Undoing Meridian Therapies
Why it is sometimes possible to undo meridian therapy healing, and what to do about it
Revision 2.1, December 18, 2009


Dear Reader:

In 1999 during one of our workshops, we asked our participants to try and reverse the effects of a well known meridian therapy, EFT. To our surprise, one of these volunteers rather quickly worked out a way to do it, at least part of the time.

In 2009 we finally had time to look at this issue. We found the problem was due to the way the different meridian points affect the removal of the trauma structures in the primary cell; some meridian points eliminate the most obvious trauma moment, but don't heal the underlying stuck gene (the epigenetic damage). Because the symptoms can sometimes go away before the gene expression problem is healed, the potential exists for the problem to return. Below is a copy of the article we wrote for our newsletter about all this, along with a way to make sure it doesn't happen.


How EFT Works, Part 1: Making EFT Irreversible
 By Grant McFetridge, © copyright 2009


We recommend the use of EFT
As students who have taken our training know, we highly recommend meridian therapies like EFT for both healing and peak states work. In fact, we recommend using them first over other therapies (even WHH), because it is so fast and simple for many problems.
 
Energy toxins and reversing EFT
Gary Craig (the creator of EFT) and Dr. Callahan (the creator of TFT) talk about the problem of ‘energy toxins’ when using meridian therapies. Briefly, some people will regain a trauma after being exposed to environmental chemicals or particular foods – or the meridian therapy won’t work until they get away from the substance (or quit ingesting it). Oddly, even in the same person, different substances affect different traumas – and the substances don’t have to be allergens or toxic in any obvious way. For example, one of Gary’s videos shows a seminar where he just could not get EFT to work unless they went outside – he hypothesized that something in the room was acting as an energy toxin for nearly everyone.
 
Over the years, there was a lot of debate on whether energy toxins really exist or not. When therapy failed to work for some unknown reason, there was a tendency to blame ‘energy toxins’ as the culprit, rather than look to other reasons why the therapy may have gone wrong. Thus, in general it is a good idea to ignore the idea of energy toxins and just keep searching for core issues – after all, even if there is an energy toxin involved, different traumas are not generally affected by the same toxin, and so you will probably work around that issue successfully. Interestingly, these last few years I hear less and less about energy toxins, and more about tricks that get EFT working successfully.
 
Directly undoing EFT’s healing
By accident, in the 1990s I found out that I could directly undo the effect of EFT in some people. I first noticed it after a Beauty Way peak state process. The test subject, a woman in her forties, used EFT on the developmental trauma, and had a stable state for a week. During a kayaking trip, she was caught in a storm, came close to dying, and lost her state. Later, when I checked, her original trauma in the developmental event had returned.

Example:
The first time I really noticed the reversal problem happened in 1998. A client inadvertently reversed healing we’d done with EFT. She had an issue involving the feeling of dying. After successful treatment, involving a womb trauma, her experience of everyday life radically improved. Eight days later, after a kayaking trip, her improved condition reversed itself. What happened was as follows: she was kayaking, and it looked like they would all be killed in bad weather on the ocean. She was feeling that she might die (Step 1). She was frantically paddling, straining and breathing hard as she fought the waves (Step 2). And she was cold after hours in the water (step 3). The reversal of healing was dramatically noted after that by the client.

A year later, during a WHH training, I asked a group of students to pick a trauma, tap it away completely using EFT, and see if they could figure out a way to recover the trauma – and one man did. He’d found that if he reversed the way he breathed (contract the diaphragm when breathing in, expand the diaphragm when breathing out) while focusing on the original trauma moment, he could get the trauma to restore itself. We then found that several others in the class could also undo their EFT healing using his trick, although not everyone could. Below is the test we ran in 1999 and what we concluded at the time.


The Initial Experiment:
In a workshop in 1999, we deliberately asked for volunteers who knew EFT to try and reverse the healing effects of EFT. Since we didn’t know what might be the key pieces in reversal, we had the participants focus on two types of traumas from their pasts, and experiment on themselves. The first trauma type was purely emotional, while the second had a physical injury associated with the emotional content. We had the participants tap out the first trauma, then try to undo it in any way they could think of. We repeated the process for the second physical trauma, and again asked participants to try and undo it. We iterated when one person discovered that moving his diaphragm opposite to normal breathing was effective in undoing the tapping. Below is a tabulation of how many people could undo the trauma and how many couldn’t. Essentially, they were just using Step 2 (in the process listed below) by itself.

