EFT for Individuals

 

To change painful emotions, we have to arrive at them to leave them and feel them to heal them.

~ Dr. Leslie Greenberg

About EFT for Individuals

Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) is an evidence-based approach to treatment that is designed to help people access, deepen, explore, express, transform, and more flexibly manage their emotions. Unlike many other approaches to counselling and psychotherapy, EFT helps people approach difficult emotions so that they can work through them, change them, and leave them behind.

Emotions Are Adaptive

Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) is based on the premise that emotions are fundamentally adaptive:

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  • Emotions offer messages that rapidly alert us to situations important to our well-being and prepare us for action.
  • They tell us what is meaningful to us and whether things are going our way.
  • They are connected to our needs and signal what needs are operating in the moment; once we know what we need, we can take steps to meet them. For example, when we are in danger, fear directs our attention to the source of the danger and prompts us to seek safety. Anger, when it’s adaptive, signals a need to defend a boundary. Sadness typically signals a need for comfort or connection, such as when grieving a loss.
  • In combination with reason, emotions help guide our decisions and solve problems. Reason isn’t enough: our emotions have important information too.

Stuck, Reactive, & Unhelpful Emotions

Emotions can, however, go wrong. In fact, the vast majority of challenges people encounter, such as depression, anxiety, low self-esteem, disordered eating behaviours, and posttraumatic stress, can be traced to how we respond to our emotions, manage our distress, and relate to ourselves.

  • Some people are cut off from their emotions or avoid them at all costs: they have learned to numb, hide, conceal, distract from, and push down painful feelings and experiences, often because, somewhere along the way, they needed to focus on managing important others’ emotions, or their emotions were ignored, discouraged, or punished in some way. Over time, the end result is that emotions become over-controlled and we become disconnected from our feelings and, because our feelings tell us what we need, our needs tend to get sacrificed, as well.
  • At the other end of the continuum, some people experience emotions at such intensity that their emotions control them, not the other way around. This can leave us feeling distressed and overwhelmed, and stuck in strong feelings, such as fear, anger, or shame. This is a common experience when we grow up in environments where we don’t have someone consistently available to respond to our emotions in an emotionally attuned, sensitive, and responsive way.
  • Many people operate at both ends of the continuum: sometimes they bottle up their emotions and then, eventually, their emotions erupt, often at less-than-ideal times or in less-than-optimal ways.

Whether we experience too little or too much emotion, or alternate between these extremes, we lose access to the adaptive information and needs embedded in our emotions. Our relationships and lives tend to suffer. We feel controlled by our feelings, instead of in control of them.

How EFT Can Help

More than 30 years of psychotherapy research has shown that EFT is a highly effective treatment for:

  • Complex interpersonal trauma/PTSD (e.g., childhood physical, sexual, and emotional abuse and neglect)
  • Unresolved anger, resentment, and hurt related to family of origin and influential others (“unfinished business”)
  • Blocked or suppressed feelings
  • Depression
  • Social anxiety
  • Generalized anxiety
  • Low self-esteem / insecurities (e.g., low self-confidence, fear of abandonment)
  • Grief and loss
  • Emotion dysregulation (feeling too much, too little, or both)
  • Disordered eating behaviours and body image concerns

EFT helps people develop greater emotional awareness and improve their ability to regulate how much of the emotions they experience. It helps them identify which emotions are useful and can be relied upon to guide adaptive action, and which emotions are residues of painful past experiences, no longer useful to the person’s current context, and need to be worked through and transformed.

EFT is an experiential therapy, meaning it involves creating and learning from new experiences, whether that’s a new experience that’s created within you with the support of your therapist, between you and the therapist, or between you and an important other. Through the process of changing an old emotional experience with a new emotional experience, over time, we change what we feel, how we think, and how we act. We change the way we experience ourselves, other people, and the world.

The general process of EFT can be thought of like an elevator, starting on the top “floor” and going deeper into our emotional experience as it starts to feel safer for you. We move back up to a previous floor, re-establishing safety and working through blocks to emotional experiencing, as the need arises:

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In EFT, the therapeutic relationship is considered central to the change process, providing the warmth, caring, and structure that will help you learn how to make healthy contact with emotions, memories, thoughts, and physical sensations that have been ignored or feared. The therapist provides an ocean of empathy in which it is safe to explore. Together, you will learn to access positive, helpful emotions so that you can build a healthier sense of self and feel more confident and capable in confronting life’s challenges.

How Long Does It Take to Feel Better?

Many clients experience an initial easing in their distress and increased sense of hope in their first session as they experience feeling truly seen, validated, and heard. Lasting change, however, takes time as we work through processes keeping the unwanted feelings and unhelpful patterns or ways of relating to self and others alive.

The typical duration of treatment is 12-16 sessions, but for some it’s less and others longer. The length of therapy depends on several factors, such as the presence, duration, and severity of early life trauma, issues related to addictions, and whether greater emphasis needs to be placed on a period of emotional stabilization prior to more evocative emotion work, as is often the case when someone is struggling with chronic suicidal ideation, dissociation, or self-harm. Your therapist will work collaboratively with you to develop a path forward together.

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Get Started With Oceanside Psychology Group

Life can be challenging. Feelings can be difficult.
Let's change the way you feel today...
Life can be challenging. Feelings can be difficult. Let's change the way you feel today...

If you’re ready to have more of the emotions you want, less of the emotions you don’t want, and lead a more fulfilling life, we’re here to support you on your journey.