China Impressions: EFT in Shanghai

Entry for 12 August 2018:

Six days’ EFT training in Shanghai.  I’ve flown from Glasgow to San Francisco, spending 3 days in Pleasanton and getting in a brief visit with Kenneth before flying on to China.  California is hot and dry, and on fire in many places.

First time in mainland China (previous trip to Hong Kong, but somehow feels like that doesn’t count).  Airport is full of construction; we land out in far reaches of airport; it takes bus what seems like ages to get to terminal & pick up suitcase.  Foreigners have to do self-service finger-printing before they can go through immigration.  Joyce has sent her helper Celia to wait for me and escort me to hotel.  When I finally emerge from international arrivals; she is surprised at how long it’s taken me.

Uber car to city:  Huge city: 25 million & counting. Radio is playing American pop music.  It takes us over an hour to go from airport to hotel, which is apparently toward the western end of the city.  It’s 30C but feels closer to 40, and very humid. It gets dark early, around 7.  My room on the 12^th floor has a great view of the nearby Shangfeng Park and the cityscape beyond, although it turns out that we are many miles from downtown.  Joyce & Morley meet me for dinner in the hotel a bit later.  There is no one else in the restaurant, although it’s Saturday night.  I’m so jet-lagged I can’t later remember what we talked about, except to make plans for Sunday. I take a melatonin and go to bed about 9pm.

I get up early the next day and go for a run on one of the treadmills in the empty gym facility in the hotel.  After showering and breakfast, Joyce & Morley pick me up in an Uber car (they don’t own a car in Shanghai).  They take me to the International Church in Shanghai, a nondenominational evangelical church in the ballroom of a large hotel. We have to show our passports to get in, proving that we are foreign nationals.  The first 45 min is prayers followed by contemporary praise music, nice enough, but after a while a bit repetitive for someone used to complicated Anglican hymns.

After church we grab sandwiches at the Starbucks and get picked up to be driven west of Shanghai to a “water town”: an old town built along a set of canals, with markets of little shops on the lanes that parallel the canals. We spend the afternoon there wandering around in the heat amidst throngs of Chinese people (almost no Westerners), looking in shops, while Morley talks to the shopkeepers, and we shop. We visit a Taoist temple, a rustic hotel, and an old tea-house where we eat fruit prepared by the owner, who is also a painter.  We take a canal ride, on a boat whose boatman propels it forward with a kind of rear mounted rudder/oar.  It’s very peaceful, and a great way to people-watch on a hot August Sunday afternoon.  Then it’s back into town for dinner, but on the way we have a fascinating and far-ranging theological discussion/sharing.  Dinner is at one of their favourite Shanghainese restaurants, whose ceilings are strikingly decorated with 20^th century figurist paintings of colonial Shanghai.  At every Chinese restaurant we go to, Morley orders for everyone, curating our dining experience with an expert touch.  He is particularly good at selecting a wide range of vegetarian dishes, which I greatly appreciate.  At this dinner, I meet Jennifer, who is going to translate for me for most of the week.

The Great Firewall of China stymies me repeatedly, even though I’ve prepared by investing in a highly-rated VPN service: they’ve blocked all Google services, including Gmail, as well as BBC news (but for some reason not NPR); Dropbox is blocked as is YouTube and Facebook.  It also turns out that they’ve recently blocked my VPN service, even though there are still web ads everywhere claiming that it works. Fortunately, Skype & Zoom still work, so I can talk to Diane & Kenneth most days, working around the 15 hr time difference.  Also, my Strathclyde email still works so I locate and install a recent version of Outlook, and have Diane scan my Gmail account and forward critical email to me.

Monday morning: Celia picks me up in taxi and takes me to Shanghai Care Corner Counselling Center, the clinic and training center that Joyce and Morley run with the help of Mary and Celia.  They have 6 counselling rooms, which they also use for skill practice break-out rooms, plus a relatively large training room that can squeeze in up to 45.  Morley embarrasses me with a totally over-the-top introduction in which he dramatically describes me in almost magical terms, with laser-like empathy coming out of my eyes. 

This presages 6 days of the most intense EFT training I’ve ever had the opportunity to deliver: 1 day EFT for Social Anxiety; 2-days Advanced Empathic Attunement; 3 days Module 2 (Focusing, Reprocessing Work, Two Chair work).  First, there are lots of participants in these trainings, ranging in number from 38 to 42. Second, they are eager to learn, to do skill practice, to volunteer for live demonstrations, and to ask questions on a wide variety of topics.  It’s invigorating, challenging, and ultimately exhausting.  It pushes my thinking forward in numerous places.  They interact in an uninhibited manner with each other, sometimes arguing and challenging one another.  Not all, but most fearlessly dive into their pain: rejecting mothers; overly strict, even abusive fathers; huge expectations placed on only children (an effect of China’s one-child policy).  Underlying much of the personal pain, is the legacy of the Chinese Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s and 70’s, directly experienced or transmitted cross-generationally.  This comes out sometimes as roughness or abrasiveness, sometimes as a kind of frozenness, which can break with a large release of emotion. There are many heart-wrenching stories that emerge during the week.

