Defining EFT (Emotional Focused Therapy)
What is Emotion-Focused Therapy?
EFT, or emotion-focused therapy, is the practice of therapy prioritizing the role one’s emotions, both temporary and long-term, play in the realm of positive therapeutic change. For a therapist using EFT techniques, it’s important to look at a client’s emotions as not simply ornaments, but as the guiding principles that a client uses throughout their lives. Emotions dictate both the day-to-day decisions and the major life-changing events, influencing every aspect of our lives.
EFT psychology is a major aspect of psychodynamic therapy, which has always theorized about emotions. The goal of focus therapy is to explore those past emotions in order to help reveal what a client needs out of a situation and if they have been ignoring and repressing an emotional need of theirs. This helps clients to develop their emotional literacy, and become empowered to be honest, both with themselves and others, about how they feel and how they would like to be treated.
Perks of Emotional-Focused Therapy
As a form of client-based psychotherapy, EFT interventions can help create psychological breakthroughs with patients and push their clients toward positive self-reflection.
Explores Why Emotions Are Produced
As a therapist or counselor, asking questions such as “Why?” can come back with mixed results. Many patients who come to a counselor, either for the first time or as experienced patients find themselves incapable of answering such a daunting question. As a psychotherapist, it is your goal to help drive your clients toward such an answer, and emotion-based therapy gives your clients a richer and more visceral reaction toward their own feelings. This means that they are able to confront their own emotions heads on.
Gives Clients A Deeper Understanding of Themselves
Once a client has a core understanding of why a certain emotion was produced in them, they then can start a deeper sense of other moments in their life when they have produced a similar emotion. From there both the client and counselor can explore the patient’s past with a fresh perspective, which helps to illuminate and potentially break unhealthy cycles and habits.
Draws from the Attachment Theory
Emotional-based therapy is not simply its own classification of psychodynamic therapy but instead draws on older psychological theories to help explore the process of human thought, such as the attachment theory. By exploring how and why relationships between humans develop with EFT psychology, a patient can see where their certain motives are drawing from, and why (or who) has influenced their past for them to act a certain way.
Why Should A Counselor Study Emotion Focus Therapy?
An EFT practitioner can help restructure the way a patient looks at their life, and how they have arrived at this moment in time. Emotionally focused therapy was originally used for couples therapy, giving each respective individual in the relationship the space needed for them to comfortably open up about what emotions they have been feeling, especially those emotions that have been repressed in the past. Once these emotions have been properly taken into account, the patients can start repairing the relationship, looking at how certain emotions have not only occurred but how these emotions have influenced the relationship and shaped it in certain ways.
An in-depth examination of a patient’s emotional history can help reshape habits and a client’s unhealthy techniques when it comes to dealing with certain emotions. EFT changes are a way to help process and accept themselves and their emotions, so they can deal with these emotions in the future. As an EFT counselor, you too can help couples, individuals, and communities and have deeper counseling sessions. At ICSW, psychodynamic therapy is a crucial part of making a difference, and getting your Master’s in Clinical Counseling and Psychotherapy can be the first step in building your career and helping others.