EFT & Couples Flashcards
What are the 3 Stages of EFT?
- De-escalation of problematic cycles
- Changing Interactional Positions (aka Re-engagement)
- Consolidation & Integration
What happens in Stage 1?
Step 1: Identify relational issues
Step 2: Identify the negative interaction cycle where issues are expressed.
Step 3: Identify attachment- oriented emotions underlying the cycle.
Step 4: Reframe the problem in terms of the cycle, attachment needs and underlying emotions.
What happens in Stage 2?
Step 5: Promote identification with disowned attachment needs such as the need for reassurance.
Step 6: Promote each partner’s acceptance of the other’s experience.
Step 7: Facilitate the expression of needs and wants, to restructure the interaction based on new understandings.
What happens in Stage 3?
Step 8: Facilitate the emergence of new solutions to old problems.
Step 9: Consolidate new positions and cycles of attachment behavior.
What are key interventions of EFT?
Empathic Interpretation – to interpret and describe the underlying emotions for the client.
Evocative Responding – questions that help them access what is happening now. Often somatic.
Heightening – bring in images, metaphors to “heighten” experience.
Enactments – where you have the clients speak to each other about their primary emotions and attachment needs.
What are the 5 moves to restructure interactions?
- Reflects what observe in the couples interaction.
- Helps deepen one partner’s level of engagement and exploration of emotion
- Sets up an enactment whereby they can communicate with their partner from a place of this expanded experience.
- Process enactment - share what it was like to hear the new message and to express new feelings. Any negative responses are explored.
- Therapist gives an overview of what has just occurred, so that it can be coherently integrated.
What is the EFT Tango?
- Cycle Here & Now: reflect and distill, present process (within/between)
- Zoom In, Access: unfold, deeper or new emotions
- Cross-Over, Enact: turn new experience into new signal to partner
- Zoom In, Process Enactment: explore experience of new sharing: “how it feels to hear/tell?”
- Zoom Out, Summarize: integrate, validate, and congratulate. Look at what you did, take a bow (metaprocess).
THEN you start the process over again
What do stages 1 & 2 look like in practice?
Identify the issues and the negative cycle where the issues are expressed. What two positions do they often take?
What does stage 3 look like in practice?
Help them to access the deeper emotions and understand cycles.
What are the secondary emotions?
What are the primary, deeper emotions that they each might have?
How might you help them to access and express these deeper emotions? Could you come up with examples of how you might use:
1. Empathic Interpretation – to interpret and describe the underlying emotions for the client.
2. Evocative Responding – questions that help them access what is happening now. Often somatic.
3. Heightening – bring in images, metaphors to “heighten” experience.
4. Enactments – where you have the clients speak to each other about their primary emotions and attachment needs.
What does stage 4 look like in practice?
How can you reframe their problems in terms of cycles, underlying emotions and attachment needs for the clients?
What does stage 5 look like in practice?
Promote identification with disowned attachment needs such as the need for reassurance.
Work with clients to contain their feelings and self-sooth rather than trying to change each other.
Teach to feel feelings fully and name them. Work on self-compassion.
Help them understand some of the origins of their feelings in childhood. These are old feelings that are triggered now. They are safe now.
What do stages 6 & 7 look like in practice?
Promote each partner’s acceptance of the other’s experience. And facilitate the expression of needs and wants, to restructure the interaction based on new understandings.
Support the couple in expressing their feelings and validating each other and asking for what they need.
Set up enactments for new ways of communicating and asking for needs to be met.
Can you think of an enactment that you could set up for clients? What might you teach each client to say? Teach them both to repeat what the other says and validate it.
What do stages 8 & 9 look like in practice?
Facilitate new solutions to old problems. And consolidate new cycles of attachment behavior. In this stage continue to address concrete problems in therapy. This stage is when the couple starts to become more active and the therapist is supporting and less directive. The therapist reflects the partners’ new way of interacting.
What are 2 common roles in relationships according to EFT?
Withdrawer & Pursuer
How d you assess fro IPV in a couple?
Ask the partners separately about IPV to assess.
Start off with general questions, then get into specific or detailed questions.
If client indicates that some instance of abuse occurs, start off asking about a higher number of instances (to give them permission that their number is okay).
2 things you NEED to do if there is IPV:
1. Give the client phone numbers/resources
2. Develop a safety plan
