Full Course Description
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) for Healing Trauma
Program Information
Objectives
- Assess for attachment injury and trauma history in presenting couples.
- Modify standard EFT couple therapy to meet the additional needs of trauma survivors.
- Structure a supportive and secure couple therapy framework.
- Demonstrate safe attachment as temporary attachment figure.
- Analyze couple attachment styles and accurately match interventions.
- Categorize interventions as appropriate for progressive stages of therapy.
- Evaluate couple readiness to move through the stages and steps of the EFT process.
- Develop effective attachment requests in couple communication to replace confused, angry, or counterproductive expressions.
- Differentiate the common styles of couple engagement.
- Modify and expand client window of tolerance to improve affective regulation.
- Utilize the Experiencing Scale to gauge depth of ability for emotional expression.
Outline
Session 1 - Introduction to EFT with Trauma Survivors
- The echoes of trauma in love relationships
- Triggers behind emotional dysregulation
- The role of love in trauma relationships
- Emotion as a messenger of love
- Multidimensional impact of trauma on survivors and their relationships
- Absence of templates for security and love
- Centrality of love relationships in treatment of trauma
- Trusting and seeking refuge when relationships have been threatening
- Building a new intrapsychic template
- Moving from intrapsychic rigidity to flexibility
- Development of defences and rigidity
- Intrapsychic rigidity vs earned attachment security
- Durability of the longing to be loved
- Identification of triggers and effective communication of reactions
- Window of tolerance and accepting anger
- Limbic stability and regulation
- Fear as primary emotion
- Emotional regulation as dyadic experience
- Clinician as temporary secure attachment figure
- Developing clarity and acceptance of emotional signals
- Somatic grounding of unmet attachment needs
- Attachment protest and insecure attachment styles
- Primary and secondary emotions
- Making it safe to hope again
- Key elements of EFT Stage 1 and 2
Session 2 – EFT Orientation to Presenting Problems
- Relationship distress and unmet attachment needs
- Resilience of needs for closeness and comfort
- Catching hold of negative interactional patterns
- Development of earned security
- Addressing client defences
- Clinician as temporary attachment figure
- When both partners have unmet attachment needs
- Heling clients befriend their inner world
- Neuroception reset and generalization of threat
- Failure of intrapsychic template for validation
- Accepting and managing reactive emotional responses
- Couple cycles of withdrawal and blaming
- Video case example - Elena and Candice
- Recovery from alcoholism - pursuit and withdrawal
- Responding to escalation in session
- Conveying intrapsychic presence through voice tone
- Therapeutic interventions: counter shaming, evoking, slowing, validation
- Scrambled emotional signals
- Fearful avoidant or chaotic defensive styles
Session 3 - Overview of Stage 1 of EFT for Trauma Survivors
- Helping couples understand negative interaction patterns
- Primacy of motives for connection
- All behaviours make sense if the context is known
- Getting to primary emotions – seeing underneath attachment protest
- Attachment theory as threat management
- Attachment security improves with emotional flexibility
- Forms of adult attachment- working with hybrid styles
- Emotional suppression as habitual memory
- Co-regulation is a dyadic process - avoiding marginalization of either partner
- Definition of secure attachment – earning attachment security
- Continued video case example - Elena and Candice
- Withdrawal and shutting down as coping response to trauma history
- Principles of Stage 1 therapeutic intervention
- Making defences situationally appropriate
- Tracking and reflecting behaviours
- Identifying triggers and protective reactions
- Use of enactment and structuring bonding moments
- Creating safe templates for couple relationships
- The good news about sharing trauma
- Resetting therapeutic expectations
Session 4 – Stage 1 EFT with Trauma Survivors: Demonstration and Analysis
- Creating space – validation, reflection, containment
- Approaching the alien
- EFT therapist as process consultant
- Emotional dysregulation as hallmark of trauma
- Loss of emotions as reliable guide
- EFT therapist as process consultant, temporary attachment figure and surrogate processor
- Development of emotional rigidity
- Developing awareness of needs and negative interaction patterns
- Assessing tolerance for intrapsychic exploration
- The five basic moves of EFT - The EFT therapist:
- Remains in the present and reflects the present process
