Transformative Tapping - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 8/10/24

Guest host Richard Syrett and author Dr. David Feinstein discuss overcoming personal obstacles through a technique called Tapping. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Now here's a highlight from Coast to Coast AM on iHeartRadio.

Speaker 2 (00:05):
I also suffer from claustrophobia. The idea of going into
a cave or even thinking about, you know, getting stuck
in a cave causes me great mental distress. I mean,
does this mean I can do this at home on
my own or doesn't need to be done under the
supervision of a psychologist because he or she are sort

(00:28):
of at the same time I'm tapping, they're kind of
probing and asking me to think about certain things and
directing me. Is that essential, very good question.

Speaker 3 (00:38):
It is both a self help technique and a technique
that really helps the clinician be more effective. So as
a self help technique, there is a fairly simple protocol
that you can use, and it works on a remarkable
number of things. And I can't tell you whether the

(01:03):
self help version would be enough for you, but it
would almost certainly decrease the amount of anxiety that you
have when you think about or actually go into something
like a cave. And sometimes there's something deeper that comes
up that really does require extra assistance, such as the

(01:28):
woman who went back to her memory of being in
trapped in that appliance box and just screaming. If the
therapist wasn't able to really help her to process that,
it might just have been another re traumatization. So there's

(01:54):
the one has to pace oneself. But there's a lot
that you can do. In fact, the book that you're mentioning,
we had test drivers who were not familiar with energy psychology,
as well as experts and energy psychology test drive all
the exercises in the book to be sure that it

(02:17):
can be used on a self help basis, because Donna Eden,
my wife, and I co authors have had many experiences
of people getting a great deal of help when we
are instructing them, but going through a book or an app.
There are also apps. It does not have a therapist there,

(02:41):
and each of the people that did the book as
test drivers found that it was very helpful and that
there were instructions in the book of where to go
if you were starting to get overwhelmed. So if, for instance,
the woman that I spoke of, we're doing this on

(03:04):
her own and we're following the instructions in the book,
when she started to get overwhelmed, she would shift from
the situation to using some energy healing techniques that immediately
calm the body so that she could have gotten centered
again and then returned to the work. So there's a
great deal that can be done on a self help basis.

(03:27):
The way that we structured the book is that each
chapter that like, for instance, there's a chapter that deals
with depression, it starts off dealing with sadness, the kinds
of feelings that everybody has as they go through their life,
and showing how to use this not to make sadness

(03:47):
go away necessarily, but to really get the lessons that
the sadness is trying to teach you, to find out
what that sadness is telling you about your life and
what you need to process that perhaps you haven't processed yet.
But as it goes in from sadness to depression, that's
where we tell the reader that if you're having extreme depression,

(04:11):
chronic depression, depression that goes back to childhood for instance,
you really need to work along with the therapist as
you use these techniques. So the second half of the
chapter teaches the person how to work within therapy, and
it also teaches therapists how to apply this technique applied

(04:33):
tapping to the best practices psychology has to offer for
working with depression. Same thing with the chapter on anxiety.
It starts out with basic fears and then goes all
the way up through panic up to PTSD. Chapter on
addiction starts out with working with habits and then goes
up to peak to working with addictions. So it's so,

(04:57):
it's so the answer, Richard is really both that there's
a great deal you can do on a self help basis,
but there is a point where it really is advisable
to be working with somebody that is skilled.

Speaker 2 (05:12):
Okay, so tapping is you mentioned you know that the
patient in the beginning you mentioned with claustrophobia was instructed
to tap on certain acupuncture points. Are there specific acupuncture
points that you tap on for each, let's say, mental issue,
whether it's is there an a pressure point for depression,

(05:35):
another one for claustrophobia, another one for addiction.

Speaker 3 (05:41):
Very good question. Originally there was there were different protocols
that the founder of this approach used for different conditions.
In the nineteen eighties, one of his students, who is
an engineer as well as a hypnotist, said, you know,

(06:04):
this can be simplified, and he came up with one approach.
It's all one size fits all way of doing it.
So he chose a series of points. We use twelve
points in the book Don and I, but usually they're
between eight and fourteen points that are used that are

(06:26):
used for every condition. So in theory, what you're doing
is you're getting the whole energy system moving in a
way that is healing that helps to overcome the problem.
And so there really are two different theories for why

(06:46):
this works. One is outside of science and one is
within science. The one that's outside of science is based
on acupuncture and the acupuncture meridians, and that you are
balancing the bodies the energy systems, that trauma is caught
in the energy system and you're really addressing it that way.

