Experiential - Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) Flashcards
Who created Emotionally Focused Therapy?
Leslie Greenberg & Sue Johnson
When was Emotionally Focused Therapy created?
The 1980’s.
Is draws from Bowlby’s Attachment Theory.
What is the primary focus of Emotionally Focused Therapy?
EFT focuses on the process of how partners create emotional meaning from their experience of their partner, and the process of how partners engage with one another. The therapist aims to guide the distressed couple away from rigid, harmful, and destructive ways of reacting and toward sensitive, flexible ones that support intimate and secure bonds.
What are the goals of EFT?
In EFCT, the therapist helps clients:
- increase emotional engagement
- take risks to be open with ea/o
- feel like a change agent
- Identify primary and secondary emotions in context of dysfunctional patterns
- understand their own role in the difficulty their partner has
- explore their individual concerns, fears, needs, and longing
- Create secure bond between partners
- break negative interaction patterns
- Access, expand & reorganize key emotional responses
How does dysfunction occur, in the Emotionally Focused Therapy lens?
In normal development, people have a sense of connection with people they are close to that offers a safe haven and secure base.
Dysfunction happens when partners are insecurely attached, and process and enact attachment needs in a context of perceived danger and insecurity that primes their distress and leads to poor coping and interactions. When
a person is insecurely attached, fear and insecurity activate attachment needs in dysfunctional ways.
What is the role of the therapist in Emotionally Focused Therapy?
- Client centered & collaborative: the therapist empathically follows clients’ experience
- A process consultant
- Choreographer of the relationship dance
Therapist engagement in alliance with each client is a predictor of positive therapy outcomes.
The therapist…
- Accepts responsibility for client/therapist relationship
- Is an expert on therapy process, not on client’s life/experience
- Is a collaborator who must sometimes lead, sometimes follow
What are the stages of Emotionally Focused Therapy?
9 steps:
Step 1: Alliance & Assessment (first 2 sessions conjoint & 2 individual)
Steps 2-4: De-escalation of negative interactional cycles
Steps 5-7: Restructuring the Bond. Creation of specific change events that allows partners to express needs and shift positions.
Steps 8-9: Consolidation of change and integration of changes
What are contraindications for Emotionally Focused Therapy?
- Ongoing IPV
- Couples who are separating (used in abbreviated form only)
What are assumptions underpinning Emotionally Focused Therapy?
- Interactions shape meaning of those experiences, and meaning then informs interactions: cyclical
- Relationships impact individual identity, both in FOO and ongoing
- Therapy can help clients expand view & change meanings they make
- No outlook of pathology
- Past only relevant for how it affects the present
- Emotion is target AND agent of change: cyclical
- Primary emotions draw partners closer. Secondary emotions push partners away.
- Distressed couples are caught in negative patterns w/secondary emotions expressed
What are primary vs. secondary emotions in Emotionally Focused Therapy?
Primary emotions are the person’s most fundamental, direct initial reactions to a situation, such as being sad at a loss.
Secondary emotions are responses to one’s thoughts or feelings, rather than to the situation – such as feeling angry in response to feeling hurt, or feeling afraid or guilty about feeling angry.
What are maladaptive emotions in Emotionally Focused Therapy?
Maladaptive emotions are those old, familiar feelings that occur repeatedly and do not change and that plague a person all their life – such as a core sense of lonely abandonment, the anxiety of basic insecurity, feelings of wretched worthlessness, or shameful inadequacy.
These maladaptive feelings neither change in response to changing circumstance nor provide adaptive directions for solving problems when they are experienced.
What happens in Assessment in Emotionally Focused Therapy?
Therapist assesses relationship factors such as:
- Cyclical factors
- Action tendencies (behaviors)
- Perceptions
- Primary & Secondary emotions
- Attachment needs
Also looks at…
- Relationship history & key events
- Personal childhood attachment (brief)
- Interaction style
- Violence, abuse, drug use
- Sexual relationship
- Prognostic indicators:
– Degree of reactivity/escalation
– Strength of attachment/commitment
– Openness & engagement in therapy
– Trust/faith of the female partner: does she believe he cares?
What is the defining feature of interventions in Emotionally Focused Therapy?
Therapists look for certain client in-session states, which are markers of underlying affective/cognitive processing problems. Clients enter specific problematic emotional-processing states that are identifiable by in-session performances that mark underlying affective problems and that these afford opportunities for particular types of affective intervention. These client markers are seen as offering opportunities for differential interventions best suited to help facilitate productive work on that problem state.
Client markers indicate not only the type of intervention to use but also the client’s current readiness to work on this problem. EFT therapists are trained to identify markers of different types of problematic emotional processing problems and to intervene in specific ways that best suit these problems.
What is the Problematic Reaction client marker in EFT, and its intervention counterpart?
Problematic reactions are expressed through puzzlement about emotional or behavioral responses to particular situations. For example, a client saying “on the way to therapy I saw a little puppy dog with long droopy ears and I suddenly felt so sad and I don’t know why.”
Problematic reaction client markers call for the evocation intervention: the therapist introduces a vivid evocation of experience to help the client reexperience the situation and the reaction, to finally arrive at the implicit meaning of the situation that makes sense of the reaction. Resolution involves a new view of self-functioning.
What is the Unclear Felt Sense client marker in EFT, and its intervention counterpart?
An unclear felt sense is where the person is (on the surface) feeling confused and unable to get a clear sense of his or her experience: “I just have this feeling, but I don’t know what it is.”
An unclear felt sense client marker calls for the focusing intervention: the therapist guides clients to approach the embodied aspects of their experience with attention and with curiosity and willingness to experience them and to put words to their bodily felt sense. A resolution involves a bodily felt shift to the creation of new meaning.
