Borrowing benefits

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Borrowing benefits is a psychotherapeutic technique invented by Gary Craig, the founder of Emotional Freedom Techniques, as an addition to the EFT toolkit. The basic principle is as follows:

A person thinks of one of his or her own important unresolved issues, makes a mental movie of it, and rates its intensity on a SUDS scale.
He or she then sets aside the issues and taps for another person, on that person's issue. This tapping is best done in conjunction with many others, all tapping for the same person.
After competing the tapping procedure, he or she reevaluates the intesnity of his or her own issue.

It is claimed that by tapping on another person's issues, the tapper borrows benefits and thus experiences relief on his or her own issues. This is because the person's system draws the necessary parallels.

Gary Craig makes the following suggestions regarding the use of Borrowing Benefits:

Do not try to ensure that your issues matches the issue fo the person you are tapping for. The system is capable of drawing parallels between apparently completely unrelated issues, that we may not consciously be able to make.
Put yourself out of the way while tapping. Let your mind flow completely into the other person's issues and problems.

An Borrowing Benefits Workshop conducted at Flagstaff was attended by the psychologist Dr. Jack Rowe, who measured its effects via the SCL-90-R (Symptom Checklist 90 Repeatable). He found that there was a statistically significant improvement immediately after the workshop that lasted after a six month period, though the effect was somewhat diminished.

See Emotional Freedom Techniques for more details.