Though many headaches derive from mechanical difficulties, i.e., pinched nerves from a slipped disc, they also source from anxiety, worry, sustained stress, chemical imbalances and repressed emotions from past trauma. There is tremendous fear that headaches will never remit and that all efforts to reduce them will fail. This is especially difficult for those with long-term debilitating headache activity. There is pain and then there is suffering about the pain.

EFT addresses many aspects simultaneously. Physical relaxation is often the result of tapping which immediately impacts tension oriented headaches. The rhythmic tapping stimulates energy flow and often precipitates a kind of meditative state. Naming the specific pain while tapping defuses the emotional power of pain and the fear that it will prevail.

The beginning point is always the most direct and simplest, tapping on the pain itself – the location, the perceived size, density, color, temperature. Generally the pain changes location and as we “chase” it around the body it begins to dissipate. Connecting the pain with an emotion is often the key to clearing it.

Just recently I tapped with an eighty year old woman who was having persistent headaches due to nerve damage in C3. Those who tried to help her prescribed muscle relaxants and anti-anxiety meds, The result did not diminish her pain but only made her groggy. After only three rounds of EFT she said, “It’s gone. How did that work? Will it come back?” After we worked on developing her own self-tapping regimen for later she proceeded with cheerfulness and a renewed serenity. And she began to incrementally reduce her medication dosage.