Three Brief EFT Myths for Les Greenberg (for His 80th Birthday)

[New blog entry: three poems in honor of Les Greenberg, on his 80th birthday, using science fiction and fantasy themes to imagine a set of myths about the origins of EFT but told to children (like my or Les' grandkids). The slightly crazy, unruly writing style was inspired by the children's books of beloved Canadian children's book author Robert Munsch. I hope you enjoy reading them as much as I did writing them!]

Preface

 

We met when we were barely out of childhood

Heads and hearts full of hopes and dreams

To change the world of psychotherapy

And psychotherapy research,

Which we did

 

Now that we are old,

We might as well make some myths.

For some reason,

These have come out as children’s stories.

 

 

Myth Number 1:  Don’t Kill the Dragon

 

You didn’t kill the dragon.

Afterall, the dragon

Is sacred to the Goddess.

Instead, you listened to her story.

(She was a very old dragon,

Even older than we are

And had a lot of story to tell.)

 

Surprised and pleased

By your empathy and compassion,

The dragon didn’t eat you.

Instead, she opened the place in her chest

Where you didn’t stab her

With your non-existent sword,

And invited you to taste

The thick, rich blood that oozed out.

 

Yes, I know, that’s kind of gross!

But really it was a great honour,

And after all, it was her core pain.

And you were brave and curious enough to try.

 

And then, just like that other hero

In that great big singing story by that German guy,

Suddenly you could understand

Not just what the birds were saying,

But also all the animals.

 

And you could talk to them too,

Because you had used your emotion empathy

Science magic to learn

The beating heart language

Of the birds and animals,

Which is after all the language of emotion.

 

But my favourite part of this story is this:

Then you wrote a bunch of books

And taught a bunch of classes

Where you worked with the rest us

To find and forge the emotion empathy

Science magic, which is very cool!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Myth Number 2:  The Temptation

 

At some point, the science wizard power bad guys

Began to get worried.

So they took you

And your science witch teacher Laura

Up to the top of a tall tower.

 

They showed you the power cities of the world,

And told you,

“We’ll let you be the boss of all this,

If you just come over

To the dark side of the Process

(that’s the magic of one-thing-after-another),

If you just say you believe in our kind of

Science wizard power magic,

Named CBT.”

 

Needless to say,

You were too stubborn to give in.

And for this we are all very grateful,

Because here we are today,

Paper bag princesses all,

(Just like in the book by Robert Munsch)

Doing three things:

 First, instead of eating CBT hamburgers

We live on honey and manna,

Which is kind of like baklava

But is really dried bug juice sap:

It really isn’t as bad as it sounds;

Plus it’s good for us

And is environmentally friendly.

 

Second, we are rejecting patriarchy!

(Which means power guys running everything

And telling women and children

And other folks what to do).

We don’t like this! Yay us!

 

Third, best of all,

We are talking with the beast and the bird

Parts of each other

Using emotion empathy science magic,

…And maybe a little help from

The Merlin apps on our phones?

 

 

Myth Number 3:  Gallifrey

 

This myth might be more for grown-ups;

It is full of Dr. Who references.

 

Les, we know you couldn’t stay in South Africa,

Any more than the Doctor could stay in Gallifrey.

Canada was and is your promised land.

 

You might, or might not, be a Time Lord,

But there is the matter of

Your two hearts:

 

One heart beats even now for Brenda,

Lost for many years, but still alive in you.

 

TARDIS BBC Television Centre; source: Babbel1996 

 

We share the other heart with Shelley.

Fortunately, like the TARDIS,

Your heart is bigger on the inside,

And there is plenty of room here

In its chambers:

Over your 80 years,

You have taken us all,

Your travelling companions,

On too many adventures to name.

 

With you we have found and forged

The emotion empathy science magic

Needed to cross time and space

Regenerating through

Nebulas of vague feelings

And supernova secondary

Chain reaction emotions

To cosmic background stuckness

And the blackest holes of despair.

 

There, fragile, broken, seemingly

Alone in the universe,

At the last moment we suddenly

Emerge through the wormhole,

Discover we are not alone,

And reach our hearts’ desire.

