me. And so, yeah, they called in the workshop leader and he come over and he started asking me some, some difficult questions. I think I was 18 or 19 at the time. Yeah, whatever. Maybe 20-21, I’m kind of forgetting the actual, the actual ages of this. But he was asking me a couple of difficult questions about dating or sex or virgin or girlfriend or whatever and I was massively ashamed of this.

And so, now I was talking about this or confessing rather in front of all these people and I, my problem now was in the room because I became massively embarrassed and ashamed and so my face flushed and my shame went through the roof. And he’s like, “All right, now do the tapping.” And as I did the tapping as I started stimulating these acupressure point, it was like something was shifting inside. Like I started to calm down and I was feeling more accepting, I was feeling more relaxed.

And you know, I did the tapping four to five minutes and you know, I couldn’t even bring that shame back. Now I could talk about it freely and something had shifted inside. And I described this before. It’s like, like a plug was pulled and all the emotion was just flushed out of my body and in place of that was really like, like, “Oh, my God”. Like a relaxation that I hadn’t felt before with any of the other stuff I combined, and I knew that something was different, and I knew that something really special had happened.

And that was like, “Alright, now my skepticism is out of the water. You know, I know that this stuff really works. I’m gonna do whatever I can, whatever it takes to use this to overcome my social anxiety”. And you know, that’s taken me a long journey to overcome and you know, since then I’ve been avidly spreading news. But kind of brings us to right here right now when we’re, we’re talking to you Dawson who knows stuff about the science behind it which is which is very exciting so kind of leads me into my, my first question. If, if people are skeptical about EFT or about EFT or about Energy Psychology, what can you say to them? Like what is your unique experience and you know, what is your science you know, insight that you can that you can give them?

Dr. Dawson Church: Well, there is a lot of science behind EFT. There are over 100 scientific studies that have been published in peer-reviewed medical and psychology journals. So, there’s lots, lots of studies supporting EFT. But usually Sebastiaan the key piece of proof that you give people isn’t the science, it’s not facts, it’s not argument, it’s not persuasion. It’s the experience you had inside your body when you feel you describe that, all that tension is draining out of your body.

Now two things happen there. One is that tension drained away. The first thing is that that workshop leader evoked that in you and we now know from a new science called memory reconsolidation and extinction. This memory consolidation is a very new branch of neuro psychology, but it shows that to really have an effective release of traumatic stress you have to feel it fully first. That’s what you’re doing the workshop was you’re feeling it fully. That was number one. The second thing is you were releasing it as you tapped.

And so, when you when you’ve had somebody actually feel that shift in their bodies then there’s no need to argue or debate or discuss it they know because it’s an experiential feeling in themselves. It’s all saying from the Gnostics. It goes back about 3,000 years, it says, “To the person who has had the experience no explanation is necessary. To the person who has not had the experience no explanation is possible”.

Sebastiaan: Yeah.

Dr. Dawson Church: So, you feel in your body that that’s the main thing. So, when I do presentations for example two groups of psychiatrists or nurses or doctors or medical professionals I usually will spend just five or ten minutes quickly reviewing the science behind EFT and then give them an experience of it because you know, that takes out of our heads out of theory, out of debate, out of processing things up here and into our bodies. And the truth is that actually you can process very little of your, your life effectively in your head. And techniques for change that rely on your mind, making your body do things are a lot less successful than techniques that integrate both mind and body and emotions and spirituality all behind your goals.

And so, the EFT does that. EFT releases all our, those inner emotional psychological spiritual tensions and then you just feel better and then you can make progress toward whatever goal it is, is once you’ve let go of that energy structure that’s been kept in place in your body for so long.

Sebastiaan: Yeah, exactly. What I love about EFT exactly is it is it is an emotional or an energetic approach. And you know, there are other common approaches to overcoming social anxiety which focus on the cognitive and the behavioral. Like “Yeah, but social anxiety is not a logical problem. You can’t think yourself out of your anxiety”. You know, it’s missing an important component. Component – the emotions.

But you know, they’re saying, “Well, you should just you know, face your fears and refocus and change your thoughts”. And that all has value, I’m not saying it doesn’t have value at all because it does have value but they’re saying ignore the emotions, just change your behavior and eventually your emotions will catch up. And my experience is that when you actually look at the emotions first it makes changing your behaviors and changing your thoughts that much more effective and efficient and more gentle. You know, you don’t have to force yourself to grit your teeth and go for it.

