(An EFT Myth for Adults Who Like Big Words and Complicated Ideas)
Session 1. The Beginning
In the beginning… there was the Process
Which is first of all
The science-magic of one-thing-after-another.
Sometime later, there was Rogers and Gendlin
(There were others, but you have to start somewhere).
And out of the swirling process
They saw presence and experiencing forming.
And these gave rise to empathy,
unconditional positive regard, and congruence.
And the response modes spoke these to the world,
But the true process was not in the response modes
But made them come to life,
Because, as Whitehead knew:
Process is the beginning and end of everything.
So we saw all this, and it was called Process-Experiential,
And, lo, it was very cool.
Session 2. The Dialectic Process
Twofold always, said Blake,
Speaking another piece of science-magic.
For EFT-ers always do things in twos:
The binary of zeros and ones,
Day and night,
Hot and cold,
Heart and head;
But: heart must come first!
And moreover:
Nature and culture (said Claude Levi-Strauss),
Being and nothingness (said Jean Paul Sartre),
Life against death (said Norman O. Brown).
Experiencer and Critic (the dance of the two chairs),
Self and other (the dance of the empty chair),
Client and therapist (supplicant and healer, said Jerome Frank),
Even binary and nonbinary:
People who say there are two kinds of people,
And people who don’t.
Les and Sue,
EFTe and EFTa:
Emotion-based EFT and attachment-based EFT.
Session 3. The Naming and Counting of Processes
And we came and we counted the many processes
And named them
With names both poetic
And like unto marketing.
For to name something is to get handle on it,
To gain a glimpse, to pick it out
In the dark, for a moment.
Though the naming is not the understanding
Nor the healing of the pain, but still,
The naming begins to take away the shaming
And starts the process.
Next after naming comes the counting
Of the many processes:
Twelve EFT tasks (great and small)
Nine types of empathic response mode;
Six task resolution stages;
Five emotion scheme elements;
Four emotion response types;
Three stages of case formulation;
Two sides to construct a dialectic;
One emotional deepening process:
To connect all the other processes
And point the way forward.
Session 4. In the End: A Little Poem Made of EFT Process Epigrams
Process is the magic of one-thing-after-another.
Process is the magic of two speaking together.
Trust the Process.
Keep calm and Process.
May the Process be with you.
Live long, and Process.
In the beginning was the Process.
But the Process that can be spoken is not the true Process;
For if everything is Process, then nothing is Process.
-Robert Elliott, October 2025