 

                        -Robert Elliott, September 2025

 

 

New Publication on Empathic Conjectures in Journal of Marital & Family Therapy

 Just published online in open access: A new study, "Empathic Conjectures in Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFCT): A Process Microanalytic Study," by Hamed Fatahian-Tehran, Simran Chatha & me.  In the Journal of Marital & Family Therapy. 

This was a fun project, initiated when Hamed and Simran each separately approached me about doing a research project on EFT. What transpired was an analysis of 12 sessions of Emotionally-Focused Couples Therapy available for training purposes. We decided to study empathic conjectures (therapist responses that guess about previously unspoken client experiences), focusing on characteristics that define empathic conjectures and identifying different types of empathic conjectures. This basically a new type of therapy process research, which we decided to call "Process Microanalysis." I'm hoping that others will take up this approach, replicating and extending our results and applying it to other types of EFT therapist response.

 Fatahian-Tehran, H.M., Chatha, S. and Elliott, R. (2025), Empathic Conjectures in Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFCT): A Process Microanalytic Study. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 51: e70075. https://doi.org/10.1111/jmft.70075

 

Real Therapy vs. In Treatment: The Role of Repetition

Entry for 21 November 2009:

[Note: For some reason, when I wrote this blog entry in 2009, I forgot to post it. Here it is, belatedly, 16 years later. -Robert] 

We loved watching the American/Israeli television series, In Treatment, which preoccupied us for two months this past September-October as we patiently watched the 40+ episodes at a rate of 5/week, just as it was intended to be watched. However, one thing that I found a bit disturbing was the fact that the therapy sessions in the TV series appeared to be no more than 20 minutes long, less than half the standard therapy session duration of 50 minutes.

After we finished watching In Treatment we decided to take a look at the real thing, and began working our way through Les Greenberg’s Emotion-Focused Therapy Over Time set of 6 sessions, with additional spoken commentary by Les. After a bit of experimentation we decided that the best way to properly appreciate these is to watch the first 25 minutes of a session, then to go back watch it again with Les’ commentary. In this manner we determined that we could get though a session in two evenings. At this point, we’ve reached the halfway point, having finished session 3 in both versions.

Part of the fun of watching this series is that we know Les, but the fact is, the series is very good: The client, a psychiatric survivor with multiple hospitalizations feels absolutely real, just like the clients that we often see in our clinic settings. She talks at Les, she externalizes, she starts to change then gets ahead of herself, crashes and gets stuck. Les does great work, too good in fact for my students today in EFT-2, who felt deskilled and intimidated. He also messes up (occasionally) and gets frustrated.

But the thing that struck me when comparing Les’ work (and my work as a therapist also) is the amount of repetition in comparison to In Treatment. That is, there is very little repetition in In Treatment, but there is a lot of repetition in Les’ and my work. When something is stuck we go over it a couple of times, just to see if it will get unstuck; when something new comes out, we repeat it at least twice, and even ask the client to repeat it. Repetition Rules!

It’s easy to see why there is relatively little repetition in In Treatment: The writers were afraid of boring people and wanted to fit a session into a half-hour slot. They were afraid to put too much repetition into the script, because they thought it would rob the program of dramatic vitality. The result is what my grandmother used to call “giving it the fictional treatment.”

In fact, repetition may be an important – but overlooked – aspect of therapy. Once, during the late 1980’s, I was showing Les and Laura a video of my work with a client from the Toledo Depression Project. I complained that I couldn’t understand why my client was still struggling with an issue that we’d already worked over in therapy a couple of times. Les quoted a Gestalt therapy maxim to the effect of, “You have to work through an issue 7 times before it sticks.” More generally, it seems to be important that new information be repeated in order to give the client time to let it soak in, that is, to reinforce or consolidate it. Cycling through material repeatedly gives the client more time to process an experience. For example, it is common for new details or connections to emerge when a client with post-traumatic stress difficulties tells their trauma narrative again. Repetition is part of a process of slowing down and dwelling that can be important for helping the client to dig deeper into their experience and to access key emotion schemes and the experiences associated with these.

