What is Emotion Focused Therapy?
Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) is an evidence-supported psychotherapeutic treatment (Developed by Sue Johnson, based on attachment theory of Bowlby). It focuses on working with clients' emotional processes and the goal is to understand and enhance adaptive practices of emotional processing.
Maladaptive emotional processing could lead to problematic difficulties such as depression and stress-related disorders. The clinician works collaboratively with the clients and teaches them to lean into their emotions. The intention is to practice and acquire adaptive emotional processing by activating clients’ negative feelings and work through the practice of healthy emotional processing. This leads to the capacity to self regulate with ease or at-least with more clarity.
The presence of compassion and empathy from the therapist helps clients feel supported and express their feelings (provided there is trust among parties). The expression of feelings is an important step towards building up client self-affirmation. EFT is highly regarded and is useful for couple relationships. Couples learn to respect, care and listen to each other's needs. The most significant aspect of EFT is to help couples build secure attachment and feel deeply connected to their partners in a healthy way. EFT is the experience of getting to know about your emotions, self and others.
Benefits of Emotion-focused Therapy
Through the EFT process, clients learn about acknowledging the conflicts, understanding emotions and tuning into their own and their partners emotions. In a couples relationship, couples learn to effectively communicate with each other to solve interpersonal conflicts. EFT provides instructions and guidelines to help couples build a healthy cycle of communication. It's not uncommon for clients to state that through EFT, they have learnt how to focus, learn, process and grow from vulnerable traumatic events that trigger emotions. EFT is a valuable tool that assists and guides us in recognizing, and identifying the triggered emotions.