Dr. Dawson Church: I heard a funny quote recently. Quote was “If thinking could solve our problems we would all be millionaires with six-pack abs”.

Sebastiaan: Exactly.

Dr. Dawson Church: So, we have these problems and you know, we know we need to solve that. We know we need to change and we can’t. One of the most frustrating things on the spiritual growth and personal growth, the personal transformation path is you know you should meditate. You know, you should get up in the morning, you know, you should exercise, you know you should spend more time in nature, you know you should spend more time with the loved ones in your life, you know you should make your values paramount in the way you live your life, you know you should have better work/life balance. We know all these things and we still can’t do them. And it often takes a crisis to make us do them.

What we teach, I teach many live workshops every year teaching EFT and meditation. And in the EFT workshops I tell people your problem is your friend. The crisis in your marriage has brought you into therapy. The weight crisis, the health crisis that that finally prompted you to hire a coach or go to the EFT Universe workshop. That thing actually is the it’s your problem you’re trying to solve yet it is the… it is the it… is the assistant. It is the aid that has propelled you to change.

And so, those things usually begin as small problems. “Weight begins as a small problem”. Relationship failure, it begins as a small problem, work failure, money failure. They begin small and they tend to escalate. And they tend to escalate to the point where we pay attention and have to solve them, or some people just fall into hopelessness. But most people try and solve them. And so, that problem then gets you into counseling, gets you to the workshop, gets you to the online course, makes you read a book, makes you take some kind of action.

So, these things we think of as problems. Physical pain is a good one. I’ve now worked with I worked with over 5,000 people in groups who have physical pain and they just want the pain to go away. And yet that pain is a message from the body that something’s wrong. And when they learn to listen to the body, read the body, respect the body, tune in to the body then the body doesn’t have to give them pain. And in the EFT research the average drop in pain is 68% in about 20 minutes of tapping.

People come start tapping and they’re tapping for often very physical things. They are tapping for shoulder surgery that wasn’t successful. And one funny one on but I’ve got 150 YouTube videos and one is I have my live workshops, they always ask for people to come up and work with me and I have a purely physical problem. I don’t want any kind of emotional component to this at all, I would need to come up and work the EFT right here if you have a problem that is purely completely 100 percent physical as this lady who’s in her 70s is really sweet lady volunteered who said “I had a rotator cuff surgery a few years ago. It was, it was successful but they, they shortened one of the muscles too much. And so, I had this pain in my biceps for the last seven years since the surgery and it never goes away, it’s not over the surgery it’s purely physical”.

So, I began to tap with her and we… actually I asked her a question I said “If you had to give the give that pain in your biceps a name, what would you call it?” And she said, “I’d call it Fred”. So, I said, “Well, is there a real Fred in your life?” And she said, “My ex-husband”. I said all this stuff has to do with her ex-husband and her biceps pain went away. And so, it’s interesting you know, so, whether it’s the social anxiety whether it’s something else these things propel us to change. And if we then take those as messages to our psyche, messages with potential saying I want you to transcend this, I want you to have a rich full life, then we don’t try and suppress these and make them into problems. We turn them into messengers that have valuable information for us that we can absorb learn listen to and then release all of that tension just like you did in that workshop and then move forward in a good way with our lives.

Sebastiaan: Yeah, excellent perspective. I’m talking about social anxiety is just a symptom of a deeper underlying problem and it’s that symptom that starts to bug you so much eventually that you start to look at “All right” or you know, you get someone to help you to look at what’s really going on here and what is really going on here is you know, there’s a perception that you’re not safe socially. And why is that? Well, because I don’t have a proper self-esteem. I don’t accept myself. I have these traumas in my past that are still getting activated. I’m reliving my past. In other words, you’re not living your, your full capacity, you’re not living your potential and you can see or your anxiety as a message that that’s what’s going on.

When you actually start to resolve all of that stuff then you get to operate and function on such a higher level and your life becomes so much better and that translates itself not just into your social life but other areas as well. So, it’s really fantastic once you actually start to start doing the work.

