Tapping on the body in “Energy Psychology”

First, a postscript on Derren Brown’s “no-touch” punch, described in a previous post. At the end, when he punches the man from behind, he doubles over FORWARD, just as he did when Derren “air-punched” him in the lower chest from in front. If someone actually punched you in the back, your stomach would move forward (not back), and your upper body would move back (not forward)—the opposite of what he did, and a pretty obvious indication that no “energy” was involved, only hypnotic suggestion.

Now let’s take a look at tapping on the body, which is a method used in most “energy psychology.” Repeated tapping, or other repeated interruptions, definitely DOES work to reduce the intensity of a troublesome representation. The question that I want to explore is, “HOW does it work?”

“Energy psychology” says that it works by “rebalancing” or “unblocking” the “energy” in acupuncture meridians. However, I think it works by rebalancing attention, and changing the submodalities of the representation. . . .

Can you recall a time when you wanted to concentrate on something, but it was really difficult, because someone kept talking to you, or kept touching you to get your attention? It is very difficult to concentrate on something when you are repeatedly interrupted by other events. Other things being equal (which they never are!) stimulation in the present usually elicits a stronger response than an internal representation of a remembered experience. . . .

The senses differ significantly in the strength of their ability to capture our attention. Vision and hearing are “distance” senses (giving us information about events that are usually somewhat distant). Because they are more distant, we usually have some time to decide on a response, so they elicit a less urgent and more conscious response. Touch, on the other hand, gives us information about what is always happening very close to us on the surface of the body. So we are much more likely to respond immediately (and reflexively and less consciously) to a touch.

If you want to get someone’s attention at a noisy party, touching them on the shoulder or elbow usually gets their attention quickly, no matter how engaged they are in conversation. (And if you touch them in certain other places, it will get a response even faster!). Smell is more of a distance sense than taste, which will usually elicit a very rapid response, because that is something very immediate and important– particularly if the taste is unpleasant or disgusting.

So tapping on the body is definitely a way to alter someone’s attention. . . . Tapping around the eyes is even more attention-getting, because of the great importance that we place on seeing, and the potential danger of any touch that is near the eyes. . . . So here’s my hypothesis, which would be ridiculously easy to test. Tapping on the body (or any other interrupting stimulus) will interfere with fully remembering and responding to a traumatic event, a problematic belief, or any other troubling internal representation. Repeated interruption by tapping, or some other event in the present will result in changing the submodalities of the troubling internal representation in the direction of making it less impactful (dimmer, smaller, more distant, more dissociated, etc.) in the same way as the NLP phobia cure does directly.

One obvious advantage of tapping is that it can be done with minimal cooperation from the client–you don’t have to ask them about their images or tell them to see them dim, distant, etc. and this can be particularly useful when the client is already hysterical or otherwise difficult to communicate with. Another advantage is that you can teach someone else how to do it in a few minutes. . . .

Whether or not you already use tapping in your work, start doing some exploratory testing. Without any preamble (or discussion of “energy meridians,” or prediction that this will make a difference to their problem or other suggestion, etc.), ask your next client with a troubling internal representation to tell you about its submodalities by comparing it with a similar representation that doesn’t bother them. Then ask them for permission to tap them around their eyes while they think about the difficult representation, and ask them to report any changes in intensity or any submodality shifts that occur. . . .

If they have another bothersome representation of about the same intensity, do the same, but this time tap them on the wrist or shoulder, etc. If I’m right, tapping around the eyes (or other more sensitive or “personal” parts of the body) should be faster and more effective. Of course, hypnosis and all sorts of suggestions can be added to this, but if you want to do science, you test only one thing at a time, as cleanly as possible. . . .

The final test would be a carefully controlled double-blind study in which neither the tapper nor those supervising the test would know anything about the hypothesis being tested. This is the kind of basic research that could be done relatively easily and definitively under controlled conditions, and I am happy to tell you that a new NLP Research and Recognition Project is being launched to do just that, something that our field desperately needs to separate itself from all the superstition and hokum out there.