We have a mind wich has a life of its own, for example, a person wich fears spiders cant control his fear, even when it is irational, the fear of spider is out of his control because his mind somehow revives the fear he felt sometime in the past, meanwhile other people arent so fearfull of spiders, i dont know why this happens, i guess that we humans are terribly fragile beigns and all of us are hurt in different ways, all of us im sure.
EFT can help this person to get rid of his fear of spiders so that he can have a normal response towards them, and it can help you to get a normal response towards people so that you arent hurt so easely anymore, this techinque has a record of having helped thousands of people around (me included) the world in a very short period of time, you just have to focus on the feelings and EFT will take them away from you.
Regarding affirmations, there is a catch to them, when you say a positive affirmation, the mind responds to it in the way its used to, so for example, if your belief is that "im am ugly" and you want to improve that, you would start with an affirmation that says "im cute", but imediately your mind will respond like this "im an not cute, im ugly" in a subconcious level, so you must firt get rid of this negative belief to later install the new belief, i recommend this article that explains this in more detail and how can you use EFT to help speeding up the process to get where you really want to be, and good luck!.
Palace of Possibilities - Using EFT to achieve one's potential