Emotion-Focused Therapy EFT: What you need to know

A Quick Guide

Emotion-focused therapy EFT is a therapeutic approach founded on the notion that emotions are essential to identity. Emotions, in accordance with EFT, can also serve as a guide for personal decision-making. This kind of therapy makes the assumption that not being emotionally conscious or repressing negative emotions can be harmful. It might prevent us from making use of the crucial knowledge that emotions offer. 

EFT-trained therapists are capable of helping clients with a variety of issues. These therapists might assist clients in developing a greater awareness of their feelings. EFT also enables individuals to improve their capacity for making use of the information produced by adaptive feelings. Maladaptive feelings may be less harmful to people to experience if they can better manage them.

History And Development

Leslie Greenberg played a key role in the creation of EFT. In order to better accept, control, comprehend, and express their emotions, individuals are guided by a humanistic therapeutic approach. Greenberg did not deliberately set out to create the strategy. Instead, he looked into how individuals develop. The development of the therapy lasted for almost three decades. The initial resources in this area were introduced in 1979. EFT is an empirically supported method that incorporates Gestalt, person-centered, and cognitive behavioral therapy concepts. It also includes elements of Piaget’s research on problem-solving techniques. EFT also makes use of interactional systemic views when treating a couple.

EFT makes an effort to encourage individuals to reflect within and gain a deeper understanding of their feelings. Although the two therapies share a name, Emotion-focused therapy EFT is not emotionally focused therapy. It is a separate intervention intended to help couples and family members fully understand the feelings of significant others in their lives. However, developing a greater understanding of one’s emotions may lead to improved interpersonal interactions.

Understanding EFT 

The foundation of Emotion-Focused Therapy EFT is the concept that emotions are not only significant aspects of our lives but also the key to who we are. According to the EFT theory, emotion is the foundation upon which we build our very identities. Emotion researchers strongly support this hypothesis, but it also offers an intuitive understanding. After all, emotions perform a variety of significant roles in our lives, such as: 

• Assisting in the establishment of goals
• Assisting in the evaluation of one’s surroundings and self
• Facilitates decision-making
• Guiding people as to whether a crucial goal or need can be met in the present circumstance
• Letting others know your goals and control how you interact
• Reminding people of the risks

Not only do emotions play a significant role in our daily lives, but they also contribute to our personalities, allowing us to better comprehend and communicate who we are to others. Since feelings are important, Emotion-Focused Therapy prioritizes them during therapy sessions. When Dr. Sue Johnson discovered that many prominent relationship interventions essentially disregarded emotions, a new emphasis on emotions in therapy was initiated in the 1980s. Later, Dr. Leslie Greenberg and Robert Elliot carried on with the creation of this novel therapy, focusing on single clients rather than married couples.

Principles of emotion-focused therapy

Dr. Greenberg asserts that there are three therapeutic principles that have empirical backing for emotion-focused therapy. The following three guidelines provide advice on how to deal with feelings productively:

• Altering an emotion
• Improving emotional control
• Increasing emotional awareness

Increasing emotional awareness is a relatively simple aim that must be attained, at least to some extent, before moving on to the following objectives. A crucial component of EFT is improving mood control. Every person experiences a range of feelings throughout a typical day, some of which are adaptive and aid us in achieving our objectives and others which are maladaptive and prevent us from moving forward. EFT can assist clients in developing the valuable skill of learning to control and deal with challenging or intense feelings.

The act of changing or altering one emotion into some other is referred to as emotion transformation. It is undoubtedly useful to be able to change a maladaptive emotion into an adaptive one, and research indicates that this is an emotion-based skill. It takes more than just rational justification and conscious decision-making for a feeling to transform. In other terms, one must use fire (emotion) to put out a fire (emotion).

In conclusion, Emotion Focused Therapy is a kind of therapy based on attachment and bonding ideas that aim to aid clients in becoming more conscious of their emotions and in providing them with methods for successfully coping with, regulating, and transforming those emotions.