Emotional Trauma: Undone-2; Unchanged - 7; Other - 0
Physical Trauma: Undone - 4; Unchanged - 4; Other - 1

(The ‘other’ case was fascinating, and gives a different verification of this test. The person could undo the trauma while using the reversing breath, but it would go back to peace as soon as she stopped the breath reversal.)

The steps we used to undo EFT (1999):
After that workshop, we spent a little time isolating what seemed to be the key pieces for undoing EFT, noted below in three steps. These are the steps we’ve identified so far. Not every step is required to undo every trauma, issue, or condition.
1. Focus on the problem feeling, just as if doing normal EFT
2. Tense the diaphragm and throat. One way this can be done is to breath in a way that is the opposite of normal breathing, i.e., suck up the diaphragm on an in breath while tensing the throat.
3. Initiate a sort of shuddery sensation, as if one were cold, with the kinesthetic feeling of pulling into oneself, as if pulling a blanket tight over one’s body. This last step is not necessary in many cases.


Almost a decade later in 2008, we figured out how to make ‘undoing EFT’ simpler to do. To get the trauma feelings to return, just have the client focus on the healed trauma moment, while evoking death and dying feelings at the same time. The emotional content of the trauma will return immediately, and remain. In hindsight, the reverse-breathing trick was simply triggering subtle death feelings. However, what was still puzzling was that some people could not undo EFT’s healing no matter what they did – for them, it was irreversible.

As an aside, this trick of evoking dying feelings may explain the energy toxin phenomenon itself. We know that during trauma the body consciousness associates sensations together in non-logical ways. Thus, substances don’t have to be toxic to evoke dying feelings; they merely have to have been present when the body felt its life was threatened. In fact, this also implies that we could restore a particular trauma by using other types of sensory stimulations (like horrible images or scary sounds) that also trigger dying feelings. Doing this might be a simple way to test if the healing could be reversed. (If you try this, let me know if it works or not.)
           
Our old recommendations about EFT and the undoing problem
We were in a dilemma after we discovered the undoing problem. EFT was radically effective, simple, and fast for most traumas and problems. Clearly, it was a powerful tool, and should be used. On the other hand, it was clear that some clients might accidentally undo the healing and get their issue back.
 
Thus, we recommended that therapists use EFT, but to warn the client that it might undo, and that they might have to repeat treatment. If the issue was such that the client couldn’t risk reversal (for example, a pilot who had become afraid of flying), then they should use a non-meridian therapy. We knew that traumas healed with regression therapies like WHH couldn’t be reversed (from ‘energy toxins’, breathing, or by any other method). However, regression therapies aren’t foolproof either: symptoms can return if the originating traumas on a trauma string were not healed.
 
In practice, meridian therapy reversals are not very common, so for the most part therapists ignore this issue and treat EFT as if the healing is permanent. Although it is a bother to repeat a treatment, this isn’t as bad as it seems, since by the end of a session, the therapist (or client) has figured out what the core issue is, and doesn’t have to go through lengthy investigative steps again. (Part of the lack of awareness about reversal on the therapist’s part may be due to selection bias – if EFT reversed, the client probably wouldn’t return to the therapist, so the therapist wouldn’t realize that it had happened).
 
Finding out what happens in the primary cell
For years we just didn’t have time to look into this issue. Finally, in 2007 at a training in Scotland, we had a chance to work with a student to see what was really going when we undid EFT. The answer was both fascinating and surprising. (Be aware that we’ve only tested the following results a handful of times, thus these results should be considered subject to change when we examine more people. However, we did the tests using different advanced therapists and different test subjects, making us feel fairly confident about the general results.)
 
EFT eliminates symptoms by affecting the trauma string structures in the primary cells (the stuck gene, the messenger RNA (mRNA) and its ribosomes) directly. This is in contrast to WHH or TIR, which actually change the trauma moment and hence, indirectly, the ribosomal gateway structure. The way EFT does this is tricky: we found that the meridian points on the head, chest and fingers cause the ribosomes on the mRNA string to shrink and disappear. This quickly eliminates the symptoms in most cases, because the symptoms were from the content of those gateway structures superimposed on the body image. If the tapping is continued, even after there were no symptoms, more and more of the ribosomes on the chain shrink, until eventually the mRNA chain itself shrinks back to the nucleus, and then the gene histone heals. To get a visual image of this effect, imagine that you are watching a time-lapse movie, running backwards, of a plant sprouting. The leaves shrink back into the stem, the stem shortens, and then the whole thing goes back into the dirt, and “pop”, the seed is gone. This is similar to what is happening in the primary cell.
           
