CBT, Clinical Hypnotherapy Find Rival in EFT

Dec. 16, 2011 - PRLog --
13 December 2011 – Cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and clinical hypnotherapy, the leading conventional psychological treatment methods used for trauma patients, might just have found a rival in the alternative treatment called emotional freedom technique (EFT) therapy.


Unlike in other typical psychological ailments like depression and anxiety, traumas and some deep-seated phobias have a root cause which is normally an abusive or highly emotional experience in the distant past that led to the psychological issue. As the symptoms don’t develop until much later on in life, the condition is often already well-established and requires more attention than other psychological issues.

While prescription medication holds off symptoms and Freudian talk therapy eases the transition for most cases of psychological matters, this approach is unlikely to work for trauma or phobia. Medication may still be provided to ease some form of drastic response to traumatic stimuli that may invoke an episode, but talk therapy can only do so much.

Talk therapy can go so far as to uncover the past experience that led to the psychological disorder, but beyond that, it’s hard to simply “talk” the patient out of his or her condition. For conditions like trauma and phobia, the therapist and the patient need to work together to set aside the mental and intellectual faculties that make it difficult to effectively root out the main cause of the condition.

In CBT, a form of therapy that goes on for a period of time, the therapist and patient working together to build a unique bond of professional trust and enables the therapist to gradually dig deep into the subconscious to deal with the root cause of the trauma. In clinical hypnotherapy, the same effect is induced through controlled and safe hypnotism.

This is also arguably where EFT (http://www.eft-therapy.com) therapy takes its efficacy against trauma and phobias from. As the alternative treatment is based from neuro linguistic programming which was in turn based on hypnotherapy, some similar elements and approaches are obvious, and the same effect of subduing mental faculties that inhibit the correcting of the problem is also achieved.