Can ‘tapping’ my chin and eyebrows break my writer’s block?

As she is cast back to her early childhood, Christine Manby discovers that the ‘emotional freedom technique’ is revealing more about her creative slowdown than she bargained for

(Illustration by Tom Ford)

The first time I met Tamara Pitelen, in the shadow of the standing stones at Avebury, I knew I liked her. Which is fortunate, because the second time I met Tamara Pitelen, we just had time to share a cup of tea before she started drumming her fingers on my face. But Pitelen was not just randomly rapping on my body. She’s a practitioner of the Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) – more commonly known as “tapping” – a healing methodology combining principles from Chinese medicine, acupuncture and kinesiology.

According to thetappingsolution.com, the first recorded instance of tapping hails from 1980, when psychologist Roger Callahan decided to take a new approach with a client, Mary, who had such a severe phobia of water she could not even bear to see a swimming pool on television. After a year of therapy, Mary still found that being near water sparked intense stomach pains.

Dr Callahan had recently been introduced to the concept of meridians in Chinese medicine. Meridians are a network of channels along which “chi”, the body’s energy, moves. Traditional Chinese medicine refers to 100 meridian points which, when stimulated, can catalyse healing. Callahan recalled that the stomach meridian has a corresponding acupuncture point on the cheekbone so when Mary next experienced stomach pains in the proximity of water, he asked her to tap on that point. To both Callahan and Mary’s surprise, her stomach pains disappeared. Not only that, after using the technique on several occasions, she discovered she was no longer phobic.