Spiritual Emotional Freedom Technique in Indonesia

Systematic review📚 9 studies reviewedPreliminary✓ Source-checked📍 Indonesia

In plain English. This is a review, not a single study — it maps out nine separate Indonesian studies of SEFT, the Indonesian spiritual/religious variant of tapping that adds Islamic prayer to the process. Most of those nine studies looked at anxiety, while a few looked at things like aggressive behavior, smoking, or workplace stress. It's a useful map of what's been studied in Indonesia, but it's a narrative summary rather than a statistical pooling of results, and none of the nine studies were randomized controlled trials.

What they found

studies reviewed

A scoping review of nine Indonesian quasi-experimental SEFT studies (2017-2022) found outcomes studied included anxiety (37.5% of studies), aggressive behavior (12.5%), smoking habits (12.5%), and stress/work motivation (12.5%); the review concluded SEFT can be recommended as an alternative complementary therapy in Indonesia.

How the study worked

Who took partAggregated across nine Indonesian SEFT clinical studies (2017-2022), sites across West Sumatra, West Java, Jakarta, Central Java, Yogyakarta, and East Java

What they didThis systematic review gathered and appraised the body of published studies against a defined method.

💡 Where this could help

Picture SEFT practitioners across Indonesian villages already weaving prayer and tapping into everyday anxiety relief, reaching people who might never see a Western-style therapist, in part because the practice requires no clinician, clinic, or fee once it's learned. If this locally rooted approach is validated with more rigorous designs, it could offer a culturally resonant mental health tool for millions across Indonesia, one that fits existing religious practice rather than requiring an unfamiliar clinical framework.

🔬 What to study next

Since this review spans nine varied Indonesian studies with different outcomes (anxiety, aggression, smoking, stress), a valuable next step would be a single, rigorously designed multi-site trial across these regions that adds objective measures like cortisol, blood pressure, or HRV, to see whether SEFT's community-taught, prayer-integrated format produces measurable physiological calm alongside the self-reported gains. Comparing outcomes across the different Indonesian regions and delivery contexts already documented here could also reveal which local adaptations of SEFT work best.

The full record

Design	Systematic review
Participants	9 studies pooled
Population	Aggregated across nine Indonesian SEFT clinical studies (2017-2022), sites across West Sumatra, West Java, Jakarta, Central Java, Yogyakarta, and East Java
Journal	Coping: Community of Publishing in Nursing
Year	2023
Country	Indonesia
Language	Indonesian
Method	EFT / tapping
Publication type	Review or meta-analysis
Verification	✓ Confirmed against the primary source

Read the original study →

Cite this study

APA

Purnamayanti, N. K. D., & Gayatri, G. (2023). Spiritual Emotional Freedom Technique in Indonesia. Coping: Community of Publishing in Nursing. https://doi.org/10.24843/coping.2023.v11.i01.p04

This record is part of the Tapping Evidence Base — an openly-sourced, fully-referenced directory of the research on EFT/tapping.