The Pros And Cons Of Emotion Focused Therapy

Therapists can help clients feel their feelings more fully by creating an environment where the client feels safe. Helping client’s feel their feelings rather than talk about them intellectually opens an opportunity for the client to enter their own experience more fully. Using open-ended questions to explore the client’s feelings can be effective. Therapists should clarify what the affective word the client uses means; not just assume they understand. Angry can mean many different things to many different people. Getting clarification not only helps the therapist understand more but protects them from overidentifying or misperceiving the client’s experience as being the same as they have experienced. It allows the therapist to enter the client’s subjective world. Entering the client’s subjective world, having the client feel respected and understood, increases the trust in the relationship. It gives the client the opportunity to learn more about themselves and possibly have a corrective emotional experience because they are met with empathy and validation from the therapist rather than the judgement, disdain, and invalidation they may have experienced with others in their lives. Another way a therapist can help a client experience their feelings is by speaking to the incongruence they perceive between what the client is sharing and the accompanying affect. This intervention starts

Rogers worked with many others in developing the idea that clients could heal themselves, if only the therapist provided ‘facilitative’ or core conditions of, ‘empathy, congruence and unconditional positive regard.’

Allowing for our ethical codes of conduct, if the client is someone we feel we can proceed with, then as always, the first stage would be to develop a good rapport and gain the clients trust to develop an honest and open relationship with them. The client centred approach as always is the best method for this – to put the client at ease in a non-judgemental space where they can express their emotions and explore what it is they want to achieve with therapy. In giving the therapist an

This is why it is important for both the client and the therapist to be open and honest with each other from the very start when discussing the initial problems/issues.

Within the early practices of family therapy, it began during the 1950’s and focused upon an individual-therapist relationship (www.abacon.com). Early therapist such as Freud and Rodgers focused upon the individual behavior which was internal, even though they understood that family interactions shapes a person’s

The foundation of therapy starts by building rapport with the client and applying strategies when necessary to overcome a variety of barriers. It is imperative to have rapport with a client and to be aware of barriers to facilitate a good treatment outcome. This will take practice and the use of methods and strategies ready to be implemented when needed. There are many components to building a good client rapport such as: intimacy, vulnerability, exploration of inner challenges, self-awareness, staying present; inner resiliency, empathy, anxiety management, and self-integration, and relationship acceptance. The two types of barriers are internal and external and this is for both the client and the therapist. The common barriers to rapport are countertransference and transference. Strategies for overcoming barriers are: Pause Moment and self-awareness. It also requires skills such as being genuine, sensitive, open, and

Having been recently introduced this style of therapy, I became curious to apply my newfound knowledge during the first session with my new client. Like most people, I learn best by doing. The literature that I have read describing MI has not been as descriptive of a real-life session as I would like for it to be. So, closely observing how a counselor guides a conversation with a client, paying meticulous attention to body language and nuanced facial expressions, has been tremendously helpful in my understanding of how these kind of interventions can

This review focuses on two 10 segments extracted from a counselling session based primarily on the use of the intentional Emotion Focused Therapy, counselling interventions. The first transcript models a more constructive use of the EFT approach, whereas the second segment highlights a less effective use of the EFT interventions, which can be seen in the client’s storytelling and the stagnation in the session during the second segment.

This is implemented by the therapist engaging the client in a conversation about the things that the client has tried to make better and the strategies the client has used. Then the client and therapist examine whether or not the current tactics have been successful. This will lead the client to realize that, from his previous experiences, what he has been doing does not work and is likely to not work in the future. Furthermore, the client is likely to not know what to do next and may anticipate new possibilities. Therefore, the he is in the creative hopelessness phase. During this time, there is room for new strategies to be developed without previous thoughts interfering. This will ultimately allow the client to begin trusting his own experiences and engaging in new behaviors instead of believing his thoughts and blaming himself for not being able to ease the situation (Hayes et al.,

Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy focusses on the feelings that impact behavior. The importance is on receptiveness of the couple to the emotional needs that arise when discussing their issues and finding solutions to the conflicts. A couple is helped to recognize and understand their connection and need for attachment. This therapy is centered on the theory that couples childhood experiences strongly influence the couple’s behavior in the relationship. In order for this therapy to be effective the professionals in the human service field must be competent in many facets. They must be able to use non-verbal and verbal skills of communication, use reflective techniques and ask closed and open ended questions. In addition the counselor

251).” Clients are taught to practice mindful exercises in which they are focus on the present moment with acceptance. This means that the client does not run away from their current reality, the look at the present moment without negative emotions such as judgment and criticism. A new approach within behavior therapy that uses mindfulness is Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT). In this therapy is a combination of psychotherapy and behavior therapy, in which the goal is to alleviate the client from emotion pain (Corey, 2013). DBT is helpful with survivors of sexual abuse because it teaches them how to allow themselves to relive the traumatic experience in a manner that is not harmful. If an a traumatic memory or feeling suddenly presents itself the client through mindfulness exercises the client is thought to not run away from it but to explore it (Decker & Naugle,

Emotion-focused Therapy (EFT) is an integrative psychotherapy approach that views emotions as a primary form of intelligence that determines the experience of self, others, and the environment. During the therapy, EFT helps clients to accept, identify, explore, regulate, make sense of their emotions, and subsequently transform and manage them.

By creating a therapeutic environment in which the client feel safe to be entirely honest and open about their thoughts and feelings we can enable the client to be

If the client feels “safe” in the session, this can be very powerful for them. As sessions occur, the client will feel more comfortable in trusting the clinician with their feelings, attitudes and emotions. The client is able to present their needs and problems in ways that only they can express. Another factor that may resonate in the sessions may include transference and counter-transference. Transference is when the client’s attitudes, feelings and emotional conflicts from past events begin to be directed to the therapist, while Countertransference is exactly the opposite, when the therapist’s attitudes, feelings, and emotional conflicts from the past are directed towards the client (Transference and Countertransference, 2011). There are not too many positive factors with Countertransference, except being able to recognize it, when it exists, and be able to work out any conflict. A client’s experiences can affect their feelings, emotions, and behaviors towards their therapist. If the therapist remains their professionalism, and sets the proper limits and boundaries, a client can work through past experiences that are affecting their functioning. In a lecture, it is the role of the counselor to recognize the client’s experience; reflect and process the client’s emotional state, as well as process their own emotional reactions to clients and their issues. When clients can work through their problems from past

Among the three main approaches to insight therapy (psychoanalysis, client-centered, or group therapy), the one that l believe has the most reasonable way to deal with psychological problems, is client-centered therapy. Client-centered therapy is an insight therapy that emphasizes providing a supportive emotional climate for clients, who play a major role in determining the pace and direction of their therapy (pg. 459). According to Carl Rogers, the man who devised client-centered therapy, three elements were necessary to promote positive changes in therapy: Genuineness (honest communication), Unconditional positive regard (therapist remains supportive, non-judgmental) and Empathy (therapist understands issues from client’s point of view) (pg. 460). In following these three elements, client and therapist were working together equally and helped client become more aware of themselves and even feel more comfortable with their therapist and the idea of therapy. Some people don’t seek help because they feel therapy might be too intimidating for them or it’s a step that they fear having to take. I can agree with this, because from my personal experience, l had pushed off therapy for so long because l was afraid to admit that l needed it.