So repetition can be important in therapy, and is yet another example of a quite broad principle of information science: Redundancy signals importance. In other words, if you want to communicate that something is important, repeat it as many times as it takes to boost its salience to the level desired.

Also, as the Danish theologian Kierkegaard once said, there is no repetition, which means that nothing gets repeated exactly, so you never know when something important is going to jump out, almost by chance, the third time around. And this is an example of another important principle, this one from complexity theory: Self-organizing processes tend to develop by capitalizing on chance, waiting for something new and important to fall out randomly, and then going with it. Complexity scientists think that complex, self-organizing processes, from galaxies to life to brains to cultures, develop in this way. Why not our clients too?

Oświęcim

[New political poem, from my visit to Oświęcim/Auschwitz in June. The parallels between early-stage Nazi concentration camps in Poland and what is happening in American right now are eerie and disturbing. Oświęcim is pronounced something like Ósh-vye(n)-shim, with an initial long O and a nasal „e”; transliterated into German as Auschwitz. ]

 

1.  Entry

 

Shh – all those „sh” sounds –

You are on holy ground,

But transformed into something wholly evil.

 

The guide says, take off your headphones

(You’ve only just put them on),

So you can hear the litany of the names

Of those who died in this place.

 

You’re familiar with many of these:

Jewish names, recognizably, the family names

Of friends and scholars you’ve learned from:

Strauss, Novak, Fisher, Goldstein.

 

Auschwitz is not the true or original name

Of this place, but is instead the German version

Of the Polish original,

Seemingly impossible to pronounce,

But: Slow… it… down: Ósh- vye(n)’- shim,

Now say it again, twice:

Ósh-vye(n)’-shim, Oświęcim.

The town was named centuries ago,

Possibly meaning, “sanctified place”.

 

Eventually, the Polish army built a base here:

Solid military buildings, built to last.

When Poland fell it became

The first of three concentration camps:

Followed by Birkenau and Monowitz,

All part of the nightmare Auschwitz system.

 

 

2. Descent

 

This human hell was manufactured by people

Not so different from you or me;

No external, metaphysical demons need apply.

 

Overseen by watch towers

And double rows of barbed wire,

You learn it now:

How the Nazis graduated step by step

Through successive rings of hell:

 

It started in the usual way:

The construction of enmities,

The consolidation of unearned power.

 

The concentration and internment

Of the designated scapegoats,

Immigrants, dreamers, asylum seekers:

We ourselves in America have previously gone this far,

Putting our Japanese-American neighbors

In the internment camps of World War Two.

 

Ideology following practice,

Do you see how easy it was, step by step?

They decided rebels, Jews and Roma people

Were subhuman, not meriting empathy or humanity.

 

When they found this insufficient

They progressed to death by firing squad

Beginning with the Polish elite,

But this was too messy, too slow, too personal:

It traumatized the soldiers.

 

After that, the SS began to dream large,

Imagining powerful possibilities for killing.

They practiced murder, seeking perfection,

A final solution, a seamless system,

A human machine of brutal efficiency

And petty profit.

 

At this point, an insight came to them:

The insecticide already used to kill

Lice and like vermin, could also be used

To kill human vermin: Just Increase the dose!

 

So they put down the rebellious local Poles,

And moved on to Jews and Roma people.

The Slavs, seen as slightly less subhuman,

Were in the interim to be saved to do the work,

But eventually would be sterilized into extinction.

 

For hours you walk among and through

The silent buildings and imagine the prisoners,

Some crowded immediately into the single

Gas chamber, cleverly designed to use

Body heat to free the poison gas.

 

Others had their deaths delayed a month

Or two or six, worked and eventually

Starved to death or died from typhus

(One fifth died every month);

Who can say if they were lucky or unlucky?

 

You see the rooms of abandoned suitcases:

Twenty-five kilos each allowed;

To concentrate the plunder;

A heart-breaking collection of artificial limbs;

Dishes and children’s toys; a room of eye glasses.

 

But most ghastly is the vast store of women’s hair,

Seven tons, ready to be woven into textiles.

