How EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques aka “tapping”) helped me break my relationship with alcohol

It was 2017, I was training as an EFT Practitioner, and I was drinking, mainly excessively and compulsively. I was an “emotionally dependent drinker” – this is how I now identify myself as being back then. 

I knew I was drinking problematically, but I was not ready to admit defeat like I had done six years before when I had reached my personal rock bottom. Despite my life looking perfectly fine on the surface, inside I was slowly crumbling. So I stopped drinking and stayed completely sober for two years by going to AA meetings. 

After two years, though, I reversed that decision. It wasn’t an unexpected relapse, but a conscious choice. And after four years I had found myself exactly in the same place. I resisted accepting it with all my brain power. I had a happier life, new goals, I had acquired a whole new set of skills and qualifications. I was building a new future for myself that I had worked really hard for. I had to find way out that did not include giving up alcohol. 

Little did I know that becoming an EFT Practitioner would have been the way out that I had not envisaged. 

At an EFT training course, I met another student and I started having sessions with them to help them practice. That was the beginning of the end of my life as a drinker. Despite my habit not being the centrepiece of my sessions, because tackling it was not my priority at the time, I had the space and a new method to start processing the reasons I was drinking. This process continued after I stopped and helped me to heal those parts of myself that led me to develop my habit. This time I would write a different ending to my story.

I am not the same person I was in 2011 or 2017, and I owe a massive part of this to EFT. Now it seems a no-brainer that a modality that is mostly used to decrease or neutralise stress, anxiety, depression and safely process trauma can be one of the best holistic solutions existent today out there to make the transition into alcohol-free living as gently and smoothly as possible. 

We now know that if we drink compulsively, alcohol is not the problem, but the solution to a problem that already existed. It is a strategy that worked for a while until it didn’t. It was just a lid on the pressure cooker. I have found that EFT can help at any stage: before, during and after we stop drinking. It can alleviate or eliminate triggers and process the causes that led us to develop our alcohol problem in the first place, and, by doing so, decrease the chances of relapse.

It is a wonderful tool which has the right to be up there with all the many resources that we are so lucky to have available today.