NICOLA MANSWORTH
Psychotherapist, MEd
Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT), as developed by Dr. Les Greenberg, is a collaborative approach in which your therapist guides you in accessing and working with your emotions in a new way that helps you to gain a different perspective on yourself and your experiences. EFT focuses on helping you to identify, understand, use and manage emotions in healthy ways to relieve distress, communicate effectively, connect with others, and overcome challenges in life. It may also help you to resolve painful feelings and change problematic, chronic emotional states such as depression, anxiety, shame and hopelessness.
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What is EFT like?
EFT understands that all emotions have an adaptive function and focuses on attending to emotional experience as a source of meaning, direction, and growth. Emotions act as a signal, highlighting what is important to us and letting us know if something is wrong or needs attention. They also provide information about what we need, motivate us to take action, and guide our communication and behaviours. To function well, we need to be aware of how we feel and be able to make use of our emotions in a productive way. However, if we have learned to distrust, ignore, fear, or avoid our emotions we are cut off from important information about ourselves which makes it difficult to respond adaptively. Past experiences of repeated invalidation, abuse, or trauma may also result in painful recurring emotions that need to be changed. Emotion focused therapy guides you to make healthy contact with your emotions in a way that leads to the transformation of unhealthy emotional states, helps you access adaptive internal resources, and allows you to live more in the present.
Emotion focused therapists work directly with emotion to help you make sense of, tolerate and manage your emotions. You will be helped to actively experience your feelings (as well as bodily responses, memories and thoughts) in the safety of the therapy session. Rather than avoiding or controlling your feelings, you learn to use them as a guide to meet important needs and goals. You will also be helped to access healthy emotions and resilient parts of yourself to change unhealthy emotional states such as a sense of oneself as bad, weak, unlovable, or inadequate.
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Is EFT evidence-based?
Emotion Focused Therapy is an empirically supported treatment originally developed for depression and based on extensive research investigating how people change in therapy. EFT has since been shown to be effective for individuals suffering from anxiety, trauma (particularly related to childhood abuse or neglect), couples conflict/distress, and family and interpersonal problems, including unresolved feelings toward past significant others and complicated grief. EFT has been found to be as effective in the short term treatment of depression (16-20 sessions) as Cognitive Behaviour Therapy (CBT) and to be highly effective in preventing relapse.
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