 

Finally, you learn that even with all

This diabolic cleverness, the process failed:

It took too long to incinerate the dead,

Too slow to implement the Final Solution.

 

And so: they decreed an even larger place

Of death: Auschwitz 2 aka Birkenau,

Meaning the place of white birches,

Although no trees, or flowers

Or even grass, existed there, only bare earth.

 

Instead of Oświęcim’s 20 barracks,

At Birkenau they built 174

And would have built more

If the war had gone on.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3. The Choice is Ours

 

On a cloudy summer’s afternoon, you see

The remaining gas chamber and crematorium.

Collapsing in on itself, in the process

Of becoming an ancient ruin, global warming

And climate change acting here as executioner.

 

Maybe you wish you could forget

What you’ve seen here this afternoon;

You might sleep better if you did.

 

You fear you might forget what you’ve seen

Here in your mind’s eye

Augmented by empathy and imagination.

You fear your own forgetfulness and denial

Could blind you to the possibility

Of this happening again,

Could blind you to the fact

That it is happening again,

In Gaza and the West Bank,

And in America to trans people

And undocumented workers

And other enemies and critics of the regime.

 

Maybe not yet with firing squad or gas chamber,

But already with starvation, deprivation, terror.

 

Remember: When the people got off the train

And were sorted, casually, with flick of a wrist,

All were sentenced to die:

Some immediately in the gas chambers,

But the rest to be killed just as dead by

Starvation, overwork, deprivation and terror.

The fact that some survived of spite of all that,

Was not part of the plan,

But just a mischance of history.

 

So: Whenever we (and I do mean we)

See ourselves locked in Darwinian competition

With others who differ from us,

Even in tiny ways, real or invented;

Whenever we throw out empathy and compassion

For those who differ from us and make us uncomfortable;

Whenever we dehumanize those we fear or distrust:

 

All these times, places, and ways put us

On the road from Oświęcim, a sanctified place

Of white birchtrees and rushing waters,

To Auschwitz, a bleak place, where human ashes

Are in the air we breathe, in the water we drink,

And beneath our feet in the ground where we stand.

 

 

But we don’t have to take those steps,

We don’t have to walk that road,

To human hell.

Are we wise enough to learn from what

Happened here in Auschwitz?

Is there a road back to Oświęcim,

To the white birches and the Vistula’s rushing waters,

To the sanctity of all human lives?

 

This is the choice in front of us.

But it starts with remembering what happened here.

Let us choose wisely.

 

                        -June-Aug 202

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

Book Launch Webinar on 2nd edition of Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy

We are doing a book launch webinar to mark the release of the long-awaited second edition of Elliott, Watson, Goldman & Greenberg (2015), Learning Emotion Focused Therapy: A Comprehensive Guide.  The webinar, sponsored by APA, will take place this coming Tuesday, Sep 9, 2025 at 11:00 AM Pacific Time/2:00 PM Easter Time/ 7:00 PM UK Time.  All co-authors will be there to talk about the second edition and to answer questions. 

 Here is a link to a brief description of the book and an online registration form for the event, which is free; https://apa-org.zoom.us/webinar/register/2317556986438/WN_S2xbB7xxRj29TDGUfN4G9Q#/registration 

 For more information, go to:

American Psychological Association (publisher): 

https://www.apa.org/pubs/books/learning-emotion-focused-therapy-second-edition 

Amazon USA: 

https://www.amazon.com/Learning-Emotion-Focused-Therapy-Comprehensive-Guide/dp/143383832X/ref=sr_1_4?dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.c9XrLn-lb5m2V83mASTsnywylg3GBxDFoeR26h5vkR325DJx8PS6zqBrslE7YHbsOX9TIrlzvFa3rAmhM5jYKk4qWoQ_ANrBfg6AHOsIwY8eUijBubSNoStgtXSB0Y0aDGm-5l-XVbwfatje4_G82xDDgOV9jwpHrgzTaEnlpj-m_ElIUq5fZhtSiDk3zR2lmME4pkfA-VlPwTfkohnM1kT6_KA9DhAJrx91D5uaO0T6rrJLYtk2PeUOVnpDYb8LwkHqzIuR3Oy9-IqUfxeD_-K_ambw9PEE5WtDGkLfCmM.3BgtcifOjjWEdYPeoc3OoghEz7Vrjf-GawlHnNyRshE&dib_tag=se&keywords=emotion+focused+therapy&qid=1757095776&s=books&sr=1-4