- Focusses on the emotional music of the relationship
- Changes the emotional music into a new dance, a different interaction strategy
- Processes the enactment, evaluates the new dance steps
- Reflects the accomplishments and new competencies
- Continued video case demonstration – Elena and Candice
- Reorienting the nervous system to emotion
- Managing overwhelm in session
- Using clinician emotion to move the process
- Tango moves 3 and 4 - enactment and fluidity
- Allowing client’s emotional exit in Stage 1
- Making experiential contact with fear
- Focused repetition to change procedural memory
- Processing the echoes of entanglement
- Moving out of Stage 1
Session 5 – Overview of Stage 2 of EFT with trauma survivors
- Stage 2 – restructuring the relationship bond
- Initiated when deescalation has provided a secure enough base to allow for risk taking
- The steps of Stage 2
- Accessing implicit needs, fears and models of self
- Softening change events
- Translate those into messages the partner can hear and understand – “catching the bullet” when partners cannot respond usefully
- Identifying and expressing attachment needs effectively, meeting those needs, managing risk
- Use of repetition, imagery, connection to facilitate expression
- Accomplishing bonding events in the therapeutic setting
- Differences between EFT for trauma and standard EFT
- Use of the Experiencing Scale – gauging depth of emotional expression
- Making the subjective objective
- Associating with and befriending the inner world
- Assessing readiness for Stage 2
- Revising view of self and other
- Viewing self as worthy of safety, affection, and love
- Continued video case demonstration – Elena and Candice
- Reciprocal affective engagement
- Emotion forms the bedrock of our sensations
- Preparing for enactment
- Amplifying and making contact with emotion
- Producing intrapsychic coherence and order
Session 6 – Stage 2 EFT with Trauma Survivors: Demonstration and Analysis
- Restructuring the couple bond
- Change in EFT therapy occurs in session before it does out of session
- Revising client view of self and others – will others respond when needed
- Shifting from individual coping to relational coping
- Stretching the window of tolerance
- Creating a healthy working distance from affect
- Healing emotional constriction and rigidity
- Adapting classic EFT to trauma survivor couples
- Addressing shame and identity – shame as defence strategy
- Restoring safety to connection
- Separating the client from their shame
- Continued video case demonstration – Elena and Candice
- Softening of pursuer role
- Effective response to partner fear
- Dealing safely with intrapartner violence
- Using RISSSSC – the structured approach of EFT
- Use of proxy voice
- Preparing for enactment
- Revision of internal working models
- Establishing gains and continued post therapy growth
- Further resources for EFT therapist development
Copyright :
14/09/2020
Healing Trauma through Connection
Program Information
Objectives
- Practice an Emotionally Focused Therapy approach when working with couples in which one or both partners has been affected by trauma.
- Demonstrate how traumatized partners can provide corrective emotional experiences for each other as it relates to clinical treatment.
- Assess the most effective ways to create enactments between partners to alleviate symptoms of trauma.
- Incorporate an understanding of neuroscience and attachment theory into your clinical decision-making and judgment.
Outline
Practice an Emotionally Focused Therapy approach when working with couples in which one or both partners has been affected by trauma.
- Key EFT interventions central to working with emotion both intrapsychically and interpersonally
- How to pace intrapsychic and interpersonal work
Explain how traumatized partners can provide corrective emotional experiences for each other as it relates to clinical treatment.
- How to work with trauma with couples with attention to heightening and/or containing emotion
- Positively and durably shifting affect regulation capacities
- Positively and durably shifting models of self and other
Assess the most effective ways to create enactments between partners to alleviate symptoms of trauma.
- How to work with trauma with couples, and work within the 'therapeutic window" both individually and relationally
- How to work with emotion "moment-to-moment" with the goal of facilitating bonding and trauma resolution
Incorporate an understanding of neuroscience and attachment theory with the aim of further informing your clinical decision-making and judgment.
- Clinical assessment and identification of various personal and relationship factors that impact clinical decision-making
- Impact of trauma from an attachment perspective with regard to mental health assessment and intervention more generally
Copyright :
22/03/2019