Processing Emotional Pain Using Emotion Focused Therapy

Emotional pain is part of most people’s reality. For some of us though, that pain can begin to impact on our ability to function in our everyday life. Despite years of valiant attempts to resolve or deny such pain, we may continue to suffer. Before her untimely death early in 2021, Dr Melissa Harte had experienced her own journey through emotional pain that led her eventually to become a counseling psychologist and an internationally accredited Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) trainer. She spent years teaching hundreds of therapists how to use EFT as well as running her own thriving private practice. The legacy of her considerable skill and knowledge remains in this book which sets out a framework and model that works gently, effectively and deeply to assist in reversing the psychological, emotional, spiritual and physical damage of unresolved emotional pain. Applicable to a range of practitioners including counsellors and psychologists, this book will help you to help your clients whose emotional pain may be attachment-related, be a single episode, a series of major trauma experiences, or the culmination of many so-called ‘small t trauma’ events. This is a ‘how-to’ book, presenting techniques and concepts to assist practitioners, including investigating the use of the impacts of trauma case studies — an area until very recently often overlooked or minimised when formalising case histories. Chapters also address: • The dilemma with the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). • The value of understanding the importance of emotions and how, as adaptive experiences, they provide essential information that can assist us in our daily lives. • The concept of emotional pain and how to work through it with an extended version of the focusing task, including the influences that helped to shape the task and its significant components. • The challenges around identifying dissociation and how to manage it. • The use of chair work as another element of working through emotional pain. At Melissa’s request, all royalties from sales of her book will go to the Australian Institute for Emotion Focused Therapy.

Emotion-focused therapy is a research-informed psychological therapy that to date has mainly been studied in the context of depression, trauma and couple distress. The evidence suggests that this therapy has a lasting and transformative effect. Ladislav Timulak presents EFT as a particular therapeutic approach that addresses psychological human suffering, offering a view that puts more emphasis on attending to the distress, rather than avoiding or suppressing it. Focusing on the latest developments in EFT, Transforming Emotional Pain in Psychotherapy presents a theory of human suffering and a model of therapy that addresses that suffering. The model of suffering assumes that the experienced emotional pain is a response to an injury that prevents or violates the fulfilment of the basic human needs of being loved, safe, and acknowledged. This book focuses on a particular way of transforming emotional pain in psychotherapy through: helping the client to tolerate the pain; assisting the client to identify the core of the difficult emotional experiences; identifying the needs connected to the core pain which are unmet or being violated, and responding (with compassion and protective anger) to the underlying needs of the client that transforms the original pain. Transforming Emotional Pain in Psychotherapy provides an account of how emotional pain can be conceptualised and how it can be addressed in therapy. It provides practical tips for therapists working with emotional pain and shows how it can then be made more bearable and transformed allowing the client to be more sensitive to the pain of others, and to seek support when needed. This book will be essential reading for clinical and counselling psychologists, psychotherapists and counsellors in practice and training, as well as for fully qualified professionals undergoing further training in EFT.

Transforming Emotional Pain presents an accessible self-help approach to mental health based on Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT). Based on the principles of EFT, and developed by clinicians and researchers, this client-focused workbook is designed to supplement psychotherapy and can also serve as a self-help book. It will help readers learn how to regulate feelings that are unpleasant and transform painful feelings, so that they can fulfil their needs and feel more connected and empowered in their lives. Providing a step-by-step sequential guide to exploring, embracing, and transforming emotions, the various chapters guide the reader to help overcome emotional avoidance, with sections on: transforming the emotional self-interrupter; transforming the inner self-worrier; transforming the self-critic; and healing from emotional injury. This workbook can be used by trained therapists, mental health professionals, psychology professionals, and trainees as supplementary to their therapeutic interventions with clients. It can also be used by general readers with an interest in self-help literature and resources or anyone wanting to explore, embrace, and transform their emotions.

This practical guide walks mental health practitioners through the conception and treatment of generalized anxiety disorder from an emotion-focused therapy perspective. Foundational concepts and therapeutic exercises are described alongside illustrative case dialogues.

