Via BBTF, Jarrod Saltalamacchia taps away the yips:

It was only in the last couple of years, after Hanson and his wife, Birgit, started their own business in Tampa, that he discovered the system of tapping.

“I didn’t make it up,” Hanson said. “I learned about it by reading Gary Craig, who is in California and developed something called ’emotional freedom techniques.”‘

Hanson’s initial reaction? “I thought it was stupid,” he said.

But after an encounter with a distraught high school player for whom, Hanson said, the technique produced immediate results, Hanson became a convert. The system, he said, is modeled after the pressure points found in acupuncture. And athletes with the yips, he said, “are in so much pain.”

“Tapping helps clear out the negative emotion,” he said. “Say you struck out to end the seventh inning, and you still have to play defense and might come up to bat again. How to clear out that negative emotion?

“You focus on the negative. Start on your eyebrows. Focus on the negative. Each site, your eyes, below your nose, below your lip. The idea is to do a tap lap, go down and around, tap the top of your head, then start again. Tapping helps clear out the negative emotion.”

Hanson said all of the counseling he did with Saltalamacchia was done over the phone. “I’ve never met Salty,” he said, “but he became pretty functional, pretty fast.”

This reminds me of something I saw many years ago. Mel Tillis is a singer who stutters when he talks, but not when he sings. He was on the Mike Douglas show one day, and they were having a very frank discussion about the stutter. Tillis demonstrated techniques for stopping the stutter, including walking his fingers down his leg while he was speaking. It was a distraction. I wonder if the tapping fits into that form of treatment.

Good for Saltalamacchia that he found something that worked.