Dr. Dawson Church: And these cuts both ways in terms of your brain development because if you… Remarkable research in the late 1990s showed that if you take a signal and pass it through a neural bundle repeatedly for an hour the number of synaptic connections that neural bundle doubles. So, every hour you’re using that signaling pathway in your brain or your nervous system to pass signal through the number of synaptic connections doubles every hour potentially. That’s how much your brain is changing.

So, if you’re now reinforcing this behavior over and over and over again if you have these negative experiences as a child you then reenact them and you’re first from early relation adult relationships, you reenact them in later relationships and you then have a pattern of reenacting them. Not only is this a behavior, it’s actually becoming neural wiring hardwired into your neural network.

And so, now you have an experience that should be a pleasant experience, a good experience but you’re perceiving it, processing it through a neural network that’s geared and as is configured to see the world a certain way. And so, all incoming information is passing through this neural network. And so, all of the ways you all other disabilities inabilities lacks limitations limited self-concepts you’ve acquired those are other filter through which you see the world and you’re highly likely to repeat those experiences because you’re creating them because of your neural wiring.

And the reverse works as well. If you liberate yourself like we now in our nonprofit, we worked with over 18,000 veterans with PTSD over the last 10 years and we’ve seen thousands of these veterans literally just recover after a few EFT sessions from EFT. So, when you do tap, when you do learn to release that energy not just around one bad event but around many bad events around all the bad events of your life suddenly then that process of neural plasticity starts to work for you because you no longer using those old new circuits, you’re building new neural circuits around feeling good, feeling love though the world is a safe place, feeling kind being able to receive kindness, be able to give, feel compassion. All these things start to shift, and you’ve said earlier that when you make these changes they propagate throughout your whole life in many other areas of your life and they do.

So, this process of shifting your energy, shifting your emotions, shifting your way of being in the world winds up being not just a behavior, not just a thought, not just a belief system not just a worldview but literally being what’s hardwired into your brain. In an e-book I’m working on we published next year middle of next year there is a chapter on this and in one of my case histories I look at the case of an Australian journalist and this man was kind of a hard-bitten TV journalist, didn’t believe in meditation and EFT and all these things, but he decided to go on an eight-week mindfulness course and before he went on the course these researchers at Monash University put him in lab gave him a comprehensive suite set of tests.

They gave him an enormous number of tests of his cognitive abilities, reaction time, all kinds of ways which his brain function. And they gave him a really detailed comprehensive MRI measuring the volume in each part of his brain. He then began to meditate, be mindful, release the stress of daily basis and he found that he had to change really, really quickly. Within two weeks he was no longer fighting with his colleagues, he was no longer having road rage, behaviorally he had a shift.

In eight weeks after he finished this eight-week course he went back to Monash University they measured all the volume and all the different parts of his brain again and there was one part of his brain many parts of his brain changed in their volume by 2% 4% 5% in just eight weeks but the part that changed the most is called the dentate gyrus and its part of the hippocampus part of the center of the brain by the emotional midbrain limbic system. And his dentate gyrus grew by 23% in those eight weeks.

Sebastiaan: Wow.

Dr. Dawson Church: That is how quickly your body is remodeling itself based on your experience. You change then you start to change the way your brain is. And the dentate gyrus is a part of the hippocampus that manages emotional regulation and coordinates emotional regulation across the rest of the brain. So, suddenly now you aren’t having road rage, you won’t be screaming at your, your kids, you won’t getting upset with your parents, you aren’t being mean to other people in your life, you aren’t reacting, you aren’t living a reactive life.

And so, your whole brain is changing this way and it is phenomenally powerful to tap, to meditate, to start bringing things into your life because after a while you literally reshape the entire wiring inside your skull.

Sebastiaan: Very, very exciting. So, let me see if I understand this correctly. So, people have a particular wiring. Their brain is kind of wired for social anxiety at the moment and we can use tapping and meditation and to kind of help undo that wiring knot and create new wiring. In other words, you know, there are roads that are very much erodes in your brain, brain pathways that have been traveled a lot. And so, those paths are you know, easy, easy roads for your brain to take. And we can use the tapping in order to make those roads less traveled and then we can form new neural pathways so, you’re creating new wiring. So, wiring for social ease, for social confidence.

Dr. Dawson Church: Yes.

Sebastiaan: Right.

Dr. Dawson Church: Yes.

Sebastiaan: Very exciting.

