Level 1 Training in Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT)

• Learn how to work with different types of emotional expression
• Learn how to regulate and how to access emotion
• Learn how to identify markers of different emotional processing difficulties
• Learn how to access adaptive emotions to produce change
• Learn skills of empathy and focusing
• Learn how to facilitate emotional processing steps to resolve self-critical splits, unfinished business, and self-interruption

Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) is an empirically-supported humanistic treatment that views emotions as centrally important in human functioning and therapeutic change.

Its increasing popularity and the growing support for its efficacy with a wide variety of problems have made EFT an important approach to psychotherapy treatment. EFT involves a therapeutic style that combines both following and guiding the client’s experiential process, emphasizing the importance of both relationship and intervention skills. It views emotion as the fundamental datum of human experience while recognizing the importance of meaning making, and considers emotion and cognition as inextricably intertwined.

EFT proposes that emotions themselves have an innately adaptive potential that, if activated, can help patients change problematic emotional states or unwanted self-experiences. This perspective on emotion is based on the view, now gaining ample empirical support, that emotion at its core is an innate and adaptive system that has evolved to help us survive and thrive.

Emotions are connected to our most essential needs. They rapidly alert us to situations important to our well-being. They also prepare and guide us to take action towards meeting our needs. Individuals and couples benefit from therapy with the help of an empathically attuned relationship with their therapist, who seeks to help them to better identify, experience, explore, make sense of, transform, and more flexibly manage their emotions. As a result, persons receiving EFT treatment become stronger and are more skillful in accessing the important information and meanings about themselves and their world that emotions contain, and become more skillful in using that information to live vitally and adaptively.

The focus of the Level 1 Training in Emotion-Focused Therapy will allow clinicians to learn how to produce change in core emotional structures. Many approaches to date have focused on changing cognition or conscious understanding. On the contrary, EFT focuses on changing emotion and using adaptive emotion as a guide to living. The concept and practice of process diagnosis will be introduced. Videotaped examples of EFT evidence-based methods, including the following major task interventions, will also be covered:

1. focusing for an unclear felt sense
2. two-chair dialogue for working with self-criticism
3. empty chair dialogue for working with emotional injuries with a significant other from the past
4. self-interruption of emotions and needs