Techniques

Two essential skills are usually the focus of EFT sessions. Which are:

• Connecting to one’s feelings by becoming more conscious of and accepting them.
• To prevent harmful or negative behaviors or other effects of certain feelings, one should learn to transform their emotions and better utilize the knowledge one provides.

This method’s practitioners handle listening and questioning with compassion, non-judgment, and reflection. This enables the therapy client to comprehend their feelings better. Then, a range of therapeutic strategies referred to as emotion coaching is used. These aid in teaching people new techniques for using positive feelings to direct their behavior. Emotional coaching may further aid individuals in transforming and overcoming difficult feelings. The goal of the first therapy sessions is to assist clients in experiencing emotions. Every session usually has one or more of the following objectives:

• Increase your emotional awareness
• Learn to express your emotions in depth and with clarity
• Learn to recognize the most immediate response and become more conscious of the many facets of emotional experiences
• Recognize, accept, and control your feelings

The treatment’s next stage centers on leaving. It might have the following objectives:

• Analyze different situations to determine whether emotions are beneficial or detrimental
• Change your unhelpful feelings
• Create new, healthy coping mechanisms for circumstances that frequently cause unhelpful emotions
• Create personal scripts to counteract any negative ideas that may be brought on by unhelpful or maladaptive emotions
• Determine the basis of unhelpful feelings
• Learn to use positive feelings as a motivator

EFT is typically regarded as having been effective when the client has a greater understanding of their emotional experience. Additionally, they might be better able to control their feelings and transform unhelpful emotions.

How Does It Work?

Emotion-focused therapy puts the emphasis of therapy squarely on emotional experiences and responses. It is founded on the attachment theory, as mentioned before, which emphasizes the role of interpersonal relationships as a source of security and comfort as well as a means of personal growth. Those others might be actual partners with whom a person is currently feeling estranged. Or they might be internal—the mental images of significant people in our lives that we all have and that frequently serve as the framework for our interactions. Or perhaps they are a component of us.

Our brains are wired for social interaction. Only connection offers the sense of security we require in order to progress, take risks, and explore the world. Its absence awakens the nervous system, causing people to become alert for threats, risk-averse, and helpless—all of which, according to EFT, are major risk factors for mental health issues.

EFT explores the nature of our interactions and the emotions they generate, whether dealing with real partners in couples therapy or mental representations of relationships in individual therapy. Additionally, it aids individuals in purposefully restructuring those connections in order to open doors for fresh, more fulfilling encounters.

Despite having attachment theory as its foundation, EFT deals extensively with the reality of current relationships and the emotions they give way to. Clients learn how their negative interaction behaviors are typically linked to fears of attachment-related loss. They discover how to identify the attachment needs that their fears hide and how to use their weaknesses to approach others for closeness under the guidance of their therapist. From there, they can easily work together to find solutions to life’s issues.

What is Emotion-Focused Therapy used for?

Different circumstances call for the use of emotion-focused therapy such as the following: 

• Addiction
• Childhood abuse or neglect
• Chronic disease
• Eating disorders
• Interpersonal difficulties with other people, EFT has also been shown to be potentially helpful in working with troubled couples
• Personality disorders
• Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)

Moreover, it can also help with the following:

Anxiety

If you suffer from extreme anxiety, you might feel helpless due to your inability to control your emotions. Your life is consumed by fear and worry, making it more difficult to operate. You gain the ability to distinguish between constructive and destructive feelings through emotion-focused therapy, which improves self-regulation.

Depression

When you have depression, you might have a tendency to steer clear of everyday circumstances. This frequently causes a lower mood and may continue to get worse. EFT gives you the confidence you need to handle these circumstances. Emotion-focused therapy offers you tools to deal with symptoms that make depression worse even though it doesn’t treat the condition.

