Emotion Focused Therapy

Question 1

What is the theory about the role of emotions?

Answer 1

Emotions are adaptive. There are 2 different paths for producing emotion–the shorter and faster amygdala pathways and the longer, slower neo-cortex pathway. Emotions can go wrong because of types of emotions and emotion schemes.

Question 2

What are the 3 types of emotion?

Answer 2

Primary, Secondary and Instrumental

Question 3

What are primary emotions?

Answer 3

Good information about needs and goals.

a. Direct reaction to a situation
B. Rapid automatic processing

Question 4

What are secondary emotions?

Answer 4

They defend against primary emotions

a. Emotional reactions to primary emotions
b. Can also be responses to thoughts

Question 5

What are instrumental emotions?

Answer 5

a. They are expressed to influence or control others

b. May be deliberate or out of habit

Question 6

Display of emotions is _____________ of a person’s original emotional response

Answer 6

independent of

Question 7

What are emotion schemes?

Answer 7

internal organizations of emotional responses

Question 8

What are types of internal emotion memory structures?

Answer 8

cognitive (appraisals, expectations, beliefs)
motivational (needs, concerns, intentions, goals)
affective (physiological arousal and sensory body feeling)
behavioral (expressive -motor responses and action tendencies)

They are elicited by cues that somehow match part of the schemes

Question 9

Emotion schemes and their activation are _________________________

Answer 9

final targets of intervention

Question 10

What can go wrong in EFT?

Answer 10

1. Lack of awareness or avoidance of internal states
2. Maladaptive emotion schemes
3. Failure in emotion regulation
4. Problem in narrative construction and existential meaning making

Question 11

Describe lack of awareness or avoidance of internal states

Answer 11

• Inability to symbolize bodily felt experience (“No words to what i feel”)
• Parts of experience are left out of awareness-not integrated
• Primary emotions are hidden behind secondary emotions or instrumental emotions

Question 12

What are maladaptive emotion schemes?

Answer 12

• Learned in interpersonal situations that evoked innate emotional reactions (anger at violation, fear at threat, sadness at loss)
• Function to manage difficult feelings
• Present triggers emotions based on past
• They repeat over and over

Question 13

What is failure of emotional regulation

Answer 13

Having too much or too little emotions

Question 14

What is a problem in narrative construction and existential meaning making?

Answer 14

“I’m not sure how I understand my story”

“I’m not sure how to make meaning of my story”

Question 15

Describe the phenomenological approach

Answer 15

Listen to and explore the client’s narrative about the problem. Gather information about the client’s attachment and identity histories and current relationship concerns

Question 16

How would a therapist observe and attend to a client’s style of processing emotions

Answer 16

• Emotionally over-regulated or under-regulated, conceptual or experiential processing
• depth of experiencing
• vocal quality and emotional arousal
• narrative style, vividness of language use

Question 17

Describe identifying and attending to painful aspects of client’s experiences

Answer 17

• Focus on the most painful aspects of a client’s experience

- Look for how the client defends against pain

Question 18

How does change happen?

Answer 18

1. phenomenological approach
2. observing and attending to a client’s style of processing emotions
3. identifying and attending to painful aspects of client’s experiences
4. identifying markers and suggest therapeutic tasks to resolve them
5. focus on thematic interpersonal and intrapersonal processes
6. Attend to client’s moment-to-moment processing during therapeutic tasks
7. Development of emotional regulation
8. Reflection
9. Transformation
10. Corrective Emotional Experiences

Question 19

Describe how to help client develop emotional regulation

Answer 19

• provide a safe atmosphere, calming/validating environment

- learn distress tolerance and self-soothing skills

Question 20

Describe how to help client w/ reflection

Answer 20

“What we make of our emotional experiences makes us who we are”

-Helps people make narratives to explain experience and recognize patterns in relationships

Question 21

Describe how to help client w/ transformation

Answer 21

“You have to feel it to heal it”

• Transforming maladaptive emotions with other adaptive emotions (core shame or fear can become empowering anger)
• not just about catharsis or “letting go” of maladaptive. rather other emotions just UNDO the maladaptive emotions

Question 22

Descrine how a therapist could use a corrective emotional experience to help a client

Answer 22

• creates interpersonal soothing
• disconfirms pathogenic beliefs
• can correct patterns set down in earlier times

Question 23

Marker: Problematic Reaction

What does it mean and what is the task?

Answer 23

Puzzlement about an emotional or behavioral response to certain situations

Task: Systematic Evocative Unfolding

vivid evocation of experience to promote re-experiencing the situation and reaction to establish the connection between situation, thoughts, feelings in order to arrive at the implicit meaning of the situation that makes sense of the reaction

Question 24

Marker: Conflict split

What does it mean and what is the task?

Answer 24

Verbal statements by the client that two aspects of the self are in direct opposition w/ each other

Task- Two chair work
Dialogue: bring two sides in creative contact
Focus not on why the conflict occurred; but, process of living through the conflict in the present to forge new solutions.
-active expression of each side of the conflict
-attending to elements of experience on each side

Question 25

Marker: Unclear Felt sense

What does it mean and what is the task?

Answer 25

client talks abstractly and intellectually focusing on external details
vague sense of “something wrong—but not clear

Task: Focusing: Facilitate development of inner felt sense

1. Clearing a space – client imagines inner space, selects experience
2. Felt sense – C attends to the whole felt sense; attains global felt sense
3. Finding a Handle: C explores labels/images for felt sense, find right one
4. Felt shift: C explores labeled felt sense until bodily felt sense shifts
5. Carrying forwards from felt shift: after staying with new, changed feeling client explores potential for change outside of therapy

Question 26

Marker: unfinished business

What does it mean and what is the task?

Answer 26

-Lingering unresolved feeling toward a significant other

Task: Empty chair

activate internal view of the other, experience & explore emotional reactions to other & make sense of them – access unmet needs & shift in view of self & other