Dr. Dawson Church: Yeah. In fact, that process takes about three weeks, so it takes about in an hour the number of neural connections can double in a neural bundle but if you quit using a year-old bundle, if you used to be anxious and you no longer are reenacting that behavior then within three weeks the body says, “Gee, I noticed that that neural pathway is being used”. Even if you’ve been using it a lot for the last thirty years suddenly the body says, you know, it’s not using a neural pathway and within three weeks the body will start to disassemble those neural clusters and remove that neural wiring. So, it’s happening, happening in both dimensions.

Sebastiaan: Okay. So, this piques my curiosity. So, is it the case that your past traumas and your beliefs are causing your brain to take that particular you know let’s just say social anxiety wiring pathways and that when you release those traumas, when you get rid of those beliefs that you’re less likely to take those. Let’s say social anxiety neural pathways?

Dr. Dawson Church: Yes. You’re less likely to reenact them. Now again bear in mind that that it’s likely if you trace this back to childhood that this behavior was in some way helpful to you. That maybe somebody in your life who was threatening or mean or difficult or in some way intolerable they may have been someone or some situation in your life that we’re avoiding them made a lot of sense. And when you were two when you were four when you’re six, fight flight and freeze is a really viable and useful set of behaviors. You need to do that. But when you’re 24, 25, 39, 52 not so helpful to be doing that. Now you have all the resources of adulthood. And often people are sliding as though the’re five.

And so, the challenge of our that we have as adults is to be parenting ourselves, is to go back and talk to those younger versions of ourselves help them shift those. But again, those things were useful to us in some stage, early stage of our lives. They just out we’ve outgrown them, and they’ve outlived their usefulness.

Sebastiaan: Yeah. We talked about in therapy land it’s often said what our current problems used to be solutions at one point. Right. Yeah.

Dr. Dawson Church: That’s right.

Sebastiaan: Okay. Very exciting. One quick thing I wanted to bring back that I that I heard you say to give people proper perspective. You said well we need to… When you deal with all of the traumas from your past and when someone hears that they might be like, “Oh, my God it’s gonna take forever and bla bla bla bla bla”. But with EFT it doesn’t take that long to actually neutralize a particular traumatic experience. And there’s also something called the generalization effect. Can you maybe talk about that?

Dr. Dawson Church: If this is a paradox with the EFT and with EFT we have you focus on usually a single event, a single major emotional trigger that happened and that event is usually one that was very brief. Maybe you were 12 years old and you had your first girlfriend and you walked around the corner in the school and she was kissing another boy. So, you have this experience of betrayal. Maybe you were five years old and you were playing with your older brother who was nine and you were wrestling with him and he lay on top of you and you couldn’t breathe and you passed out. So, you have this traumatic experience.

So, people have these kinds of early experiences. What we do is we have people in EFT find these early experiences and work on them in great detail how it felt the somatic experience of feeling your brother crushing you, the memory of passing out. Your attempts to get him to stop and him not stopping. We have you work on this in this great detail. You might think, “No, I’ve had five thousand traumatic events. Do I have to go to each one in that detail?” And we have you go to one or a few of them in great detail with EFT but there is a part of there’s a new part of psychology called memory reconsolidation and extinction.

It’s an amazingly interesting new line of research and it shows that if you tell the brain that a certain stimulus is not a threat to your survival then it potentiates every symbol similar stimulus that you have in your environment. So, for example maybe you’ve been afraid of taller men ever since your brother you know, lay on top of you and you passed out. So, now you’ve had this irrational fear of taller people and, so you feel uneasy around them. You reinforce this for a long time. Now you work on that one event and maybe you’ve had maybe you know, 35 bad events with your brother. You work on one event and when your hippocampus realizes that that event is not survival, it generalizes that to all of the other similar events. It says, “Oh, that’s not a threat”.

Like me, one example from PTSD. There was a man that we worked with and he was triggered by the sound of a plastic water bottle. You ever see water bottle in your hand right now and so that’s the end before we put the top back on it’s just crush it like crackle it like this. Okay. When this guy who’d been in Iraq would hear that sound, he was triggered because it sounded like small arms fire to him. Sounded like pistols going off to him. So, here he is getting this innocuous cue which happens often you hear plastic water bottle and has been now has been back from Iraq for seven years and is still responding to it.

