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What is Emotion-Focused Therapy?

  • Emotion-Focused Therapy (previously known as process-experiential psychotherapy) is an empirically supported, emotion-focused, humanistic approach that uniquely integrates emotion theory with person-centered, gestalt, existential and systemic therapies to contemporary psychological thinking.

 

  • It was originally developed by Dr. Leslie Greenberg in collaboration with Dr. Robert Elliott and Dr. Laura Rice for individuals and with Dr. Sue Johnson for couples, and continues to develop through active research by many researchers in the present.

Why are emotions important?

  • Emotion-Focused Therapy views emotions as central to human functioning and therapeutic change.

  • We propose that emotions have an innately adaptive potential that if activated can help us change problematic emotional states. 

  • Emotions tell us what is important in a situation and act as a guide to what we need or want; which in turn, helps us figure out what actions to take.

  • Knowing what you’re feeling is not enough because one can feel stuck in painful emotions. EFT therapists help clients experience their emotions in the safety of the therapy session and spend years learning to facilitate productive emotional processing so they can use emotions as a source of meaning, direction and growth, rather than feeling stuck in them.

Therapy Session
Is EFT research based?

Emotion-Focused Therapy is a bottom-up approach that emerged out of years of process and outcome psychotherapy research on what brings about change in the therapy room.

 

Over the years, research has demonstrated that the approach is effective for a variety of psychological difficulties like

  • Depression

  • Abuse

  • Complex trauma

  • Interpersonal difficulties

  • Generalised anxiety difficulties

  • Social anxiety difficulties

  • Fear of cancer recurrence

  • Decisional conflicts 

  • Binge eating

  • Mixed client difficulties

  • Emotional injuries and conflicts between couples

  • Mixed difficulties with children and adolescents and their families

Reading a Compass
Therapeutic style in EFT

In EFT, clients are viewed as the expert of their own lived experience and therapists are viewed as ‘process’ experts. That is why, the EFT therapeutic style is of following and guiding (or ‘being’ and ‘doing’) and emphasizes both therapeutic relationship as well as intervention skills.​

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For more information about Emotion-Focused Therapy, please visit the International Society for Emotion-Focused Therapy.

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