The Setup

The standard setup phrase takes the form of:

"Even though ____________ ,
I deeply and completely accept myself."

The above blank is replaced with the issue you are tackling (e.g. "I fell off my bike and broke my arm")

EFT is most effective when targeted towards a particular problem event, so be specific if you can.

"Even though I have low self-esteem…"

is a global problem in that many events contributed to you feeling this way. A specific event that contributed to the problem might be:

"Even though my history teacher told me I would never amount to anything at age 12…"

Sometimes, we cannot recall specific events and it is OK to work on the global problem. If we imagine it as a forest, each specific contributing event is a tree in that forest, and we may or may not be aware of what all of those problem trees are. As you do successive rounds of EFT you will lop the tops off the tallest trees in your problem forest (i.e. those problems that are the biggest contributors). As the importance of one of these tall trees is diminished the next round will address the next tallest tree and so on, until one day you realize that you no longer have that issue because all of the trees that comprised the whole problem have been felled. One other wonderful side-effect of EFT is that you normally do not have to fell every tree in the forest. Often, once you have felled 6-10 of the tallest trees, there is a generalization effect and the whole issue clears up.

Using the Setup Phrase

Tap on the Karate Chop point (KC) while repeating your setup phrase three times.

This is necessary because in about 40% of problems you will find that you are polarity reversed—this means that in relation to your problem, the polarity of the energy flow is actually reversed (like you've installed your batteries the wrong way round). This has the effect of stopping dead any progress in dealing with the issue (and that is the case with EFT, traditional therapy, medication, etc.—until you address this polarity reversal you will make little or no progress).

So for simplicity's sake (it only takes a few seconds to do after all) we assume polarity reversal and tap this Karate Chop point in order to correct it.