Now we work with them with EFT, we tap them one time. We then have him we bring an association in his brain between this net sound and going into fight or flight. And once we break the Association one time, it’s not like we have to work on every single event like that. Break at one time around one big event and suddenly the hippocampus then generalizes it that emotional learning part of the brain says, “Oh, I now know that tall taller people are not a threat to my survival”. And so, then suddenly all of those stimuli go away. That’s also why we always work early with EFT. We don’t work on the adult events. We work on the childhood ones and work on those at that early age.

Sebastiaan: Excellent. Back to my list of questions. Dawson what is what’s the most compelling evidence of EFT or EFT’s effectiveness for anxiety specifically that might also be quite easy to understand for people?

Dr. Dawson Church: There have been many studies of EFT for anxiety and there’s also been a meta-analysis of those studies. And a meta-analysis is a very sophisticated piece of data crunching where a researcher will take all of those studies. As in this case this particular researcher who works in the Syracuse University in New York took 14 randomized controlled trials for anxiety and she crunched the numbers and as a scale by which you can calculate how effective a therapy is. And on that scale, a therapy with some efficacy has a score of 20, moderately effective therapy has a score of 15 and a highly effective therapy has a score of 80. So, 20 little bit effectiveness, 50 effective therapy, 80 highly effective therapy. EFT on that spectrum was at 131.

Sebastiaan: Wow.

Dr. Dawson Church: Highly effective for anxiety in those 14 randomized controlled trials. Some of which were only one session for certain kinds of anxiety. So, like public speaking anxiety for example, most of the research is just a single session of that and people’s public speaking anxiety goes away. I worked with many people with public speaking anxiety and again usually in one session it’s gone.

Sebastiaan: Amazing, amazing. What it… what is interesting is a whole bunch of years ago while I was still foolish enough to argue on Forums with people whether the EFT is the real deal or not, I posted on there some, some stuff that I found, and you know, when you put some information there and people don’t want to give in to come up with counter information. And one of the counter things that people say it’s like, “Well, EFT is pseudoscience, look Wikipedia says so”. And what would you say to someone like that?

Dr. Dawson Church: I tell him to go look at the evidence and then look at Wikipedia. Wikipedia was taken over around 2004 – 2005. All of the alternative medicine entries in Wikipedia were taken over by a group of skeptics. They’re highly organized, they’re very aggressive in what they do. They deleted all of the entries on that were there already on things like energy medicine, Energy Psychology and they wrote their own calling these things pseudoscience.

So, acupuncture, they tagged as pseudoscience. And the acupuncture entry is just bizarre. Now again it used to be a good entry but then they’d be an inserting these things like pseudoscience into the entry. So, even, even methods like EFT with over 100 studies, energy medicine you’ll read Wikipedia is pseudoscience. On my non-profit website we have a database of research published on energy medicine in peer-reviewed medical psychology journals. There are over 600 studies there and that isn’t even include acupuncture or Energy Psychology. So, energy medicine studies showing us perspective for all kinds of diseases. Go to Wikipedia and it says it’s pseudoscience. So, this is a this is skepticism of that nature is a faith based system.

And so, when the faith of those skeptics is challenged they simply dig in and deny it. And so, one of the things that really disturbs me about our culture is science denial. And so, there’s science denial of evolution. This science denial of climate change, this science denial of energy medicine, energy, energy therapies. And it’s a real problem because you know, we don’t take action on climate change. It’s causing us as human species problems if we don’t get proper medical treatment because someone on Wikipedia has tagged an evidence-based therapy. Let’s accept it like all of my, all my classes when I teach a live workshop. If you’re a doctor you’ll get continuing medical education credit from the American Medical Association from taking my class. You’ll take continuing education credit from the American Psychological Association if you take my class. And you’ll go on Wikipedia and they’ll tell you it’s pseudoscience.

So, this is deep denial. And when people like these skeptics are able to seize public information sources like Wikipedia and pass off their faith based, their faith based belief systems. Which I met I respect people’s beliefs completely. It’s just that you know I don’t want to want to have them shoved down everyone’s throat or presented as facts and that’s what Wikipedia is so. I would, I would really, many parts of Wikipedia have wonderful information but anything to do with alternative medicine on Wikipedia is just gonna very rarely be in accordance with an evidence-based approach to healing.

