Gary Craig - A Practitioner's Reflection

​You might already have heard that the founder of EFT, Gary Craig, passed away in December. I wrote a post about it on my Facebook page but I was using my phone and when I hit the button to post it the entire thing disappeared into thin air. I always take things like this as a sign to slow down and reconsider or wait for a better time. I'll trust that this is that time and how fitting it's the first newsletter of my new series :-)

I never knew Gary Craig personally, but his influence on my life — and on the lives of countless others — has been profound. Like many people, I learned EFT directly from Gary Craig’s free materials — his videos and manual — and using only what he taught there, I was able to resolve the depression that had defined two years of my life and set me on the journey of becoming an EFT practitioner.

In 2024, when I returned to his original explanations while doing research for the Evidence Based EFT Manual, I found myself returning to Gary Craig’s original explanations. I wanted to hear the concepts again from the source. From the horse’s mouth.
What struck me then, even more than it had the first time, was how elegant and pared back the original system was. Over the years, EFT has been iterated on, expanded, refined, and sometimes complicated by many well-meaning practitioners and trainers. Some of those developments have been genuinely valuable. Others less so.

What also stood out — especially in hindsight — was how gentle his approach was. These techniques emerged at a time when the language of “trauma-informed care” did not yet exist in the mainstream. And yet, the EFT methods he taught were inherently protective of the nervous system. They did not rely on re-exposure, reliving, or retraumatisation. They worked with the body rather than against it.

It would take decades for much of the psychological field to catch up with the idea that healing trauma does not require re-traumatising people. Gary Craig was already operating from that understanding long before it was fashionable or formally recognised.

When I reflect on his legacy now, I don’t see someone who “invented” something entirely new. I see someone who helped return something to us.

By working with acupressure points and the body’s stress response, he gave people back an awareness that had been largely forgotten — that we have built-in mechanisms for regulating our nervous systems. That we carry, quite literally, the ability to calm fight-or-flight responses within our own bodies.

In that sense, what Gary Craig offered was a kind of birthright reclaimed. A reminder that self-regulation is not reserved for experts, institutions, or specialists, but is something we are all capable of learning and using when we need it.
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That, to me, is a legacy worth honouring. I hope, wherever he is, he still cares about helping spread EFT around the world and he'll use whatever celestial leverage he may have to smooth the way to the mainstream acceptance that will at last put this simple yet powerful modality within reach of everyone.