People rarely talk about the tapping problems caused by religion because it seems insensitive and incorrect but I want to discuss anyway. Religion can play with people’s minds in a deep way so their tapping suffers.
I have no ax to grind about religion. I wasn’t abused by nuns, priests, rabbis, monks or bishops. Most of the time, religion doesn’t even come up when tapping. But sometimes it’s a miserable obstacle. Religion trains minds to accept absolutes and fixed ways of thinking that subvert critical and logical thinking in ways that can sometimes interfere with mental and emotional healing. Tapping can lead to cognitive changes but those won’t happen when religious indoctrination stands in the way.
I spent many hours with a devout Christian who was troubled because he didn’t want to go to heaven. We talked a lot about his beliefs about God and heaven. He believed heaven was a place in the clouds where you sat around playing harps and praying all the time. He feared eternal boredom. By the way, this is not mentioned in the Bible anywhere. He picked up this concept of heaven through pop culture. He also believed none of his good friends were going to make it to heaven because they were all such sinners. He didn’t want to spend eternity without them. He could be good and go to heaven and be bored and lonely forever. Or he could sin and achieve eternal damnation and spend eternity with his friends. This was an enormous and vexing dilemma for him.
I asked him to describe God for me. He told me God is a loving father and creator. We tapped on “Even though I have this fear my loving God will sentence me to eternal boredom…” That didn’t produce much change.
We reframed the problem and reworded the setup phrase a number of times but he wasn’t feeling much better.
After a number of tapping sessions, (not rounds, hour long sessions.) he finally budged a little. Very little. We found some relief with the setup phrase “Even though I can’t trust an infinitely creative and loving God to do what’s best for me, I deeply and completely love and accept myself.” This created a bit of constructive cognitive dissonance. He realized the absurdity of the phrase by tapping on it. As he tapped, he began to trust God more although he still had his concerns about eternity and the boredom he was sure he faced.
The use of EFT should not in any way go against anybody’s religious beliefs. Very occasionally religious beliefs pop up in a session that impede progress. If you think your God doesn’t want you to be healed of your problems, tap on it. I have yet to find a religion where God doesn’t wants people to be happy and healthy.