Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT)

The foundation of Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) incorporates Carl Rogers’ person-centred therapy and Gestalt therapy, which is about the life processes that people use to organise life, created by Fritz Perls. Leslie Greenberg first developed EFT. Its goal is to transform the early maladaptive emotion scheme that causes the client’s symptoms.

Emotions are highly complex. It not only provides information on how the client feels. It describes an experience with physiological, cognitive, behavioural, and affective effects on the client. Emotions can be differentiated as primary and secondary. Emotions can be adaptive or maladaptive. As a result, we categorise emotion as primary adaptive, primary maladaptive, secondary reactive, or instrumental. i) Primary adaptive emotion is the client’s immediate gut response, a raw and unprocessed feeling. They are healthy and helpful feelings to respond to the situation (e.g., fear and running when a bear threatens one’s safety). ii) Primary maladaptive emotion keeps clients “stuck” emotionally in the past. They are unprocessed and blocking the client from emotionally moving forward (e.g., a child abuse victim attached to the perpetrator’s comfort, but humiliating). iii) Secondary reactive emotion is maladaptive and problematic. It inhibits the emotional experience and prevents clients from experiencing their true feelings (e.g., a man feels angry with himself afterwards for being afraid in a particular situation).  iv) instrumental emotion is used to control others (e.g., a bully exhibits anger to intimidate others) (Syed, 2024)

From early childhood, the learning experience forms the emotion schemes that some are maladaptive and reinforced in adulthood. The three main categories of EFT that work for emotional change are utilization, transformation, and regulation. Six principles of emotional change are: i) awareness means heightening emotion, which allows deeper feelings and recognising bodily feelings. ii) express those feelings. iii) Reflection means contemplating their emotional experience from a more adaptive perspective. iv) changing emotion with emotion means focusing on past experience and utilising a more adaptive emotion to undo maladaptive emotion schema. v) & vi) to identify the problem emotions and hopefully lead to the client’s willingness and deliberate regulation of this emotion. Automatic regulation.

In session, EFT utilises chair-work in response to the client’s marker. There are two-chair work for self-evaluative splits, empty-chair work for unfinished business, and two-chair work for self-interruption splits.

Two-chair work intervention for self-critical splits is done by helping the client to set up a dialogue between themselves and the criticism and expectation from their critic. Then deepen the splits by identifying the values and standards of the critics. The therapist accompanies the client and facilitates the emergence of unwanted feelings. The second stage is softening of the critics, eliciting compassion from the critics and the client to accept their own feelings. Finally, the two-chair dialogue brings negotiation between the client and critical selves.

Reference:

Syed, F. (2024). Using Emotion-Focused Therapy Chair Work in Working with Shame and Self-Criticism in a Muslim Demographic The Chicago School.