Butterfly Hug Technique: A Self-Calming Exercise from EMDR

The butterfly hug is a self-soothing technique from EMDR therapy: cross your arms over your chest, rest your fingertips near your collarbones, and alternate tapping each side slowly, like wings. That left-right pattern is bilateral stimulation, the mechanism EMDR is built on, and doing it yourself can calm your body within a couple of minutes, no equipment or partner required.

Maybe your chest feels tight and you can’t name why yet. Maybe a hard memory surfaced somewhere inconvenient, a meeting, the car, 1 a.m. with the lights off. The butterfly hug gives your hands something steady to do while the rest of you catches up.

Where does the butterfly hug come from?

In 1997, catastrophic flooding from Hurricane Pauline hit Acapulco, Mexico, and EMDR clinician Lucina Artigas needed a way to calm groups of traumatized children who wouldn’t necessarily want to be touched by a stranger. Her solution, now documented by EMDRIA, was simple: ask each child to cross their arms and pat their own shoulders, alternating sides, like a butterfly’s wings.

It worked well enough that Artigas and fellow EMDR clinician Ignacio Jarero built it into the EMDR Integrative Group Treatment Protocol, a group-based approach still used with disaster survivors today. A 2017 study in Frontiers in Psychology tested that protocol, which uses the butterfly hug during its reprocessing phases, with teenagers who had survived a major earthquake in central Italy. Trauma symptoms eased across the three group sessions, tracked with standardized measures, and researchers followed up again afterward to check whether the improvement held.

How do you do the butterfly hug, step by step?

This takes one or two minutes, and you can do it seated or standing, eyes open or closed.

1. Cross your arms over your chest, right over left or left over right, whichever feels natural.
2. Rest your fingertips just below your collarbones, near your shoulders, so your arms form an X.
3. Take one slow breath in and out, and let your shoulders drop.
4. Alternate tapping your hands, left, right, left, right, at an easy, unhurried pace, like slow wingbeats.
5. Tap in short rounds, roughly six to eight taps at a time, then pause and notice how you feel.
6. Let whatever surfaces pass through, a thought, an image, a feeling, without chasing it or pushing it away.
7. Stop once you feel steadier, which usually takes a minute or two.

If you’d rather have the rhythm paced for you, EmEase, a self-guided EMDR app, offers on-screen or audio bilateral stimulation. It’s the guided version of this technique, useful on days when counting taps is one more thing than you can manage.

What’s actually happening in your nervous system?

Bilateral stimulation, alternating input from one side of your body to the other, is the mechanism EMDR therapy is built around. The butterfly hug delivers it through touch instead of the eye movements or tones a therapist might use in session. The working idea is that alternating stimulation helps keep you inside your window of tolerance, the zone where you can feel something difficult without it overwhelming you, partly by splitting your attention between the tapping and whatever you’re feeling.

The exact mechanism is still debated inside EMDR research, and most of the strongest evidence covers the full group protocol above, not the butterfly hug used alone at your kitchen table. What’s well established is that it’s fast, free, and carries little downside, which is part of why it’s built into disaster-response protocols like the one above.

Is the butterfly hug the same as EMDR therapy?

No. The butterfly hug is the self-administered bilateral-stimulation piece of EMDR, borrowed for everyday use on its own. Full EMDR therapy is a structured, eight-phase process guided by a trained clinician, built around reprocessing one specific distressing memory from start to finish. Can You Do EMDR on Yourself? goes further into where that self-guided line actually falls.

It’s also not the same as EFT tapping, even though the two get confused. EFT taps acupressure points based on traditional Chinese medicine. The butterfly hug alternates the left and right sides of your body instead, which is bilateral stimulation, a different mechanism entirely.

When does the butterfly hug fit, and when doesn’t it?

Reach for it before a hard conversation, in a wave of grief, or anytime anxious feelings spike and you need to self-soothe without leaving the room. It sits alongside other resourcing exercises built to give you a calm state you can call up on demand, wherever you are.

The technique was born out of calming children through a natural disaster, and that history is worth naming honestly. It’s good at settling your body in the moment. It isn’t built to reprocess the heavier memory underneath it.

If a specific childhood memory keeps resurfacing no matter how many times you tap through it, that’s worth bringing to a trained professional. It doesn’t mean the technique failed you.

For more on pacing yourself with self-guided bilateral stimulation, see the beginner’s guide. Most days, though, this is as simple as it sounds. Cross your arms, tap slowly, and give your body a minute to catch up with the rest of you.