Amazon UK:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Learning-Emotion-Focused-Therapy-Comprehensive-Guide/dp/143383832X 

Deathmatch Poems, WorldCon Seattle 2025

[Note: Last week, at the World Science Fiction/Fantasy Convention (WorldCon) in Seattle, Rebecca Demarest hosted a boisterous session in the poetry track.  This was a Speculative Poetry Deathmatch featuring a series of prompts/challenges, with genres and key phrases supplied by the audience.  Five panelists and three randomly selected audience members competed in pairs through several elimination rounds, judged by volume of audience acclamation.  I arrived a couple minutes late and did not put my name in, but like the rest of the audience I responded to the prompts with my own little poems, which I’m presenting here.]

 

1.     Prompt: 4 lines/4 minutes; magical realism; energy drink

 

Your favorite energy drink:

Citrus bubbles full of fairies in the basketball court.

Wait for tomorrow, the children say:

No more free throws for you!

 

 

2.     Prompt: 5 lines/5 minutes; cyberpunk; hairless cats

 

Virtual punk cats,

Bald since last week’s security upgrade

Leave null lines of code

For hacking their litterbox.

Naughty kitties will have to learn Ghost Fortran on their own!

 

 

3.     Prompt: 7 lines/7 minutes; space opera; pickles

 

Cucumber pickle-shaped star cruisers

Span the stars, colonizing all worlds as they go.

Three hundred years later chip-shaped saucers

Start a light-years-spanning rebellion

Over fast food franchises:

Chicken wings or hamburgers?

Drowning 10,000 worlds in mustard and catsup dipping sauce.

Blurb notes for A. Pascual-Leone, 2026: Principles of Emotion Change

[Notes: (1) I get asked to write blurbs for forthcoming books, in exchange for getting to read an advance copy. It’s always a challenge to boil a book down to 2 to 3 sentences, and I often end up writing a couple different versions for the marketing folks to pick from, plus some of my other favorite bits. (2) Reference: Pascual-Leone, A. (2026). Principles of Emotion Change: What Works and When in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life.  APA.  Book details: Paperback; Publication date: November 2025; ISBN: 978-1-4338-3660-2; 656 pp; US$54.99]

 

Short blurbs:

Brilliant! Elegant, clear-thinking and highly practical at the same time. Provides the empirical and conceptual foundation for the next generation of Emotion-Focused Therapy theory and practice.

 

Lovely writing, highly quotable, chock full of concrete, wide-ranging practice suggestions with a range of compelling metaphors and entertaining case examples.

 

  

 

 

Longer blurb:

Serious EFT therapists and practitioners of related emotion-based approaches will want to read this book, because it provides a solid, clearly stated scientific foundation for five key kinds of emotion change processes. The author has produced a tour de force based on a rigorous, decade-long systematic review of a wide range of applied emotion research, producing a fresh look at the key therapeutic tasks such as empty chair work, grounding them historically and in the wider field of applied emotion research.

 

 

Other favorite bits:

 

Antonio has done us an enormous service by developing and putting forward a unified grounded theory of the specific emotion processes that drive change in psychotherapy and people’s lives more generally.

 

One of my favorite things about this book is the humility of the author: At the end of an enormous and masterful review, the client is the hero of the story, choosing the emotion change processes that make the most sense to them and using these to change themselves. This book then serves to help therapists support this process.

 

Favorite quote: “While the therapist chooses the intervention, only the client chooses the process” p. 45

 

 

Additional note: This book is due out a couple of months after the second edition of Elliott, Watson, Goldman & Greenberg. (2025). Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy: A Comprehensive Guide. It’s a great complement to Learning 2, essentially providing the basic science underpinning Learning 2, and maybe pushing its edges in places. Antonio has been working on this book for 12 years, and it’s massive, a real magnum opus!