Sebastiaan: And what website would people go to, to get the… I’ll ask you more about your own website it might be the same website I don’t know but where would people go to check out some studies?

Dr. Dawson Church: Well, we keep the only up-to-date current website EFT research on the web. And it’s called research.EFTuniverse.com So, EFTuniverse.com is my main website and research.EFTuniverse.com is the research page. Go there and or just type in and just Google “Research EFT” and you’ll get EFT universe web, website and do a search page and right at the very top and you’ll read there about the American Psychological Association standards for research, accreditation of our trainings, you will be able to find all of the links to all of these studies on PubMed, the US government’s database publications. So, that’s where you ought to go to get to get the facts. And if anybody can do anything about Wikipedia, like if you if you’re listening and you are a Wikipedia editor please go to the top pages of Wikipedia and make a comment because for a long time now more than ten years the skeptics have been able to just propagate this anti science belief system in the pages on again for chiropractic, for acupuncture, for homeopathy, for Energy Psychology. All of these kinds of therapies are tagged that way. And so, it’s one of those things which if you can do anything about it, it’s well worth giving it a try.

Sebastiaan: Yeah, because it’s a very unfortunate thing. You know, something that is this effective and people type in Google you know, whatever they type in and they come to Wikipedia because it’s such a popular website and they’re you know, “Wikipedia says it’s not true. All right well I’m not even gonna give it a go”. They face out tremendously which you know, it’s alright good we’ve said enough.

All right. Moving on. What why do you think that Energy Psychology and EFT isn’t mainstream yet? You know, given that it’s so effective, why is it not mainstream yet?

Dr. Dawson Church: Well, any new therapy takes a while to catch on, even good therapies. And I wrote a paper in a very prestigious journal about this. And medical innovation is one of those areas which I think is trying to think of a of the right word here Sebastiaan, it’s astonishing. So, what the US government commissioned a panel in 2000 to figure out how innovations get from the lab to the patient. So, we have breakthroughs in medicine. How did it get into the hospitals, into doctors? What what does what this panel found was that of every 10 innovations in medicine only 2 ever reach the patient. On 10 only 2 reached the patient. And it takes an average of 17 years to get to the patient.

Sebastiaan: Wow.

Dr. Dawson Church: So, what you mean… Look I’m using an iPhone over here, pretty new iPhone, it’s great and it has all these wonderful features. So, I upgrade my phone every couple of years. And so, when it comes to our cars, when it comes to the Internet, when it comes to our computers and our payment systems and some of the points of our technology we’re in this in this frantic technological race start grade. When it comes to medicine and our bodies and our health we are getting 20% of 17-year-old technology. That’s what there isn’t medicine. And the whole enterprise of medicine is heavily biased against new technologies. Not because they… There’s anyone any, any bad person out there. Not because the drug company is in your rule, rule the show but because people go to college, they learn some things in college. In college they’ve been taught by professors to learn there’s not a generation before. Then they graduate from college and that’s that what they have in their toolbox. They then become doctors and nurses and people they go and practice those things for a 30-40-60-year career.

And they may update their knowledge a little bit but the whole brings in a new therapy in and bring any kind of new advanced and is very difficult. So, that government panel found that again we get about only 20% of medical breakthroughs ever and we get them 17 years late. So, while we are advancing very rapidly when it comes to this kind of technology there are all amazing medical breakthroughs. They’re amazing therapies out there. It’s just that they aren’t being practiced in the hospitals till you know, they all show up there with 2050 so…

Sebastiaan: Yeah.

Dr. Dawson Church: Yeah.

Sebastiaan: Yeah. I think it’s generally just being looked down upon. You know, I talked to my Dutch doctor about acupuncture and he’s kind of scuffed like, “You’ve been in Asia too long like what’s wrong with you?” And that’s the typical the typical attitude towards it. Which is also a reason, a big reason why I’m saying, “Hey, I’m interviewing Western traditionally trained psychologists, psychotherapists, doctors, researchers, you know, who have that particular training as their default who then have incorporated EFT or Energy Psychology into their practice and now have the credentials while they rave about it.

