When I was in hypnotherapy school, everything we learned was presented as another tool we could put into our therapeutic toolbox.
Some tools made sense to me immediately. Thought Field Therapy didn’t.
I wasn’t really understanding what it was doing or why it was working. I wasn’t having the same responses I was seeing in some of the other students, and frankly, it felt like too much for me.
So I made a decision.
I didn’t have to use every tool I was being taught. I was learning plenty of others. I simply wasn’t going to use this one.
If my therapeutic toolbox had been sitting out at a garage sale, this was the tool I wouldn’t even have tried to sell.
I would have given it away for free.
What I couldn’t have understood at the time was why I was having so much difficulty with it.
Following an accident at Stanford Hospital, I was living with fibromyalgia, myofascial pain syndrome and chronic fatigue syndrome. I was in excruciating pain 24 hours a day and taking seven different medications, none of which adequately controlled it.
Looking back, I understand something I couldn’t have understood then. My brain wasn’t functioning like my normal brain. I was experiencing what is often called “fibro fog,” and learning anything required far more effort than it normally would for me. I wasn’t fully comprehending the technique, and I wasn’t having the same responses to it that I was seeing in the other students.
At the time, I didn’t understand how profoundly my physical condition was affecting my ability to learn.
I simply thought:
This isn’t making sense to me. I don’t need this tool. I’m not going to use it.
And that might have been the end of the story.
Maybe I Made a Mistake
After school ended, a group of us who had been classmates got together to catch up.
By then I had used hypnosis to gain control over the three conditions I had been told had no cure, and I had opened my hypnotherapy practice.
As we sat talking, one person after another began sharing remarkable experiences they’d had using Thought Field Therapy.
I had nothing to say.
And I could feel it coming.
Eventually someone turned to me and asked what amazing stories I had about using it. I admitted I didn’t have any.
I had decided not to use it.
The looks on their faces said everything.
Are you kidding me?
That was the moment I began wondering whether perhaps I’d dismissed something too quickly. Maybe I’d made a mistake.
I promised myself I would go home, pull out my school materials and look at it again. I did exactly that.
And that’s when I realized something else. We had been taught the basic technique. But I needed more than the basics.
I didn’t want to know only what to do when everything worked exactly as expected. I wanted to know what to do when it didn’t.
What if I went through the basic technique with a client and they looked at me and said, “Nothing happened”?
Then what?
What was Plan B?
What was Plan C?
I wasn’t willing to sit there thinking, Well…oh well. Let’s try something different.
If I was going to put this tool into my therapeutic toolbox and use it with a client, I needed to have a plan.
Why Callahan Kept Looking
So I started researching the man behind it, psychologist Dr. Roger Callahan.
What I learned about Dr. Callahan helped me understand why he had begun searching for something different in the first place.
As I remember being taught in my training, Callahan had learned that it could take years – possibly as long as seven years – for a person to change a deeply held belief or emotional response.
He wasn’t satisfied with that.
He didn’t want the same people sitting in his office week after week, year after year, continuing to talk about the same things while waiting for something to finally change.
He believed there had to be another way.
So he began looking beyond the conventional approaches he had been taught and researching other possibilities.
That search eventually led him to Eastern medicine.
He became interested in acupuncture and acupressure and the ancient system of meridian points on the body. He began exploring whether what he was learning might somehow be useful in addressing the emotional challenges he was already trying to help his patients overcome.
And eventually, one particular patient gave him an opportunity to try something different. Her name was Mary.
Dr. Callahan and Mary
Mary’s fear of water wasn’t limited to swimming.
It affected some of the most ordinary parts of her life.
Even taking a bath was frightening. She used as little water as possible. Rain terrified her. She couldn’t take her children to the beach, and simply seeing the ocean could produce overwhelming anxiety. She even had nightmares about water.
There was virtually no escaping it.
Dr. Callahan had a swimming pool at his home, which gave him an unusually useful setting in which to work with Mary’s extraordinary fear of water.
For approximately a year and a half, he worked with her using conventional psychotherapy. Over time, Mary reached the point where she could sit at the edge of his pool and reluctantly put her legs into the water.
But she was still terrified.
She could make herself do it, but the emotional response hadn’t gone away.
She couldn’t even look at the water while she sat there, and the stress of those sessions could leave her with a severe headache.
Then, during one of those sessions near the pool, Mary described the terrible feeling she experienced in the pit of her stomach whenever she thought about water.
That gave Callahan an idea.
He had been studying the body’s meridian points used in acupuncture and acupressure. He knew that, according to traditional Chinese medicine, a point beneath the eye was associated with the stomach meridian.
