One of the great contributions to therapeutic practice is what I call the EFT Framework. EFT (short for Emotional Freedom Technique) was created by Gary Craig many years ago. Gary was an engineer by training and this meant he was able to home in on what the smallest bit of emotional trauma is. He created the idea of the Specific Event and of diffeent Aspects within each Specific Event. But what do these terms actually mean?
What is a Specific Event?
A Specifc Event can best be described as follows:
“That time when I was aged X, Y happened and I felt Z”
For example,
“That time when I was aged 7 and the school bully made fun of me in class and I felt humiliated”.
You can see there that there is a specific incident in time. What’s more, a specific thing happened and the person felt a specific feeling
Note, it is not something like:
“My childhood at school when I was bullied all the time in school”
This is not a Specific Event as it is not a specific moment in time. There is also no specific feeling associated with it. By sticking to the definition of a Specific Event, it breaks down an emotional trauma to a single moment in time and a single feeling. This is the smallest “unit” of emotional trauma.

Why Break Things Down Into Specific Events?
The point about defining things like this and then working on the particular feeling is that it is very well defined and it is possible to measure the emotional content using a 0 to 10 scale before and after an intervention. This way you can measure the effect of the intervention immediately. With EFT the intervention is done using a tapping procedure but other methods can also be used. Because the trauma is so well defined, it’s easy to see the improvement almost immediately. If instead you try to tackle childhood bullying as a whole then it will be very hard to shift the needle much with a single intervention.
Gary Craig likes to use the table metaphor as a useful way to think about this. Being emotionally traumatised by bullying in your childhood is like a table. Supporting this table are numerous specific times when you were bullied. These are multiple Specific Events which are the legs of the table. If you try to collapse the table by tackling bullying as a whole this is like banging on the table top and will take a long time. However, if you work on a Specific Event then it’s like breaking off that particular table leg from the table. If you break off enough of these then the whole table will collapse. This is the power of working from the point of view of Specific Events – you are focusing in on particular things which are holding up the trauma as a whole. If you collapse enough Specific Events then the whole trauma will resolve.
What is an Aspect?
When an intervention is made (e.g. a round of tapping is done) typically what you might find is that the humiliation (to use our example above) might have changed. Now the original humiliation might have gone (which is a measurable success!) and instead there might be something like anger. This new feeling is called a new Aspect of the Specific Event. So one Specific Event might be made up of multiple different Aspects which will need to be worked through. Again, by defining each component precisely in this way, it’s possible to measure progress as work is done.
What is a Specific Event List?
It is useful to compile a Specific Event list. This is a list of all the Specific Events that you can remember, written down in chronological order. Once this list has been compiled then it can be systematically worked on. As you remember more events you can add them to the list and as things are resolved they can be crossed off. What’s more, compiling this list helps you to engage with your memories. It is of great therapeutic benefit as it forces people to think back through their life and actively seek out the times when they felt emotionally troubled.
Note, it is also useful to add the 0 to 10 emotional intensity scale to the end of each Specific Event entry. So our example above might look like this:
“That time when I was aged 7 and the school bully made fun of me in class and I felt humiliated”. 7 / 10
This way you can tell at a glance which things are the most emotionally intense things which have a higher priority over the low scoring ones.
One key component of this process is to imagine yourself back in the sitation that happened to you, associating with it fully (so seeing out of your eyes). Then ask yourself how you feel. If you can still feel an emotional charge then this is an unresolved Specific Event. Note, if something is severely traumatic then you should NOT do this as it might retraumatise you. Please be careful when revisiting past traumatic events..
Resources
The complete EFT tapping course is available free on-line on Gary Craig’s website here. Note that there are many spin-off versions. This is the original one – it is the most rigorous about how it works and how it is applied. This course gives full detail about Specific Events and Aspects and how to work through them systematically