Emotion-Focused Therapy

Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) focuses on building awareness of one’s emotions, reducing harm that is caused from lacking emotional awareness or avoiding unpleasant emotions. In this approach, both therapist and client are viewed as equal contributors, and that the client is seen as the person most capable of interpreting their emotional experience.

EFT is founded on the idea that emotions should be used to guide healthy, meaningful lives, and that emotions influence human functioning, and are related and influence thoughts and behaviour.

‘Emotion schemes’ are the core concept of EFT, and are felt physically, cause physiological changes, influence thinking and guide future action. EFT helps people both accept and change their personal emotion schemes.

Goals of EFT therapy are:

• to help people arrive at their emotions and gain better understanding and awareness of them;

• learn to welcome, allow and regulate emotions;

• learn to describe emotions clearly and in detail;

• increase awareness of the multiple layers of emotional experiences;

• evaluate whether emotions are helpful or unhelpful in various situations;

• learn to use helpful emotions to guide action;

• identify the source of unhelpful emotions;

• learn to change unhelpful emotions;

• develop alternative, healthy ways of coping with situations that often elicit maladaptive emotions; and

• form personal scripts that help change the destructive thoughts that may be associated with unhelpful or maladaptive emotions.