Emotion-Focused Therapy? What is it?

Sometimes I wonder if, at the core of it all, it's emotions that make the world go round... Take a look at anything human - be it politics, behaviour, various creations and inventions - and you will always find emotions at play on some level, if not at the actual epicentre of it all. And maybe it makes sense as it's almost impossible to uncouple emotion from what it means to be human. Emotions colour our days, create memories, they show what's important to us. Often, they merge and intertwine with various feelings in the body and thoughts in the mind. More often than not, emotions are very complex. It's not always clear why they affect us so much or what they are trying to say to us.

Sometimes emotions are quiet and almost imperceptible, while on other occasions they are loud and screaming. Sometimes we have emotions, sometimes they have us. And haven't we all, at least once, felt like holding on to the feel-good emotions and wanting to delete the "bad" ones? So that's what's going on inside of us, but when you add the cultural and societal judgement of what is "appropriate" to express and what is "too much", what is "manly" and "feminine", "shameful" or "weak" ... Making sense of emotions can become even more confusing.

My personal curiosity in this obscure emotional world led me to the Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT). One of the main premises of EFT is that emotions are inherently adaptive; their main function is to help us survive and thrive. You might have experienced this adaptive function when you realised that you reacted quicker than your "thinking brain". For instance, you might have instinctively turned the wheel sideways when a deer jumped out in front of your car or suddenly realised you were clenching your fists and raising your voice in anger when someone attacked you. In the first instance, fear helps us react quickly and instinctively avoid danger, while the second example shows how anger organises our body for the attack or protection.

As far as everyday life and living are concerned, EFT claims that emotions are there to provide useful information about our needs and actions we can take to fulfil those needs. That is the basic function inherent in all emotions. However, feelings can become problematic when (over time and often due to various traumatic experiences) we learn to ignore or dismiss them. We can then lose our ability to process emotions productively and get stuck in old, repetitive ways of feeling and being. Sometimes we might even start struggling to understand ourselves at all.

EFT has a unique perspective on emotions as a source of meaning, direction and growth. One of the main aims of EFT is, therefore, to help clients process their emotions more effectively, so they can solve their problems and live in greater harmony with themselves and their environment. Gradually becoming more aware of our feelings, we can learn to use them as a source of knowledge about what's important to us, what we need and who we are. Being continuously connected with the core emotional self helps us have a sense of direction, continuity and wholeness.

An EFT therapist genuinely appreciates and values their client as a unique human being. Collaborative work, lots of empathy and genuine therapist's care help transform maladaptive emotions into adaptive emotions that are useful and appropriate for the situation at hand. For example, you might have experienced a lot of criticism as a child, and now even constructive feedback can evoke feelings of shame. Feeling shame makes you want to shrink, hide and disappear. It might have been useful to make yourself smaller at some point in the past when you needed to hide away from a critical other. But now the feeling of shame is maladaptive because it closes you off from receiving feedback that could be useful for your growth. Alternatively, if the feedback is actually offensive and mean, the same feeling of shame can disconnect you from your protective anger, so you cannot stand up for yourself. In EFT, you can learn more about your unique responses and work towards transforming them into more useful experiences of yourself, such as self-respect, feelings of self-value.

EFT is widely used in working with such emotional difficulties as anxiety, depression, childhood traumas and other psychological difficulties.