So he decided to try something.
He asked Mary to tap beneath her eye. What happened next surprised both of them.
Mary told him that the terrible feeling in her stomach was gone. And then she got up and headed toward the swimming pool.
Callahan was startled. Mary couldn’t swim, and suddenly this woman who had been so terrified of water was heading directly toward his pool.
He followed her.
Mary reassured him:
“Don’t worry, Dr. Callahan. I know I can’t swim.”
That sentence has always been one of my favorite parts of Mary’s story.
She hadn’t forgotten reality. She hadn’t suddenly decided that water couldn’t be dangerous. She knew perfectly well that she couldn’t swim.
What had changed was her fear.
She went to the pool and interacted with the water without the overwhelming emotional response that had controlled her for so long.
This is probably a good place to explain the names, because they can get a little confusing.
And that experience with Mary became the beginning of what Callahan would continue investigating and developing.
From Callahan Techniques to TFT – and EFT
Dr. Callahan’s early work became known as the Callahan Techniques. He later named the approach
Thought Field Therapy, or TFT – which is what it was called when I learned it in hypnotherapy school.
Years later, Gary Craig, who had trained with Dr. Callahan, developed a simpler approach based on Callahan’s work and called it Emotional Freedom Techniques, or EFT.
TFT and EFT are not exactly the same method, but they share the same family tree. Dr. Roger Callahan’s pioneering work was the foundation from which EFT developed.
So if you know this work today as EFT, now you know why I’m calling it Thought Field Therapy throughout much of this story.
Thought Field Therapy is the tool I originally learned – and the tool I almost gave away.
The Cost of Helping People Faster
As Callahan continued developing his work, something happened that probably wasn’t part of his original plan.
Helping some people more quickly wasn’t particularly good for repeat business.
According to Callahan’s own later account, his previously successful psychology practice suffered financially as some people required far less treatment.
His wife at the time pleaded with him to abandon what she regarded as his strange new therapy and return to his former way of practicing.
He refused.
Callahan even wrote that he would sooner go back to working on a trash truck – something he had done while attending graduate school – than abandon the work he believed in.
Eventually, his financial situation became so difficult that he closed his office. He also wrote that his marriage later ended and that his former wife subsequently married a wealthy man.
I remember learning that story during my training, and it stayed with me. Not because of the divorce.
Because of his dedication.
Here was a man who believed he had found a way to help some people more quickly, and he wasn’t willing to abandon it simply because helping people faster wasn’t helping his bank account.
He continued developing Thought Field Therapy and eventually devoted his professional work to it, teaching the method to other practitioners through his training organization in Southern California.
And that’s how the tool I had once decided I didn’t need eventually led me back to Callahan. In 2000, I paid $750 to take the more extensive training.
And believe me, $750 in 2000 was a lot of money.
The tool I once wouldn’t even have tried to sell at a garage sale – the one I would have given away for free – had suddenly become something I was willing to spend $750 to understand.
My garage-sale item had become an investment.
I have told Mary’s story to virtually every client I’ve taught this technique to. Why?
Because I’m about to ask them to do something that looks pretty weird.
I want them to know why I’m asking them to do it and where it came from.
And before they’ve ever tapped a single point, Mary’s story gives them something very important:
hope.
Words Matter
One of the most important things I learned from Callahan was the importance of the words we use. I still teach this today.
Ask yourself:
Would you rather have pain or discomfort? Almost everyone I’ve asked chooses discomfort. One man chose pain.
His reasoning?
“Then I could just take a pain pill.”
Well, okay. There’s always one.
Words create different emotional responses. Imagine saying to a child:
“Jimmy, come into the kitchen. We have a problem.”
Before Jimmy even gets there, what’s he thinking?
What did I do?
Now try:
“Jimmy, can you come in here? I’m having a challenge.”
Different word. Different response.
There’s a reason “Houston, we have a challenge” doesn’t have quite the same ring to it. (The original, of course: “Houston, we have a problem.”)
I encourage my clients to replace words such as problem and issue with challenge whenever they can. Because, as I have said in my office for years:
What you focus your attention on, you energize.
And words help determine where that attention goes.
The Roads We Travel Again and Again
When I’m teaching this work, I use visual images because different minds understand things differently. One is an old dirt road leading to a farmhouse.
Imagine that people have driven that road for decades – in rain, mud, heat and every kind of weather. Eventually the tires create deep grooves.
Drive that road again and your tires naturally fall into those same tracks. Some of our emotional patterns can feel like that.
We’ve traveled them so many times that they’re familiar.
