Emotion-Focused Therapy: Coaching Clients to Work Through Their Feelings

Emotion informs before reason does1

Emotions set a mode of processing: fear sets off a search for danger, anger focuses on a violation. Reason then makes sense of it.

Feel it to change it1

People change emotions by accepting and experiencing them, by meeting them with different emotions, and by reflecting to make new meaning.

Acceptance comes first1

A major premise: if you do not accept yourself as you are, you cannot make yourself available for transformation.

Emotion is the primary pathway1

Problems have many sources, but emotional change is treated as the key to lasting change in thinking and behavior.

Two treatment principles1

An empathic therapeutic relationship, plus guided therapeutic work on emotion (from Greenberg, Rice and Elliott, 1993).

Arriving and leaving1

Emotion coaching has two phases: arriving at an emotion, then leaving it; each has its own steps.

Kinds of emotion1

Therapists learn to tell primary from secondary and instrumental emotions, and adaptive from maladaptive ones.

Expert on method, not on the client1

The therapist does not know what the client feels; they know how to help the client reach their emotions and needs.

Coaching beyond therapy1

Greenberg uses 'coaching' to include parents, teachers, couples, managers and health workers, not to set it apart from therapy.

Robert and the bang1

A loud bang startles Robert at his desk; fear makes him duck before he thinks. Then reason checks the window and finds a backfiring car.

“What are your tears saying?”1

When a client's eyes fill, the EFT therapist asks this, then what the client needs, rather than where the feeling comes from.

Body first, need second1

EFT leads with “What do you feel in your body?” and, after dwelling in the emotion, asks “What do you need?”

A trainee's surprise1

A newly trained doctoral student told Greenberg he had never once been encouraged to treat emotions as central in his clinical training.

The heartfelt need1

The coaching steps now stress reaching the need underneath a painful emotion.

New chapters1

A chapter on marker-guided interventions and case formulation, plus chapters on forgiveness and on emotion in leadership.

Wider evidence1

Since the first edition, EFT has been tried with anxiety, trauma and eating disorders, with promising early results.

Not a first step for severe impairment1

Greenberg writes it is not a first-stage treatment where serious functional impairment must first be managed behaviorally or with medication.

Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy

The therapist's training text: the tasks and markers in detail.

Facilitating Emotional Change

The 1993 manual where the tasks were first set out.

Emotion-Focused Counselling in Action

A shorter, phase-by-phase introduction for counsellors.

Emotion-focused therapy

The approach itself: theory, tasks and evidence.