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 patient’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 emphasis of this 4-day Level 2 training in Emotion-Focused Therapy – exceptionally lead by the developer of the EFT model, Leslie Greenberg, assisted by EFT Supervisor Cristina Orlandi – will be on case formulation, advanced emotion assessment and advanced skill training in marker identification and marker guided intervention. Didactic material on case formulation will be made more concrete by following the videotaped therapy of one case from beginning to end, highlighting the 3-stage Emotion-Focused Therapy case formulation process that guides the intervention work. This includes the identification of: the patient’s emotional processing style; the underlying core painful emotion schemes (both adaptive and maladaptive); interruptions or blocks to accessing core emotion schemes and providing a formulation to the patient. Throughout the training course there will be a focus on identifying core painful maladaptive emotion schemes and accessing primary adaptive emotions to transform these painful core emotions.
The following topics will be covered:
- Marker identification;
- Advanced emotion assessment;
- Identification of productive and unproductive emotional processing;
- Case formulation;
- Stages of case formulation;
- Additional markers and tasks: self-interruption; anxiety splits; self-soothing; imaginal transformation;
- Advanced work with two-chair dialogues and unfinished business;
- Forgiveness;
- Depression and anxiety;
- Advanced skill training.
Day 1 will be mainly didactic and include a wide range of videotaped clinical examples. The mornings of day 2-4 will involve discussion on all of the above-mentioned topics through a combination of brief lectures, video demonstrations, live modeling, and case discussions. The afternoons of days 2-4 will be comprised of hands-on skill development through extensive supervised practice of live experiential work. The only way to learn how to work with emotion is to work on one’s own emotions; therefore, the experiential component of the training course will invite clinicians, on each day, to work on their own emotion awareness, self-criticism, unfinished business and blocking of emotion as a way to learn about working with these processes as therapists. In this way, this training course also offers a personal growth component.
