How Pat Carrington Introduced Choices into EFT

Dr. Carrington was one of the world's first EFT practitioner's to be certified by the Emotional Freedom Technique's (EFT) founding father, Gary Craig. She is currently the Clinical Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Piscataway, New Jersey and has written and lectured on the emotional freedom technique throughout her illustrious career.
Dr Carrington did something great for the Emotional Freedom Technique; she introduced the Choices Method which powerfully extends the scope and power of the EFT tapping routine.
The Choices Method is a way of turning around negative thoughts which stall and impede our natural energy flow along our meridians. It is introduced right from the set up phrase of the Emotional Freedom Technique.
The first step to healing via EFT is always to acknowledge the problem and accept that you have it, but that you still like yourself. That kind of acceptance stops the guilt and angst which can so often hold you back from healing. As always, you should estimate your level of pain or distress on a scale from one to ten; this helps you to visualize it and make it real so that you can deal with the distress; it also means that afterwards, you have a baseline measurement from which you can see how far you have progressed and your distress levels receded.
What Dr Carrington says you should now do, puts the positive thoughts back into EFT. Having decided earlier what the problem is, you should now formulate a statement which is basically the opposite or the antidote to the problem.
So, if you are seeking healing for nerves and your set up phrases is something like ‘Even though I get really nervous when I have to talk to new people, I still really like and accept myself' then the antithetical choice which Dr Carrington's Method advocates could be, "I choose to feel happy and confident when I speak to new people".
Then you combine to two, so that as soon as your mind has recognized the problem, it sees the way to heal it. So, you might say, "Even though I get really nervous when I have to talk to new people, I now choose to feel happy and confident when I speak to new people". Whilst you repeat your phrase in this way, you should tap the meridian at your karate chop point three times.
Then you move on to what Dr Carrington calls the Choices Trio, because it's a three step process.
In the first step, you should perform your complete EFT tapping routine whilst only repeating the negative side of your set-up phrase.
Immediately afterwards, you should carry out another round of EFT tapping - this time only using the positive side of your set-up phrase. Repeat the phrase at every tapping point, as you did in the first round.
The next round gets a bit fancier so stick with me here! You again perform your EFT tapping routine, but you alternative your positive and negative set-up phrases between meridian points.
That completes the whole EFT tapping routine which incorporates Dr Carrington's Choices Method. You should then assess your level of discomfort, distress or pain and repeat the whole process until you manage to get your level down to zero.
The advantage of the Choices Method as advocated by Dr Carrington is that it helps the set-up statements be believable. Traditionally in EFT (or as traditionally as you can get for a therapy born in the 1980s!) the Choices Method is not used, but that can lead to some very unbelievable set-up phrases when you are trying to visualize what you want. For instance, what's the point in saying "I live in a bright, sunny country' when you so clearly live in a flooded and Britain! Your brain just won't buy it.
Gary Craig himself, founder of EFT, endorses this Method and it really is an important step for the Emotional Freedom Technique, making it suitable for so many more people.