This process is the reason why EFT could be reversed. What we found is that the shrunken ribosome would plump right back out from the mRNA string, like a balloon blowing up, when we used our dying-feeling trick. And presto! the trauma symptoms would be back. And in fact, this trick would often make the trauma worse than it was originally – apparently the organism had some self-healing that occurs to try and minimize the problem. Thus, if the original mRNA string was still present in any form whatsoever, the entire trauma string could be recreated every time.
           
However, we found something different with the nine-gamut and karate chop points (and to a lesser extent, the fingers, especially the thumb and forefinger). Tapping these affects the gene directly. In the case of the nine-gamut point, the effect goes powerfully upwards into the mRNA string, affecting everything simultaneously, and so is quickly noticeable to the client. Unfortunately, from an experiential viewpoint, the other hand points primarily affect the gene, and so it usually feels like nothing is happening until the gene heals fully. This is because the trauma string remains intact until the gene heals and retracts; whereupon the mRNA string is released out of the nuclear pore and quickly dissolves. When this happens, all of the symptoms suddenly vanish (assuming there weren’t multiple roots to the trauma still holding the string in place, of course). We also found that tapping on the fingers helped eliminate body associations and other psychological reversal issues that could block the EFT process.
 
To review, the head and body points start healing from the ribosome and then heal down to the gene (by analogy, down from the leaves to the root); the nine-gamut, karate chop and to a lesser extent the fingers start from the gene and go up to the ribosome (up from the root to the leaves). The nine-gamut is a bit of an oddball – it focuses on the gene, but simultaneously affects the ribosomes and mRNA string.
 
Our current recommendations on using EFT
Summarizing, current meridian therapies are often excellent at getting rid of trauma symptoms quickly because they shrink away the ribosomal gateway structure that cause the problem. However, because the symptoms often go away before the gene histone heals and the mRNA is released, the client’s symptom from the corresponding traumas can be recovered. This problem of not knowing when the trauma string is completely healed is intrinsic with the full EFT or TFT process – clients cannot usually tell when the entire trauma string is irreversibly healed using current technique protocols.
           
To be clear, understand that these observations don’t change our strong recommendation of meridian therapies. Below, we offer two simple alternatives to simply improve on what you’re already doing. (However, realize that our work is preliminary – we will be continuing our testing. Thus, with time, we may come up with better, faster or simpler ways to deal with this issue.)
 
Alternative #1:
Just do your meridian therapy as you’ve always done - but after the trauma symptom is gone, keep tapping on the client for another two to three minutes. In practical terms, it can be difficult to keep the client focused on an issue that they can’t feel anymore, and they easily get distracted away from the trauma string at this point. (Fortunately, this isn’t a problem for our Gaia command processes, because the phrases and music keep the client focused automatically. Years ago, Dr. Pellicer discovered empirically that we got far better results on a process if the client kept tapping for at least three minutes after they had no more symptoms on a command.)
           
Test by using the dying-feeling or reverse-breathing method to try and restore the trauma.
 
Alternative #2:
A simpler, faster and irreversible approach is to have the client focus on the issue while simply tapping on the nine-gamut point, or just use the nine-gamut eye roll technique; for most, the nine-gamut point also gives some immediate symptom relief while the gene histone is healing. Continue until all symptoms are gone (this occurs when the gene is healed). Be sure to go a minute or so past the time the client no longer feels symptoms to completely heal the underlying biology.
 
If nothing appears to be happening, add the karate chop point, finger and thumb points. If it is taking more than a minute or two for any change to occur, add the psychological reversal step (or find and heal the ‘guarding traumas’ that cause psychological reversal as in BSFF). Remember, if a shortcut isn’t working, the therapist simply adds omitted steps until the client’s problem goes away. You can certainly tap on the face and body if you need to calm the client’s symptoms quickly, but this may not heal the gene histone; and so you would need to check for reversibility by using the dying-feeling or reverse-breathing trick.


Revision History
Revision 2.1, December 18, 2009: Deleted the feedback emails from Gary Craig, Kate Sorensen, and David Grudermeyer; and duplicated the content of a newsletter on this topic on this webpage.
Revision 2.0, 2008: Added a link to the newsletter of our discovery of what caused meridian therapy 'undoing' and a fix for it.
Revision 1.1, Sept 30, 2002: Added a fix for this problem submitted by a student who experimented with the problem.
Rev 1.0 July 8, 2001: Wrote this webpage the experiment we'd run to see if EFT was reversible, along with comments on this experiment by Gary Craig, Kate Sorensen of Trauma Relief Services, and David Brudermeyer of ACEP.