OUTLINE:
3 STAGES OF EFT STEP BY STEP
STAGE 1: ASSESSMENT AND CYCLE DE-ESCALATION
Step 1: Establishing safety and building an alliance. Therapist creates safety by being open, accessible, responsive, and engaged with clients while tracking moments of connection and disconnection between partners in the session.
Step 2: Identifying the negative dance or cycle. Therapist invites clients to interact with each other to reveal the pattern of their dance, triggers, and disconnecting behaviors.
Step 3: Slow the dance down. Help partners access previously unacknowledged attachment-related emotions that underlie triggers and negative behaviors. Deepen those emotions by exploring:
Step 4: Reframe the problem in terms of the negative cycle and its underlying attachment emotions and needs. In EFT, the negative dance is the problem to solve-not the partners.
STAGE 2: CHANGING PERCEPTIONS AND RELATIONSHIP STANCE. CREATING NEW BONDING EVENTS
Step 5: Help partners identify disowned needs and parts of self and practice communicating this information to each other.
Step 6: Promote partners’ acceptance of new information about self and partner. Support responsiveness to new behaviors.
Step 7: Deepen the expression of attachment emotions and needs to create new interactional patterns.
STAGE 3: CONSOLIDATION AND INTEGRATION
Step 8: Celebrate new solutions to old relationship patterns of disconnection.
Step 9: Consolidate new patterns of closeness and safe attachment-the new dance of connection.
THE ROLE OF THE THERAPIST IN EFT
The EFT therapist uses attachment theory as a guide to the emotional terrain of close relationships.
EFT is a collaborative model. The therapist is neither guru nor authority, but models a healthy way of relating by being accessible, responsive, and engaged.
The EFT therapist works with emotion in a way that, first and foremost, maintains safety for the client. The therapist validates all emotion including fear and anger.
The EFT therapist explores and deepens emotion in a structured way using a variety of methods:
The EFT therapist contains emotion by validation, structuring, and organizing it in a way that maintains safety.
The therapist regulates the client even when deepening emotion by:
The therapist reframes current behaviors in the context of a cycle of attachment-related emotions, triggers, and reactions.
The therapist creates enactments in each session and then facilitates small shifts in the interaction.
OBJECTIVES:
Explain the purpose of each of the 3 EFT phases of treatment.
Copyright : 15/08/2016OUTLINE:
DEMONSTRATION OF ESTABLISHING SAFETY AND BUILDING AN ALLIANCE IN PHASE 1 WITH ANALYSIS
In the first clip, the therapist begins to establish safety and build an alliance with both partners. She is open and real with them. She wants to hear their stories. She understands, normalizes, and validates. She is attuned and engaged, looking for incidents of connection and disconnection between the partners in order to begin tracking their dance.
Notice how she mirrors their pace and language.
Notice the therapist’s use of requests and questions:
Questions like these serve in 3-ways:
DEMONSTRATION OF PHASE 1, STEP 2 WITH ANALYSIS
In order to Identify the negative dance, triggers, and disconnecting behaviors, Sue Johnson invites partners to interact with each other in the second clinical demo clip. She generally moves from one to the other deepening, slowing the pace, rephrasing, mirroring in order to get the clearest possible picture-all in order to get to the primary underlying emotions.
NOTE: Therapist works with Craig first to see if there’s a path through his difficulty with emotions. Sue believes needs to be resolved if EFT is to help the couple.
She explicitly elicits how he responds to his wife’s depression, anger, and requests for more closeness. Sue validates him by putting his withdrawing/distancing behavior in the context of his being a scientist. He validates and normalizes this going into his head.
She also recognizes and validates the concrete help he gives his wife.
Sue turns to his wife and invites her to tell her husband how she feels about his help. The wife replies that she appreciates his efforts, but still misses the connection with him. Sue Johnson repeats and summarizes for Michelle: So what you need is not the help, but you need him to get close.
Sue ends by working with Michelle validating and normalizing her pain, sense of loss, and need. Notice how deftly she moves Michelle from a lengthy explanation to the crystalized feeling really lost.
In the third clinical demo clip, Sue continues working with Michelle, identifying attachment-based emotions, reactions, and triggers. In small bites, Sue distills Michelle’s emotions into a request she can make to her husband. Sue then sets up an enactment and engages and reframes for both partners.