The advantages of emotion-focused therapy

It has been shown to be efficient. EFT is helpful for both individual and couple therapy, according to studies. Emotion-focused therapy produced outcomes that were just as successful as other conventional forms of therapy in numerous studies comparing therapeutic approaches. One research found that EFT has a 77% success rate in preventing relapse. Other advantages include the following:

• A deeper level of awareness in daily living
• Forming bonds between couples
• Recognizing the link between outcome and empathy
• Understanding feelings

Families and couples can benefit from EFT in a variety of ways. Among them are the following:

Enhanced interpersonal awareness

EFT enables individuals to become more conscious of their partner’s needs. Because of this knowledge, they can listen and talk about issues from a place of empathy rather than from a position of hostility or defense.

Improved mental capacity

EFT offers a vocabulary for constructive dependency between partners and examines key actions and moments that characterize a mature romantic relationship. The model’s main objective is to enlarge and reorganize a couple’s emotional reactions.

Stronger connections

EFT is derived from attachment theory, which claims that interpersonal attachments frequently serve as a secure haven away from the outside world as well as a means of obtaining comfort, security, and a stress-relieving buffer.

Limitations Of Emotion-Focused Therapy

Some psychiatric conditions, like panic attacks or problems with impulse control, can be characterized as heightened reactions to one’s inner experience. These components of experience could be bodily sensations, thoughts, or feelings. EFT enables individuals to become more receptive to their inner experiences. Because of this, it is typically not advised in the management of these problems.

People must be honest and upfront when using EFT. It also aids individuals in taking a sympathetic attitude toward their own emotional experiences. Therapy can help people be more sincere and compassionate. However, those who might purposefully lie to or manipulate the therapist are typically not suitable for this therapy.

EFT is a form of therapy that aims to enhance a person’s general functioning. It is not intended to treat any particular conditions. Therefore, it might not be as successful for those wanting treatment to lessen a particular mental health symptom. EFT has been proven to be a successful method by a variety of research studies carried out by the developer and others. The approach is an evidence-based treatment that has empirical proof.

What to Expect?

Your therapist will use empathy and understanding to create a secure and safe environment for you during an EFT therapy appointment. Instead of suppressing or trying to control your emotions, they will help you learn how to recognize, sense, and experience them. EFT practitioners are educated to spot issues with emotional processing and to help patients in the appropriate way. Through the guidelines of emotional intervention, your therapist will assist you in making sense of your feelings by helping you with:

• Identifying and naming your emotions.
• In order to communicate your feelings, you must overcome your tendency to suppress them.
• Learning how to change unhelpful emotions like dread and shame into helpful, positive ones is known as transformation.
• Regulation entails developing distress tolerance skills in order to better manage intense feelings such as pain.
• The ability to have fresh, real-life events that can alter old emotions is known as a corrective emotional experience.
• Understanding your mental experiences and the circumstances that led to them requires reflection.

How to Get Started?

EFT therapists undergo extensive training in order to perform their work successfully. With the help of the International Society for Emotion-Focused Therapy, you might be able to locate therapists by country. Emotion-Focused Therapy Institute can help you locate an EFT practitioner in the US.

Although not specifically for EFT, the organizations below offer directories of therapists you can call to find out if they offer EFT. Remember that not all clinicians use emotion-focused therapy; some use emotionally-focused therapy. Although the therapeutic theory and practice of these schools of thought vary, they are both valuable.

• American Psychological Association
• Anxiety and Depression Association of America
• National Register of Health Service Psychologists

To sum it up, it is crucial to note that the importance of emotions in bringing about psychotherapeutic change is the main emphasis of emotion-focused therapy (EFT). It is used to help people who suffer from depression, anxiety, and other mental health issues. It is also applied in family and couple counseling.

We hope you found this article helpful in learning more about Emotion Focused Therapy EFT along with how it works, its techniques, its benefits & limitations, and how to get started.