Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT)
Emotion-focused therapy is a type of humanistic psychotherapy. Where cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) focuses on thoughts and behaviours, EFT places emotions at the heart of the process.
What is EFT?
EFT is similar to traditional talk therapy. You talk about things that are on your mind and your therapist will focus on certain areas or ask relevant questions to help you explore your feelings.
In EFT, we differentiate between primary emotions and secondary emotions. Social anxiety is a great example of this. You may worry that you will embarass yourself: fear of shame. Fear is a secondary emotion here, whereas shame is the primary emotion. By recognising this, we can bypass the fear and work directly with the shame, tackling the root cause of the problem.
EFT uses a series of tasks to help clients regulate, articulate and transform emotional pain. This often includes using "chair dialogues" in which we will use two chairs to talk to different parts of yourself. For example, if you have a harse self-critic, you might practice telling them to stop bullying you.
How EFT helps with anxiety and OCD
Anxiety and OCD are often driven by an internal self-critic who demands perfection, or a an inner voice that tells you that you need to worry to keep yourself safe. By identifying and working with these parts of ourselves, we can transform these painful feelings.
Unlike CBT, emotion-focused therapy in done in-session with minimal homework, and is also therefore well suited to individuals who prefer to do all of their work in the therapy room.
How we use EFT
Emotion-focused therapy underpins our case formulation. This means that when we are designing your treatment plan, we consider what primary and secondary emotions are in play and how we can best address them.
For clients working with a psychologist, you will also be invited to engage in emotion-focused tasks, where appropriate.