The third clinical demo clip wraps up with a summary of the feelings, triggers, and reactive behaviors that make up the couple’s dance. Notice how Sue:
Craig and Michelle do agree that Sue has summarized what happens between them correctly and now both partners are primed to explore the attachment-related emotions, triggers, and reactions that have informed their dance of disconnection.
OBJECTIVES:
Explain how the EFT therapist conducts a Stage I session step by step
Copyright : 15/08/2016OUTLINE:
After summarizing the situation, Susan Johnson moves into deepening Craig’s feelings and giving them a name. She begins: It must be hard for you—not knowing what to do.
Craig explains that he tries to talk his wife out of her sadness or irritation, but that doesn’t work. Craig articulates that he is often feeling “blindsided” by his wife’s mood swings. Notice how Sue uses that word in other parts of the session as they explore the role of attachment-related emotions in the couple’s dance of disconnection.
At one point Craig asks: What does this mean for the immediate future.
Notice how Sue jumps in to:
Sue responds to Craig’s fear that sharing his emotions might make things worse by:
The corrective emotional experience that follows allows Craig to articulate to his wife both his fear and his love for Michelle. He does this with a little help from Sue. She asks him to look at his wife and tell her what he sees. He responds: I see compassion, I see a listening soul. Sue validates and affirms him, pointing out that nothing bad happened.
Sue then turns to Michelle to involve her in the completion of the corrective emotional experience. The invitation: Can you help him out here? How was that for you?
This clinical clip ends with Sue Johnson processing what happened in the enactment and correction including the feeling of connection. She summarizes what’s been learned by each partner about needs, triggers, emotions, the effect of reactive behaviors and what’s required for them to connect.
Here’s a summary of how Sue Johnson has moved through the EFT Phase 1 process as illustrated by the first 3 clinical demo clips. The therapist:
At that point, both partners and the therapist agree: the dance is the enemy.
DEMONSTRATION OF PHASE 1, STEP 4 WITH ANALYSIS
EFT healing takes place in real time, in the clinical session through enactments and the creation of corrective emotional experiences—this is a unique feature of the approach.
In this final video demo clip, Sue Johnson refers to the enactments we’ve seen earlier in the session in order to validating the couple’s progress and affirm her hope in them for the future. She also sees an opportunity in closing for another, related corrective emotional experience when she invites and coaches Craig in expressing what happens for him when his wife becomes angry. It is a second clarifying experience for the couple and another great example of how easily these corrective experiences can be created in real time in the clinical session.
Sue summarizes for Craig what she’s heard him say and what he’s tried—showing up emotionally—in the context of an experiment. She validates his courage in doing this. He confirms his experience and what he’s learned by saying the fix is not to fix it.
Sue switches briefly to psycho-education confirming that Loneliness is a depression pill. Note how Sue changes her tone—to more factual—for this educational piece.
She turns to Michelle to confirm that the experience is what she’s been wanting and asking for. Michelle says it does, confirming it felt good.
Sue returns to Craig to ask him to amplify what it was like for him to take that emotional risk. Sue emphasizes that this is a new behavior and different from what they’ve done before.
She affirms and validates his courage in trying this new, vulnerable behavior as well as his ability to actually carry it out. He comments that he can see from her response that it comforts his wife.
Sue takes them deeper into emotion, looking at the anger issue in their relationship. They establish that when Michelle gets angry, Craig gets frightened then angry. Sue does another enactment where Craig tells Michelle that when she gets angry, he becomes alarmed.
Sue wraps up, asking them how they’re doing. She then validates any doubts they may have at this point and reminds them that choreographing the new dance will take time and take place over time.
Again this points to the key dynamic of EFT healing: It takes place in real time, in the clinical session through enactments and the creation of corrective emotional experiences.
OBJECTIVES:
List the requirements for creating and maintaining safety in EFT sessions.
Describe 3 steps for “ordering” a client’s emotion to make them manageable and accessible.
Copyright : 16/08/2016OUTLINE:
Sue will field questions from the audience and will expect to cover a wide range of information including:
OBJECTIVES:
Summarize the role attachment theory plays in EFT.
Copyright : 08/12/2016Objectives
Outline
Overview of couple’s therapy
Experiencing couple’s therapy
Concluding remarks with Sue Johnson and James Coan
Objectives
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Overview of couple’s therapy
Experiencing couple’s therapy
Concluding remarks with Sue Johnson and James Coan
Objectives
Outline
Objectives
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