Is EFT Dangerous? Try a Safe Tapping Script for Top 4 Fears

Powerful opportunities, like EFT Tapping, can look dangerous at first. Here are the top 4 fears people new to Tapping often have, and a safe script to address them — so you can heal yourself and feel emotional freedom.

We all find ourselves with resistance to good things sometimes, even if we’ve tried them and seen them work, we still may find ourselves pushing them away.

But if it works, it’s good for us, and it HEALS us with love… Why would we push it away?

I often see doubt or resistance from people who’ve already had great success with EFT. This resistance they feel often is the direct result of the sudden, powerful realization that they’re actually able to change beliefs, fears and limitations, and change them quickly.

You would think this would be great news! It is, however, also confronting. Very confronting. Hence the reactive resistance and doubt.

There are 4 main reasons for sudden friction:

1. “What if…” and “Yeah, but…”

The biggest fear is becoming too clear, too powerful, and too alive. This may sound counterintuitive, but you are letting go of years of learning to be helpless.

When you Tap, your mind experiences major cognitive dissonance; your subconscious starts to purge old information, and when that happens your old built-up identity pushes back in an effort to maintain its definition of the “truth” that you’ve spent your whole life believing.

The best remedy for this top fear is to use EFT and melt it with your love.

Try this:

1. Make a list of every “what if” and “yeah, but” about why it’s scary to use EFT to heal yourself.
2. List the worst-case scenarios and limiting thoughts you have about rising to your next level (becoming more successful, healthier, stronger, capable and aligned).
3. Then, use EFT to accept and melt through the fear on your list.

Need help? I’ve written out a Tapping script for you at the end of this article, which will give you a jumpstart to clearing this list. Don’t worry, it’s not as hard as it sounds. And it’s oh so worth it because these fears are blocking everything…until they’re not.

2. Accumulated Self-Identity & Emotional Intelligence

We define ourselves by our past, by how we’ve been treated and what’s happened to us.

Effectively clearing emotional pain is a relatively new art; it’s only recently gained traction as a legitimate possibility. Now, we call emotional resilience…emotional intelligence.

Our parents’ generation was used to functioning from a place of complacency, repeating to themselves reasoning, like, “This is just who I am because of how I was raised / what happened to me when I was 8 years old.”

We have inherited this self-defeating attitude. We have suffered along helplessly believing it was just our astrology or circumstances at play.

But among all our layers of “self,” we have a “personality self” that’s been developing since we were born to help us navigate life. This part of us can feel resistant to the love that EFT Tapping brings because it’s trying to protect its built-up definitions of we were, instead of letting us break them and rise into a new way of being.  

This personality self shows up, again and again, every time we Tap. Many people I’ve tapped with have told me flat out and with great worry, “I don’t know who I would be without my identity!” I simply tell them identity is overrated, and to be curious to find out who they are without the fear.

Your personality self has to be updated regularly, just like an app.

You express yourself in the ways that helped you survive certain situations. Once those situations end, those parts of you are no longer useful; they need to be updated for the version of life you are living in now. This lets the past pass.

3. It’s Impossible

It’s likely you grew up in a culture that didn’t know how to clear biases and emotional scars. People in your culture believed (because it was true for them) that it takes a lot of time to get over things, and that there are many traumas from which you can never completely recover.

It’s been widely accepted that emotional recovery is temporary, impossible, or at least tremendously difficult.

With such limiting beliefs passed down for generations, it’s no wonder we often give up trying to address our attitudes about ourselves or heal incidents that negatively impacted us. Believing you’re forever stuck as the product of your past is a natural byproduct of this outdated “victim” mindset.

Yes, bad things do happen, even terrible things, but we now have tools for the times to successfully move through them.

Our pasts can actually empower us.

Thanks to decades of research and neuroscience, we now know better. Your chemical makeup is constructed by your perception of your environment. And perception is malleable!

Now we have proof that you are not merely the product of your past or your family’s history: you’re the product of what you make of it, as created by you. EFT Tapping helps you heal your heart, dump the baggage and transform the trauma into strength, grace and wisdom.

4. Safety

We are a species hardwired to evolve through experiences. This means we continually want and reach for new challenges, yet resistance emerges first because it’s a new experience. We experience the fear of the unknown as stress and anxiety.

Because most of us have already learned to deal with life’s challenges at our present comfort level, we consciously and subconsciously dread what might happen at the next level — rising to a new challenge will probably require new skills, new friends, playing your edge, and eventually… It will become a new comfort level.

Going to the next level can feel painful, but Tapping makes it much more fun and easy. You can level up in an hour and get some real traction if you commit to doing it often. Life just gets easier when it feels less scary.

Facing your fears feels exhilarating and you end feeling heroic inside.

