Emotion Training Institute

Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) is a richly elaborate, textured, and nuanced psychotherapy model developed by Dr. Leslie Greenberg. Overarching emphasis is on the quality of the therapeutic alliance, therapist empathic attunement, and deepening of the client’s experiencing of their painful emotions. EFT outlines a clearly articulated guidance system for therapists to support clients in approaching their most painful emotional experience, follow them to that experience, and guide them in how to transform even intransigently stale and stuck painful emotions from the past.

EFT promotes and supports the development of emotion self-efficacy, or mastery, in living productively with the array of human emotional experience. Based on a half-century of study, clinical practice, and research, EFT gives us the science of emotion to help clients move from a fear and avoidance of painful emotion to a competence in utilizing the inherent guidance system that our emotional experience provides us. Emotion Focused Therapy delineates the manner in which the therapist works empathically and systematically with emotion via four central orientation systems.

Emotion Focused Therapy delineates the manner in which the therapist works empathically and systematically with emotion via four central orientation systems.

1. Assessment. We assess the quality and productivity of client’s emotion processing via the therapist’s empathic attunement to emotion data, knowledge about universal emotion, knowledge about client’s issues and ways of responding, and knowledge about their own emotion.
2. Principles of Change. With three broad steps and within them, numerous micro steps, the therapist supports the client to: a. Get access to their emotions, increasing awareness of emotional experience and building competence to express their emotions. b. Modulate and understand their emotions. c. Transform painful emotions. Transformation occurs through two specific mechanisms guided and supported by the therapist and backed by the research on the nature of emotional change. We change emotion with emotion, and we change emotion through the corrective experience of the therapeutic relationship.
   “Changing emotion with emotion” is a hallmark of the approach and significantly informs the support of therapists’ learning. Developing skills and techniques occur in tandem with an even greater emphasis on the development of excellence in the therapist’s empathic attunement and capacity to facilitate a deepening of client emotional experience.
3. Case Formulation. In EFT case formulation, the therapist works, again empathically and systematically, to develop a “pain compass” to follow the client to their core painful emotions and associated needs. The therapist then facilitates the process whereby the client moves towards a transformation from their initial presentation of undifferentiated distress toward an increased capacity for compassion in the place of self-criticism, and for healthy, protective boundaries in the face of painful experience.
4. Problem Markers. In EFT, the therapist learns to identify and follow “markers” that indicate when the client is caught in a problematic emotion or process that needs addressing. The therapist learns to recognize these markers as cues to engage in certain therapy tasks. These include tasks to process and resolve inner splits or dilemmas such as self-criticism, or self-interruption where the client stops themselves from feeling. Markers also cue the therapist to initiate tasks to resolve unfinished business, when unresolved painful feelings regarding a significant other emerge.

In keeping with the clarity of the overall system for working with these four systems, therapists also learn to identify markers not only for when to initiate tasks, but also for which actions and steps to take within tasks for productive transformation of core pain. The system thus resembles an elaborate, but well-marked, series of trails. The therapist, as they develop, can thus learn to follow prompts which occur organically in the process, and which they learn to utilize in their decision of which task to do when, and how to navigate each task step by step.

Tasks include a variety of specific empathy tasks, methods to deepen and clarify emotional experience, and gestalt-inspired chair tasks. Significant emphasis is placed on developing and honing therapists’ capacity and excellence in using empathic attunement, and their abilities to work productively, specifically, and effectively with painful emotional experience as it emerges and fluctuates throughout the therapy. The clarity of the structure of EFT rests in part on the very specifically operationalized mechanism of change that this therapy utilizes. When the therapist can themselves learn the system sufficiently to grasp and articulate that mechanism of change, and to combine it with a deeply empathic presence, the methods, techniques, and skills of the approach become tools for change readily available to therapist and client.