Why EFT Matters for Psychotherapists: Healing Minds, Embodying Safety, and Preventing Shutdown
September 18, 2025
“Drop into your body. Lose your mind. Come to your senses.”
That’s the rallying cry I often share with therapists and clients alike. But why does it matter so deeply?
The key is understanding what the polyvagal theorists and trauma specialists call 'dorsal shutdown'.
Understanding the Nervous System Hierarchy:
Polyvagal Theory, introduced by Dr. Stephen Porges (2011), helps us make sense of how our bodies respond to threat, hierarchically we have a:
Ventral Vagal System: Our social engagement engine, the system of voice, facial expression, and attunement.
Sympathetic Nervous System: When we feel unsafe, we move into fight-or-flight.
Dorsal Vagal System: If threat overwhelms us, we may collapse into freeze or shut-down mode; disengaged, immobilised, disconnected.
Most therapists will have, at some point, witnessed a client in that dorsal shutdown state: dissociated, immobilised, emotionally numb and ‘checked out’. Traditional talk therapy stalls. Clients can't access insight or somatic and emotional shifts because they simply can't connect, with themselves, their bodies, their ‘stuff’ or with you, the therapist.
EFT: A Grounded Path Back to Safety
Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT), or "tapping," offers a gentle yet profound by-pass around the freeze state. Tapping stimulates acupoints above the diaphragm, grounding us physically and neurologically. Electrical signals through the peripheral nervous system to the brain calm the amygdala and the nervous system, activating the parasympathetic nervous system, reducing cortisol and sending signals of safety to the body.
This means that your client can allow themselves to linger longer at that emergent edge, allowing the emerging material to keep emerging without overwhelm or shut-down inhibiting progress. Your client has the resilience to stay connected with uncomfortable material, and to you, the therapist. And that means they are able to process traumatic material more gently, for longer and more sustainably. EFT soothes and softens the resistance that keeps people stuck and restores the flow of transformation. They get there faster and more gently.
And even when dorsal shutdown does occur, tapping helps shift the nervous system out of that state, back through fight or flight into ventral vagal functioning. It promotes regulation, presence, and connection, even when cognitive processing feels temporarily inaccessible. It whispers to the body: ‘It’s okay. You are safe.’
Why It Works
EFT isn’t just experiential. It’s physiological. Here’s what actually happens within the body:
Cortisol reduction: Tapping lowers stress hormone levels rapidly (Church et al, 2012).
Brain activity changes: EFT deactivates and calms the amygdala (Hui et al, 2005).
Epigenetic changes: Initial findings indicate that EFT can influence gene expression; reducing inflammation, enhancing immune function and neuronal processes in the brain (Maharaj, 2016).
This all means that clients don’t just get better insights, and they don’t just feel better, their bodies respond better too.
Navigating Shutdown
If your client freezes it’s not failure, it’s biology. EFT, with its emphasis on self-acceptance helps you to meet your client where they are. Here are some things that will help you to navigate the shutdown:
Normalise the shutdown: it’s wired-in survival, not resistance.
Begin with safety cues: using prosody of voice, mindful presence. Keep tapping.
Tap silently together: mirror tapping on acupoints is enough to shift physiology.
Embody regulated witnessing: your calm continued presence and mirror tapping with the client activates mirror neurons to co-regulate.
Build momentum: once ventral vagal tone returns, and the pre-frontal cortex comes back on-line, cognitive processing reignites. Senses and feelings return and are accessible for processing.
Why This Matters for Long-Term Practitioners
I’ve lost count of the number of therapists I’ve seen burnout because they got stuck in trauma without tools to move through it. EFT changed that for me, and it can do the same for any therapist:
It helps your clients move from freeze to flow and that makes your job easier.
It helps you move from freeze to flow and makes your job easier.
It protects you from secondary trauma as you work.
It grounds therapy in being, not just doing, deepening connection with self and other and facilitating both the client’s transformation and long-term role-sustainability for therapist.
Therapy isn’t simply a conversation. It’s a dance of energy systems, of nervous systems, of bodies: yours and your client’s. When one or both of you hits fight or flight or dorsal shutdown, words alone aren’t enough. You need the safety of somatic connection that EFT offers.
So, let’s give therapy back its humanity, its capacity to reconnect, resonate, and heal. Because the body remembers what the mind forgets.
References:
Church D, Yount G, Brooks A.J. (2012) The effect of emotional freedom techniques on stress biochemistry: a randomized controlled trial. J Nerv Ment Dis. 2012 Oct;200(10):891-6. doi: 10.1097/NMD.0b013e31826b9fc1. PMID: 22986277
Hui K.K., Liu J, Marina O, Napadow V., Haselgrove C., Kwong K.K., Kennedy D.N., Makris N. (2005) The integrated response of the human cerebro-cerebellar and limbic systems to acupuncture stimulation at ST 36 as evidenced by fMRI. Neuroimage. 2005 Sep;27(3):479-96. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2005.04.037. PMID: 16046146.
Maharaj, M. E. (2016). Differential Gene Expression after Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) Treatment: A Novel Pilot Protocol for Salivary mRNA Assessment. Energy Psychology: Theory, Research, and Treatment, 8(1), 34–49.
Porges, S. W. (2011). The Polyvagal Theory: Neurophysiological foundations of emotions, attachment, communication, and self-regulation. W. W. Norton & Company.