(07:09):
The approach that I talk about much more has to
do with nature. The electrical nature of acupuncture points. That
there is a difference between an acupuncture point and an
adjacent point. Electrochemically, acupuncture point induct electricity much more than

(07:31):
other points. So that's the first thing that it needs
to be interested. The second thing is that tapping on
an acupuncture point generates an electrical signal, and that is
a well known process that doesn't come from energy psychologists
from physics and biology that there are certain cells that

(07:53):
when pressure is applied to them, it opens up ion
channels that wind up aiding a electrical signal that goes
to the nervous system and that also appears to go
to the body's connective tissue, and from the connective tissue

(08:14):
has a lot of collagen, which is a semiconductor, which
means that when that signal hits the connective tissue, it
can move very fast, almost speed of light, fast to
wherever it is needed and where is it needed. What
happens is that whatever the person is thinking about, whatever

(08:35):
part of the brain is active when they're thinking about
their problem or their condition or their goal, that becomes
like a magnet that attracts the signal to that part
of the brain. So you are tapping on this point,
for instance, on your hand, and you are thinking of

(09:00):
going into a cave. When you think about going into
a cave, it activates your amignala, the threat activation part
of the brain that tracks that signals from tapping on
your hand goes really connective tissue to the brain and
it gives the instruction to calm to deactivate the amgalo

(09:24):
from the threat response.

Speaker 2 (09:27):
Is there any scientific are there studies like could you
see this on a brain scan or I don't know,
some sort of imaging device while you're tapping, you can
see the brain centers that are activated.

Speaker 3 (09:43):
Right. All this is fairly preliminary, but there are some
studies that really do show it. For instance, there is
an FMRII study, which is a very sophisticated imaging tool
that shows where blood is flowing in the brain, which
means that where the blood is flowing is where it

(10:06):
is going to parts of the brain that are active.
That once they did a study of pain and a
study of food cravings. In a study of food cravings,
what they did was very clever because you can't cap
while someone's in an fMRI machine. So what they did
was they you can flash images. So they there's a

(10:28):
group of people of obese people who were in a
program to use weights. Before they entered the program, they
went to the fMRI and images of junk food were
flashed in front of their eyes, and the FMR showed

(10:50):
what parts of their brain light up when they see
these junk foods, and the parts of the brain that
light lit up had to do with craving, had to
do with reinforcement, had to do with desire. Then they
went through twelve tapping sessions group tapping sessions actually, which
were all oriented towards losing weight towards craving, And at

(11:13):
the end of the twelve they got back into the
machine and the FMRII showed that even though they saw
the exact same images of junk food, those parts of
the brain that had to do with craving did not
lie up, so the blood did not flow there. So
there was a shift that in those twelve sessions from

(11:40):
being very vulnerable to the craving for those foods to
being not vulnerable at all. This corresponded with weight loss
and corresponded with subjective reports of feeling of experience being
less craving. So what you had there is that the
tapping had sent signals to the parts of the brain

(12:00):
that we're activated when they would think of the jump
fruit and that, and then it reduced the activity in
those parts of the brain.

Speaker 2 (12:09):
That's remarkable. What about what about an addiction, whether there's
a strong there's a like a physiological dependency, like I
don't know, an opioid addiction. Would this tapping technique work
with that type of an addiction.

Speaker 3 (12:26):
Yes, the addictions are tough. Serious addictions require a multi
modal approach, but tapping can really help. There are clinics
now that we're in patient clinics where tapping is the
major therapy that it's used very few, but they're starting

(12:47):
to take roots. So, but you don't throw away all
the other things that you utilize intriguing addiction you but
what the tapping does is, like with the food cravings,
it will decrease the amount of of pulls that the

(13:09):
object of choice, whether it's a drug or pornography or
whatever it is, it will decrease the chemical pull towards
that so that other you know, addictions have changed the
person's life. So you're you're really having to work with
all the ways that their relationships may may be in trouble.

(13:34):
All that is part of the package in working with
somebody with an addiction. You often want peer support twelve
twelve step groups or whatever kinds of group peer support
is most effective for that particular kind of addition. So
so it's not like an easy you just tap the

(13:56):
addiction away. No, it's not like that at all, but
it can really be a very strong component of a
full program for working with addictions.

Speaker 2 (14:07):
You began our discussion talking about how I guess one
of the directors at the Johns Hopkins Medical Center sent
you to California to search out different modalities. When you
came back with him and you told him about tapping
and explained how it worked, what was his.

Speaker 3 (14:26):
Response, Well, it was actually ten years before I'd ever
heard of tapping, so I had looked at all. So
it had prepared me to really be skeptical about tapping,
because I had been skeptical of all these other therapies.

(14:46):
As it turned out. He was the chairman of the
Department of Psychiatry, Joel Elkie's, and a wonderful man, and
I kept in touch with him over the years because
he really helped my career in tremendous ways. And so

(15:07):
when I started to get into energy psychology and I
wrote my first book on it, he was very skeptical
at first, and I actually helped him. You know, he
was elderly at this point and everybody was using computers
and he found that very frightening, and I helped him

(15:29):
get over his fear of using computers, and that really
won him over so that he actually, with the full,
you know, full authority of his incredible, you know position,
he endorsed the book. He gave it a very strong endorsement,

(15:50):
and so that was So that's the kind of roundabout
answer to your question. He didn't that study when I
was in my late twenties, did not food tapping that
I came back, There was a full circle back to
the person that commissioned to study.

Speaker 1 (16:09):
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