Transforming Generalized Anxiety: An Emotion Focused Approach examines an approach to treating generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) which attempts to uncover the deeper, underlying emotional experiences that clients are afraid of. It also demonstrates how these painful experiences can be transformed in therapy into a form of emotional resilience by generating experiences of self-compassion and healthy, boundary setting, protective anger. Though most of the literature on treating GAD is dominated by Cognitive Behavior Therapy, this book presents emotion-focused therapy as an alternative treatment of this condition. The emotional resilience this particular approach instils serves as a resource when encountering triggers of emotional vulnerability, but also decreases the client’s need to avoid hitherto feared triggers and the emotional experiences they bring. Developed in a series of research studies, and illustrated with reference to case examples, this book offers a practical, theoretically informed, evidence based guide, to conducting therapy with clients. Using clinical material, and applying the outcome of a series of research studies, Transforming Generalized Anxiety will equip psychotherapists and counsellors with the means to help GAD clients transform core painful experiences into a sense of empowerment and inner confidence.

"Emotion-Focused Therapy is an effective transdiagnostic treatment for the common symptoms that underlie depression, anxiety, and other related disorders. Given the high comorbidity of mental health symptoms and our growing understanding of psychopathology, transdiagnostic treatments are becoming more and more common. This book conceptualizes Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) as a transdiagnostic approach for treating a variety of mental health problems. The authors use elements of a modular approach that is the culmination of a decade-long research program, targeting some symptom-level presentations, as well as the underlying emotional vulnerability that manifests in depression, anxiety, and other related disorders. This approach conceptualizes and integrates a range of symptom-level EFT tasks, including tasks aimed at facilitating regulation of emotional distress, as well as tasks that specifically target self-worrying, rumination, perfectionism, and other discrete symptoms. Strategies that target clusters of symptoms, such as two-chair dialogues and self-interruption, are illustrated through richly detailed session transcripts. This book helps mental health professionals enable their clients to access emotional vulnerability, facilitate emotional regulation, guide emotional transformation processes, and engage in healthy interpersonal experiences"--

This influential volume provides a comprehensive introduction to emotionally focused therapy (EFT): its theoretical foundations, techniques, and clinical practice. EFT is a structured approach to couple therapy that integrates intrapsychic and interpersonal perspectives to help couples create new, more satisfying interactional patterns. Since the original publication of this book, EFT has been implemented and tested with growing numbers of couples in a wide range of settings. The authors, who codeveloped the approach, illuminate the power of emotional experience in relationships and in the process of therapeutic change. The book is richly illustrated with case examples and session transcripts.

From best-selling author, Susan M. Johnson, with over 1 million books sold worldwide! This essential text from the leading authority on Emotionally Focused Therapy, Susan M. Johnson, and colleague, T. Leanne Campbell, applies the key interventions of EFT to work with individuals, providing an overview and clinical guide to treating clients with depression, anxiety, and traumatic stress. Designed for therapists at all levels of expertise, Johnson and Campbell focus on introducing clinicians to EFIT interventions, techniques, and change processes in a highly accessible and practical format. The book begins by summarizing attachment theory and science – the theoretical basis of this model – together with the experiential approach to change in psychotherapy. Chapters describe the three stages of EFIT, macro-interventions, such as the EFIT Tango, and various micro-interventions through clinical exercises, case studies, and transcripts to demonstrate this model in practice with individuals, highlighting the unique benefits of EFT as a cross-modality approach for treating emotional disorders. With exercises interwoven throughout the text, this book is built to accompany in-person and online training, helping the practicing clinician offer targeted and empirically tested interventions that not only alleviate symptoms of distress but expand the client’s emotional balance, agency, and sense of self. As the next major extension of the EFT approach, this book will appeal to therapists already working with couples and families as well as those just beginning their professional journey. Psychotherapists, psychologists, counselors, social workers, and mental health workers will also find this book invaluable.