Emotion-Focused Therapy

What is Emotion Focused Therapy?

A Definition

Emotion Focused Therapy, or EFT, is based on the idea that emotions are not only important factors in our lives, but the key to who we are. The theory behind EFT posits that we construct our very selves based on emotion (Greenberg, 2004).

This theory has a lot of backing from emotion researchers, but it also makes intuitive sense. After all, emotions play a wide variety of important roles in our lives, including:

  • Informing people that an important goal or need can be pursued or inhibited in the current situation

  • Contributing to goal setting

  • Contributing to appraisal of the self and the environment

  • Communicating intentions to others and regulating interactions

  • Informs decision making

  • Alerting people to threats (Greenberg, 2004)

Emotions are not only an important part of our daily lives, they also contribute to our identities, helping us to understand who we are and share who we are with others.

Emotion focused therapy recognizes the importance of emotions, and places them front and center in therapy sessions.

This renewed focus on emotions in therapy started in the 1980s when Dr. Sue Johnson realized that many popular relationship interventions basically ignored emotions (Good Therapy, 2016). Later, Dr. Leslie Greenberg and Robert Elliot continued the development of this new therapy, this time targeting individual clients instead of couples (Good Therapy, 2016).

According to Dr. Greenberg, emotion-focused therapy is based on three empirically supported therapeutic principles. These three principles form a guide to working effectively with emotions:

  1. Increasing awareness of emotion

  2. Enhancing emotion regulation

  3. Transforming emotion (Greenberg, 2004)

Increasing awareness of emotion is fairly straightforward – this is the first goal of EFT and must be achieved, at least to some degree, before moving on to the next goals.

Enhancing emotion regulation is a vital part of EFT. We all feel various emotions throughout a normal day, some that are adaptive and help us reach our goals, and some that are maladaptive and hinder us from getting where we want to be. Learning to regulate and cope with difficult or intense emotions is a valuable skill to have, and EFT can help clients acquire this skill.

Finally, emotion transformation refers to the process of changing or transforming one emotion into another. The ability to transform a maladaptive emotion into an adaptive one is clearly a valuable skill, and research suggests that this is a purely emotion-based skill (Greenberg, 2004). Reasoning that an emotion should be transformed and deciding to change it is not sufficient for the emotion to actually change. In other words, fire (emotion) must be fought with fire (emotion).

To sum up, emotion focused therapy can be defined as a type of therapy based on attachment and bonding theories that aims to help clients gain a greater awareness of their emotions and provide strategies to effectively cope with, regulate, and transform their emotions (Good Therapy, 2017).

History and Development

EFT was developed primarily by Leslie Greenberg. A humanistic approach to treatment, it is designed to help people better accept, regulate, understand, and express their emotions. Greenberg did not set out to develop the approach intentionally. Rather, he studied how people change. The process of the treatment's development encompassed nearly three decades. The first related materials were published in 1979.

EFT is an empirically-based approach that draws from principles of cognitive behavioral, person-centered, and Gestalt therapies. It also incorporates aspects of Piaget's studies on how people solve problems. When directed toward treating a couple, EFT also references interactional systemic perspectives.

What is Emotion-Focused Counselling? (Elliott & Greenberg, 2021)

Emotion-Focused Counselling (EFC), more commonly called Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT), is a contemporary form of the Person-Centred-Experiential (PCE) Approach, and has as its most important sources Carl Rogers' and Fritz Perls' deeply humanistic visions of therapeutic change.

EFC is, as its label clearly says, focused on emotion, not emotion as an abstract entity, but emotions in all their concrete, embodied, messy confusion, including the range of our immediate, moment-by-moment emotions: the small, subtle ones as well as the big, powerful ones. Emotions fill our lives and give them meaning, flavour and direction. Without emotions, we strongly believe, life would be colourless, empty and without meaning.

EFC is a humanistic therapy, embodying centuries of humanistic values, such as authenticity, growth, self-determination, creativity, equality, and pluralism. These values have often put humanists at odds with authority and power structures, but in their hearts humanistic therapists want to help their clients live fuller, more meaningful lives of mature interdependence with others (Fairburn, 1952; Lewin, 1948).

EFC is an integrative approach, pulling together key forms of practice from across the humanistic therapy tradition, including not just the Person-Centred approach of Carl Rogers (1951, 1957, 1961), but also the dramatic, active approach of Psychodrama (Moreno & Moreno, 1959) and Perls' Gestalt therapy (1969; Perls, Hefferline, & Goodman, 1951). Other key humanistic influences are existential psychotherapy (e.g., Schneider & Krug, 2017), with its focus on what is most important in lived, human existence, and narrative therapy (Angus & Greenberg, 2011), which recognizes the key role of context, story, and story-telling for human beings.

Finally, EFC is evidence-based. It emerged out of the careful study of how clients change in sessions and is supported by a strong and growing base of outcome research, both quantitative and qualitative (see reviews by Elliott, Watson, Greenberg, Timulak, & Freire, 2013; Elliott, Watson, Timulak, & Sharbanee, in press; Timulak, Iwakabe, & Elliott, 2019). This also includes the development of a wide range of useful research tools that can be used to support practice and evidence-based models of how clients accomplish specific kinds of work in sessions.