I also use California’s Highway 101.
Imagine the main challenge as Highway 101 and all those entrance and exit ramps as triggers. Something happens – a look, a word, a memory, a situation – and suddenly you’re back on that familiar emotional highway.
Thought Field Therapy gave me another image recently:
landscaping.
Sometimes there’s old material cluttering the pathway. Weeds.
Stuff that should have been cleared away a long time ago.
So maybe we’re doing a little landscaping in those thought fields.
Let’s get rid of some weeds. Let’s clean up the pathway.
By this point my clients are sometimes looking at me as if to say:
“Okay, Gwenn. Can we just do the thing now?”
Sorry.
I have to finish telling you my stories.
Then Along Came Dr. John
In 2002 or 2003, I received an email from a clinical psychologist who specialized in chronic pain. I’ll call him Dr. John.
He had been a psychologist for 18 years. He had found me online and was interested in talking with me because I was a certified hypnoanesthesiologist, and he worked extensively with chronic pain patients.
After quite a bit of correspondence, we decided to meet. We met for lunch at Nordstrom Cafe.
At some point, Dr. John asked me to hypnotize him.
Right there.
At noon.
In a crowded restaurant filled with conversations, music, dishes, kitchen noises and people everywhere. I suggested that perhaps he’d rather come to my office, where it was peaceful.
That, he told me, would defeat the purpose.
He wanted to know whether I could hypnotize him there.
What I didn’t yet know was that Dr. John had studied hypnosis himself, although his training was in the Ericksonian approach, which was different from mine.
So I leaned toward him and quietly worked with him for perhaps five minutes. When I brought him back, he looked at me in amazement.
He told me that at some point he had stopped hearing everything around us. The conversations were gone.
The music was gone.
The restaurant noise was gone.
He had heard only my voice.
Then, as I brought him back and directed his awareness toward the sounds around him again, suddenly everything was there.
What surprised him most was that I had somehow been able to get his mind to focus completely on my voice and tune out all of the distractions around us.
He told me I had an innate ability to do that. I was surprised.
I hadn’t been taught to do it. I didn’t even know I was doing it.
And apparently, he did.
Later, at my office, I mentioned that I also used Thought Field Therapy. He had never heard of it.
So I told him about Dr. Callahan. I told him Mary’s story. I explained the technique exactly as I would explain it to one of my clients.
And I could see the skepticism growing on his face. Finally he said:
“Gwenn, how do I know that your clients just don’t like you so much that they’re going to believe whatever you say?”
Holy Toledo, Ohio.
I was dumbfounded.
And flattered.
“My gosh, you’ve just met me and you’d say something like that? I am so incredibly flattered!”
But I explained that this was precisely why I told people Callahan’s story first. I was about to ask them to do something weird, and I wanted them to understand where the technique came from and why I was asking them to do it.
He thought for a moment.
Then he said:
“Well, it is a very compelling story.”
The Pen
Then Dr. John picked up a pen.
He told me to imagine putting my challenge into the pen. He held it on one side of his body and then slowly moved it across to the other side while my eyes followed it.
Once the pen reached the other side, he explained, I wouldn’t have the challenge anymore. I laughed.
He became very serious.
He cleared his throat.
Apparently this was an actual technique he used.
Oh.
Open mouth. Insert foot. Wiggle toes.
I apologized.
And then – because apparently I hadn’t dug the hole quite deeply enough – I said:
“Well, I’m sorry. That just wouldn’t work for me.”
What I told him was different about TFT in my experience was that when something shifted, you could feel it.
That caught his attention.
“You feel something?”
“Oh, yeah. You feel it happening.” He thought about that.
Then:
“Okay. I want to do this.”
“Come On. Do the Thing.”
I was thrilled.
Here was an experienced clinical psychologist who knew nothing about the technique and wanted to experience it himself.
So I asked:
“What do you have a challenge with?”
His entire demeanor changed.
“There’s this doctor whose clinic I work in twice a week, and I can’t stand him.”
Why?
“Because he intimidates me.”
I couldn’t believe it.
This intelligent, accomplished psychologist who had been practicing for 18 years was visibly becoming angry simply talking about this man.
So perhaps I got a little cocky. I asked him:
“Dr. John, correct me if I’m wrong, but if I told you somebody was intimidating me, wouldn’t you tell me, ‘No one can make you feel anything. You are allowing it’?”
He stared intensely at me.
His jaw was clenched.
“Why do you think this upsets me so much?”
Point taken.
I asked what the other doctor actually did.
Dr. John picked up a piece of paper and demonstrated it for me. Pretending there was a phone number on the page, he pointed to it as though he were speaking to the doctor.