Research on stress has shown that when you’re stressed, up to 70% of the blood drains from the frontal lobes of your brain and into the chest and limbs to prepare you for confrontation, escape or hiding. This stress response dramatically reduces your ability to reason or to think clearly.

Fear shuts down your digestive, reproductive and immune systems all at once.

EFT helps you face fears head-on and ahead of schedule, clearing a path for staying even keeled, and clear headed. Tapping also keeps us from manifesting our secret fears and our parents’ old patterns.

Tapping protects you from self-sabotaging the evolution you’re here to experience.

That coy little personality self only knows where it’s been in the past. Its default setting is to “keep you safe,” so it keeps you where it knows which way is up and which way is down — even if it sucks. But is it safe to play small while aching to give your gifts to the world?

Is it safe to solely do what you have already done over and over, getting more and more bored, discontent and disconcerted from the thrill of living life fully?

Is there really any safety in refusing to let your true purpose unfold while watching someone else ignite theirs?

If you felt yourself saying “no,” or maybe even a “hell no!” to any of those questions, then it’s your job (and your right) to Tap through the fear and allow yourself to create a new outcome.

When we release fears and limiting beliefs (which EFT is highly effective in doing), we graduate to the next level, which is actually much safer and feels exciting! Our brains instantly light up, our true and innate genius switches on, and the logic and creativity we need become available. Through Tapping, we gain clarity and innovative approaches to making our goals a reality.

As you Tap on your resistance to using EFT, your new normal will be to truly go for it in all areas of your life!

If you’ve been telling yourself “what’s done is done” — that you’re permanently damaged from past relationships or past experiences, or if EFT looks too strange and woo-woo to be taken seriously…it can be very helpful to do what I call a “pre-tap.”

A pre-tap will help your mind relax and accept the new possibility that you can heal your past.

Use this pre-tap EFT script to make the going easier. It can also be helpful if you have been tapping for a while, yet doubt and skepticism have crept back in.

Pre-Tap Overview

This is a beginning-level script that requires no experience with EFT Tapping. It does help to have a basic understanding of where the tapping points are on your body, so here’s a simple chart to help you find the points and a brief video where I walk you through.

As we’ve discussed, fear and doubt can limit your success in any area of your life, especially healing your mind and heart. This EFT Tapping script is designed to help you discover and dissolve some of your old underlying patterns around the doubt that EFT will help you.

Yes, we begin by using EFT to help you heal your doubts about EFT helping you.

The proper frame of mind for this pre-tap isn’t to be a “believer,” it’s to be a beginner. Keep your skepticism as it is while you lean into the idea of opening to new insights and possibilities.

What to Expect While Tapping

You will be tapping gently on the flow of points described below (approximately 7-10 gentle taps for each point), moving in this order:

1. The set-up point (the sore spots on the upper pectoral muscles)
2. The face points
3. The torso points
4. The hand points
5. The head points

Moving once through this full set of points completes one round of EFT.

You can tap with either or both hands. When you tap on the hands, you can do one hand first, and then the other in the next round, if you feel like it.

In this script, I’ll walk you through the points one by one.  When tapping on your own, don’t worry about getting them in the perfect order.

EFT is a very flexible and forgiving process; you can’t mess it up.

As blocked energy starts exiting the body, it can manifest in different ways. These are all signs that EFT is working:

• Yawning
• Laughing
• Crying
• Burping
• Passing gas
• Queasiness and other sensations (this is not as common, but it may occur, especially with extreme blockages)
• Body temperature increasing or decreasing, temporarily

I call this phenomenon of somatically releasing accumulated stress from the body and nervous system “off-gassing.” Rest assured that any of these physical responses, including not feeling much at all, are all perfectly normal responses. Please honor whatever reactions you have rather than trying to stifle or force something.

Your body knows how to realign itself, given the opportunity.

You may also find yourself spacing out, having distracting thoughts, or having a sudden  overwhelming desire to sleep (especially in cases where disassociation or leaving your body was a coping strategy). If you’re spacing out or feeling sleepy, tap while saying one of these options:

1. “Even though I am spacing out or feeling sleepy and it’s hard to focus, I deeply and completely accept myself.”

2. “Even though a part of me doesn’t want to look at this, I deeply and completely accept myself. It’s safe for me to look at this issue now.”

Keep tapping (for several rounds, if necessary) until you feel yourself coming back into your body and staying present more easily.

Next, Set Up Your Space

Carve out some time for yourself in a quiet place without interruptions for 15-20 minutes (phone and all screens off, door closed, etc.). Have a pen and paper handy.

The following tapping script is simply a guideline. Feel free to add to it or change it to fit your experience more accurately.

P.S. I know growing can be challenging. This is why I created a safe and loving space for you to feel it and heal it: The World Tapping Circle, a global online community of people like you who meet every week to feel, tap, and heal. This circle helps you evolve more quickly and become more emotionally resilient.