So, you know, it’s not just Joe off the street but it’s this person who has been a doctor or psychotherapist for 20 years who’s telling you, “Hey, my results with my clients are 10 times as effective and what used to take years now takes you know, months or just a few weeks.” And so, that builds a lot of credibility. I also personally think that it’s not mainstream yet because it looks a bit silly and it’s, it’s really lit the leading edge.

You know, I tell friends about it and it’s like… And I pre-frame it, right? You know, I’m like you know, it looks a bit silly because you’re tapping on your face and your body and you probably think you know, you’re looking like an idiot and maybe you do but who cares? It’s actually gonna get you the benefits. And then I’m the weird tapping guy for a while until I actually guide them through a bit of an experience and then it’s like “Wow, you know, tell me more about this”. And you know, it is spreading and it’s becoming more mainstream, you know.

Dr. Dawson Church: Yes.

Sebastiaan: Just from memory I know it’s been on Dr. Oz, it’s been on… Helped me out here, Psychology Today. It’s been on really big platforms and that’s growing and expanding, and I think it will it is continuing to grow because it is this effective. So…

Dr. Dawson Church: Yes. Any really good therapy it’s, it’s hard to suppress it or it’s hard for it to fall by the wayside so really if there’s if there’s incremental improvement then it may or may not get adopted but when you have something that’s a dramatic improvement like you know, with PTSD we show, our research shows that in between four and ten sessions people recover completely PTSD in 90% of cases and when we follow them up six months year later they are still fine.

So, when a therapy is that effective in a short period of time that you can compare to a drug therapy which may only mask the symptoms and then you have the other drug for years all the rest of your life. So, we’re seeing a lot of people. I’ll be doing a training this weekend. It will be almost all mental health professionals. It will be psychiatrists, it will be psychologists, it’ll be nurses, it’ll be psychotherapists, social workers. So, we trained thousands of professionals every year. Life coaches using it in the Olympics, base sports figures using it in the national baseball, major league baseball in the U.S. in the National Football League in the U.S. Many athletes using it. In the Olympics again, there are a lot of people tapping. So, again athletes want an edge. They want something that will work and help them succeed and EFT is quick portable, easy to learn and really works.

Sebastiaan: Awesome. I’d like to ask you a bit of a more personal question when it comes to doing research. So, if I would want to put a, put a, put a research thing together to you know, look at the effectiveness of EFT for social anxiety, typically what I understand is that these research pieces are quite expensive. Like what is required in order to put something like that in place?

Dr. Dawson Church: Well, a research project can be expensive. My first pieces of research were really cheap. I would just do a workshop like a weekend workshop or 3-day workshop or 1-day workshop and I’d had people a piece of paper when they walked in the door, I’d say, “Fill out this questionnaire”. And it was a validated psychological questionnaire that would protest for anxiety, depression, PTSD and a few other things.

They woke off the door at the end of the day I had another questionnaire and say, “Fill out a post questionnaire”. And then once you’ve got 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 or 100 of those together you go to study. So, that’s very simple research. Where research is going though now is much more into the biology of EFT. Like we just finished a $50,000 study of things called micro RNAs and this is a really exotic lineage in terms of biology.

We’ve also done several studies of gene expression and those are expensive. So, which genes are expressed when you do EFT? So, we found in one piece of research that when you get just a one-hour EFT session that genes that code for cancer killing are turned up. Genes that code for metabolism are being increasingly expressed, genes that code for immunity. Like the production of red blood cells and also the what kind of work life white blood cells that kill many organisms. All of those genes are being upregulated are being turned dialed up by EFT pervasive health benefits from just a one-hour EFT session.

And so, those are expensive studies they cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars but basic research on behaviors and also on mental health issues like PTSD phobias anxiety are pretty easy to do.

Sebastiaan: Great. Okay. All right. Final question. If I did not ask you something that I could have asked you that would have allowed you to share something important, what would my question have been and how would you have answered it?

Dr. Dawson Church: Sebastiaan, I really… When I do live workshops I… People tell us their stories and so, often they’re on camera, they are coming up in front of the room, they sit with me and they tell me their story and it is just shocking to me how people suffer. They are suffering inside their heads in all kinds of ways.

Like at one workshop recently a young woman described an incident on a train where she was really triggered by a man who was unkind to her on a train. But it turned out to relate to another event in her early childhood. We worked on the early childhood event and then she eventually, came to a complete sense of peace about the early childhood event and then she was no longer bothered by the man on the train.