I’ll call him Dr. Gomez.
“Dr. Gomez, is this the phone number that I would call if I needed a lab result for such-and-such?”
Then he showed me exactly how Dr. Gomez would respond. A long pause.
Eyes closed.
Eyes open with a huge eye roll. Another pause.
“How long have you been here?”
Pause.
“How many OTHER people could you have asked this question?”
I understood.
I explained that before we began, we were going to assess how strongly he was experiencing the challenge on a scale of zero to ten.
Zero meant it wasn’t a challenge at all. Ten meant it was as strong as it could be.
Then I asked:
“What number are you, on a scale of zero to ten?”
“I’m an eight! Oh my gosh, I’m just thinking about him, and I’m an eight!”
The man wasn’t even there. Dr. John was simply thinking and talking about him, and his response was already at an eight.
Then he waved his hands toward me.
“Come on, come on. Do the thing. Do the thing!”
Eight. Four. And Then No Number.
I formulated the phrases for him because by then I understood exactly what we were working with. He followed the tapping sequence and repeated the words.
At the end I asked him to rest his hands, close his eyes, take a deep breath and simply assess what he was experiencing.
He inhaled.
He began to exhale.
Before he’d even finished, his eyes opened.
“Oh my God. I am so relaxed right now!”
I had never had a client respond so profoundly, so quickly.
I immediately asked:
“What number are you?”
“Four! I’m a four! How do I know this?”
I told him that his subconscious mind knew where he was with it. Then he asked:
“Can we do it again?”
Absolutely.
We did another round.
Again, when we finished, he took the breath.
Again, before he’d completed the exhale, his eyes opened.
“Oh my God! I cannot believe how calm my body is right now!”
I asked for the number.
This time he searched for it.
He looked around as though the answer ought to be somewhere. Finally, he gestured behind his head.
“I can’t see the number!”
I was stunned.
Then he became even more puzzled.
He told me he could think of the doctor’s name.
But at that moment, as hard as he tried, he couldn’t bring the man’s face into his mind.
I had never seen anyone respond quite like this. He was absolutely stunned by his experience. Then he looked at me and said:
“Okay. I’m sold.”
One Week Later
About a week later, I saw Dr. John’s name come up on my phone. I answered.
“Hey, Dr. John. What’s going on?”
He was whispering.
And snickering.
I actually pulled the phone away from my ear and looked at it for a moment before putting it back.
“John, are you okay?”
He was still snickering.
Then, in a whisper, he told me:
“I’m at the clinic.”
Dr. Gomez had just walked in.
And then Dr. John stretched out the next word as though he could hardly believe it himself:
“I don’t even caaaare.”
He was practically snickering.
“This is so cool.”
And I started laughing with him.
Here was the same man who, only a week earlier, had become so activated simply talking about Dr. Gomez that he’d rated his response an eight.
Now Dr. Gomez himself had walked into the clinic.
And Dr. John was calling me, whispering and snickering because:
He didn’t even care.
“She’s Going to Do Something Really Weird, but It’s Okay.”
Dr. John had already told me:
“This is way too much for me to learn about, and you’re the expert. You’re the expert in this. I’m going to send my patients to you.”
And then came his proposed advance warning:
“I’m going to tell them, ‘This lady’s going to do something really weird, but it’s okay.'”
Not long afterward, I opened a wellness center, and Dr. John became part of the team. He had an office there, and some of his chronic-pain patients would come down the hall to work with me.
Sometimes I could tell from the expression on their faces that they’d received his little warning. I’d look at them and ask:
“Did Dr. John tell you I was going to do something weird, but it was okay?”
They’d nod.
And I’d laugh.
I knew exactly what he’d told them.
The psychologist who had once asked me how I knew my clients weren’t responding simply because they liked me was now sending his own clients to me.
Life has a sense of humor.
What’s Sitting Around in Your Thought Fields?
And maybe that’s a good place to leave you with a question.
What’s sitting around in your thought fields?
An old fear? An old hurt? A reaction that keeps taking you down the same familiar road? Maybe some emotional trash that’s been sitting there so long you’ve forgotten why you’re still carrying it – or even that you’re carrying it at all.
Perhaps it’s time to do a little landscaping.
Pull a few weeds. Clear out some old trash. Make room for new pathways.
Because changing your mind doesn’t always mean forcing yourself to think differently.
Sometimes it means making it easier to feel differently about something you’ve been carrying for a very long time.
And that’s one of the reasons this tool – the one I once would have given away for free – has stayed in my therapeutic toolbox all these years.
