Emotion Focused Therapy Flashcards
What is the theory about the role of emotions?
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.
What are the 3 types of emotion?
Primary, Secondary and Instrumental
What are primary emotions?
Good information about needs and goals.
a. Direct reaction to a situation
B. Rapid automatic processing
What are secondary emotions?
They defend against primary emotions
a. Emotional reactions to primary emotions
b. Can also be responses to thoughts
What are instrumental emotions?
a. They are expressed to influence or control others
b. May be deliberate or out of habit
Display of emotions is _____________ of a person’s original emotional response
independent of
What are emotion schemes?
internal organizations of emotional responses
What are types of internal emotion memory structures?
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
Emotion schemes and their activation are _________________________
final targets of intervention
What can go wrong in EFT?
- Lack of awareness or avoidance of internal states
- Maladaptive emotion schemes
- Failure in emotion regulation
- Problem in narrative construction and existential meaning making
Describe lack of awareness or avoidance of internal states
- 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
What are maladaptive emotion schemes?
- 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
What is failure of emotional regulation
Having too much or too little emotions
What is a problem in narrative construction and existential meaning making?
“I’m not sure how I understand my story”
“I’m not sure how to make meaning of my story”
Describe the phenomenological approach
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
How would a therapist observe and attend to a client’s style of processing emotions
- Emotionally over-regulated or under-regulated, conceptual or experiential processing
- depth of experiencing
- vocal quality and emotional arousal
- narrative style, vividness of language use
Describe identifying and attending to painful aspects of client’s experiences
- Focus on the most painful aspects of a client’s experience
- Look for how the client defends against pain
How does change happen?
- phenomenological approach
- observing and attending to a client’s style of processing emotions
- identifying and attending to painful aspects of client’s experiences
- identifying markers and suggest therapeutic tasks to resolve them
- focus on thematic interpersonal and intrapersonal processes
- Attend to client’s moment-to-moment processing during therapeutic tasks
- Development of emotional regulation
- Reflection
- Transformation
- Corrective Emotional Experiences
Describe how to help client develop emotional regulation
- provide a safe atmosphere, calming/validating environment
- learn distress tolerance and self-soothing skills
Describe how to help client w/ reflection
“What we make of our emotional experiences makes us who we are”
-Helps people make narratives to explain experience and recognize patterns in relationships
Describe how to help client w/ transformation
“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
Descrine how a therapist could use a corrective emotional experience to help a client
- creates interpersonal soothing
- disconfirms pathogenic beliefs
- can correct patterns set down in earlier times
Marker: Problematic Reaction
What does it mean and what is the task?
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
Marker: Conflict split
What does it mean and what is the task?
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
Marker: Unclear Felt sense
What does it mean and what is the task?
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
- Clearing a space – client imagines inner space, selects experience
- Felt sense – C attends to the whole felt sense; attains global felt sense
- Finding a Handle: C explores labels/images for felt sense, find right one
- Felt shift: C explores labeled felt sense until bodily felt sense shifts
- Carrying forwards from felt shift: after staying with new, changed feeling client explores potential for change outside of therapy
Marker: unfinished business
What does it mean and what is the task?
-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