And then the lady sitting next to her who was an elderly woman using a cane to walk around suddenly felt so good she was using her cane. Just amazing how, how seen people heal like that. But when they tell me those stories, like this woman, woman, this young woman looked she is so competent, she’s so professional, she’s so together looking and yet when she tells you what’s happening inside her head, she is just suffering so much, and my heart just goes out to people when I hear these stories.

And then I realize help and relief is right here their fingertips. Just that little bit of tapping, little bit of acupressure can help them feel enormously better. So, that’s really what I want you to know if you’re listening. As you listen, know that your limitations, and the things you believe hold you back, are not objective truths. They are subjective coping mechanisms you developed as children. As a child. And which you’ve long since outgrown. And so, let them go. You have enormously more potential than you realize.

My forthcoming book is called, “Mind to Matter: The Astonishing Science of How Your Brain Creates Material Reality”. And in that book, I review a huge number of studies, over 500 studies and they show that literally as we change our, our consciousness as we change the way our minds work our brainwaves change. Those brainwaves are objective and we measure them on an MRI on an EEG. And as they change they’re sending signals to ourselves that are affecting our telomeres, that are affecting our stem cells, that are affecting our enzyme production in our bodies, that are affecting cell regeneration, that are affecting cell metabolism, that are affecting our body’s ability to fight cancer. All of these things are happening purely by changes in consciousness. And when you let go of those limitations and let go of that negative self-talk, you have a whole new “You” and you make radical changes to your biology. You then make radical changes to your life.

So, our limitations we have in our heads are sad, tragic stories about why our life has to be this way. They’re just constructs and it’s time to let them go and replace them with a story of love and potential and becoming the person you know you can be. You can be that person that you’ve suspected is inside the giant inside of you. It is possible to be that huge force for good in your life, in your community and in the world.

And so, I love for people to let go of the limitations, tap them away, release them and then claim their full potential. So, that’s what motivates me to talk to everyone today, to do what I do in the world every, every, every moment and it’s just gratifying to see people shed those limitations.

I can tell you I’ve shed enormous limitations in my life. You will hear people who’ve tapped, who shared their limitations and you can too.

Sebastiaan: Awesome. Thank you for much, so much for sharing and I think it’s been very inspiring also to hear the science behind the tapping. Where can people find out more about you and your work?

Dr. Dawson Church: Go to my website dawsongift.com We can download the free EFT mini manual and you all get the instructions on how to do it on yourself. That’s just Dawson Gift, just my name. D-a-w-s-o-n Gift dot com. And the free mini manual is there, my meditations is there, there are a whole bunch of links to our certified practitioners there, our live workshops, we have weight-loss program, we have a relationship skills program. Tons of links through dawsongift.com

Also, our veterans stress project. We treat veterans free of charge. You can access through dawsongift.com So, that that’s the one place to go for access to all of those things.

Sebastiaan: Awesome. Dawson thank you a lot for your wisdom and inspiration and I really appreciate it.

Dr. Dawson Church: Bless you and bless everyone who’s here and listening and watching.

Sebastiaan: Thanks.

If you experience Social Anxiety, click below for a free video course to start to overcome it.

SUMMARY

In this post, I interview award-winning author Dawson Church, PhD on the science behind energy psychology and the link between emotions and genetics. Dr. Church is the author of the best-selling book “The Genie in Your Genes” and has done groundbreaking research and published studies of post-traumatic stress disorder, PTSD, depression and anxiety.

In this interview we go into great detail on how to use EFT Tapping to heal your traumas and you’re your potential.

Here is some of what we discuss:

Key piece of evidence he recommends for the EFT and Energy Psychology Skeptics.
How social anxiety can actually propel you to change you’re struggling to take action.
Many examples of the science behind healing.
How to use science to stop repeating the patterns created by your limiting beliefs.
How to hard-wire positive shifts in your energy, emotions, and way of being in the world.
How to stop having a reactive life.
A new line of research showing how you can work on healing one event in great detail for your brain to heal many related events.
The results of many studies about EFT being highly effective for anxiety.
We discuss Wikipedia’s take on alternative medicine and where to get the facts.
We talk about why Energy Psychology and EFT are not yet mainstream when they’re so effective.
What you can do to overcome your limitations and maximize your potential.