They refer to me as a “master” and “teacher”.  There are endless photographs during breaks and at the end of each day. Towards the end, Morley starts running interference for me so that I can have recovery time during my breaks. They soak up what I’ve got to say, even with the sequential translation.  At the best moments, the translators and I get into a kind of rhythm, as I condense what I have to say into a series of short sentences that build dramatically to climaxes. A couple of times during the week, to illustrate a key point, I find myself sharing a highly dramatic personal story, and am startled (and pleased) when they spontaneously applaud at the end. I share my mantra: Love, courage & wisdom.  Love and courage they have in abundance; for them as for me, the wisdom part is a work in progress.

To cope with the intensity, I have a power nap each day, and take melatonin most of the week, to avoid the episodes of severe insomnia I had last time I dealt with double jet lag. As we finish on the 6^th day, I write in my Pukka Pad, “tired, drained, relieved”. I have the feeling of being filled with ideas for how to move EFT theory, practice & training forward, too many to write down so that I am left hoping that they will come back when I need them. Here are a few that I was left with at the end of this running of Module 2: (1) The Focusing input needs a major update (reduce coverage of Clearing a Space, re-do task model to reflect flexible emotion-scheme based questioning strategy, which can also be used for skill practice, emphasize use within Chairwork).  (2) Due to popular demand, I’ve written part of a new input on emotion regulation (needs to be finished, lead with emotion regulation principles; figure out good place for it in later modules, probably with first chairwork).  (3) Better integration of Reprocessing Work with Chairwork is needed, to highlight its role both as stand-alone and within Chair Work. (4) Better integration of Empty Chair Work and Two Chair work is needed, underlining the role of self-interruption conflict splits in Empty Chair Work and more importantly the integrated task of Conflict Splits about an Important Other, in which it’s useful to alternate between Two Chair Work and Empty Chair Work, as each task supports work on the other.

Last day: Up early, I think maybe I’ll attempt a run in Shangfeng Park near the hotel, but it’s disgusting outside,  like a steam bath: 30C already, near 100% humidity, and the rain has already started; it’s been clear and dry all week but now a typhoon is coming in.  Run on the treadmill again; shower, pack, breakfast.  Mary meets me at 10am, checks me out of hotel.  Uber car to airport, heavy rain part of way; reminds me of Ohio summer.  Long conversation with Mary about her experiences growing up. She waits with me in the queue at check-in in case of problems (they’ve taken such good care of me here!); after taking selfie with me, she leaves me at immigration & security.  The flight is two hours late leaving, but I’m pleased with the first EFT training I’ve run in China.

When I visit a new country, I make a practice of learning about and collecting some of its folk and popular music.  Hearing of my interest, Mary has kindly assembled a diverse collection of Chinese music of various kinds and ethnicities. (I think she said there were 17 different ethnic groups represented.)  Also, the other night, Joyce & Morley took me to a record/DVD store after dinner and bought me a couple of collections of interesting Chinese music.  It is going to take me quite a whole work my way through all of this richness. 

One more thing: I’ve also picked up a bit of Chinese, simple words for “thank you” (“Xièxiè”, pronounced “she-she” with a falling tone on each syllable), “OK”   (“Hǎo”), and “Right” (“Duì”). Chinese characters fascinate me, and as I return home I’m taken with the idea that the standard written Chinese for “San Francisco” is not a transliteration but is instead the native Chinese name for San Francisco from the 19^th century:

旧金山 , in Mandarin transliterated back into the roman alphabet as “Jiù Jīn Shān”

This is not a transliteration but instead means Old (“旧”) + Gold (“金”) + Mountain (“山”), a reference to the California gold rush, which started in 1849. (I think of the archeological remains of the old Chinese dam below my brother Conal's place in Murray Creek up in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, imagine Chinese workers trying to extract the last of the gold from the valley.  I hope they found some...)

As the plane crosses the wide Pacific Ocean, I review all this richness in my mind.  A word from last Sunday’s sermon surfaces: It is the Greek perissos, meaning “abundance or plenty” (from 2 Corinthians 9:8).  Earlier in the week I asked Kenneth about the etymology of the word, puzzling to me because of its similarity to per- cognate with English fear.  He laughed, reminding me that that is Latin, not Greek.  Instead, per- is a prefix that means “around or at the edge of” (cf. “peripheral”).  Issos, he said is the Greek verb “to be”; hence, “overflowing being”: perissos, abundance.  That pretty much describes my week in Shanghai.

Jeremy Safran: April 23, 1952 – May 7, 2018

We are all more deeply connected to each other than we can ever know, and sometimes it takes a tragedy to remind that this is so.  All of my networks have been buzzing this week with the news of Jeremy Safran’s brutal and senseless murder last Monday.  Even if you’ve never heard of Jeremy or haven’t read anything of his, if you are a psychotherapist or counsellor today, the chances are very good that he has influenced your practice.

His was a maverick spirit, wandering restlessly between most of the major approaches to psychotherapy, always open to new things. He started in the humanistic-experiential therapy tradition, where he first studied with Les Greenberg and help lay the theoretical ground work for emotion-focused therapy.  After that, with Zindel Segal, he was responsible for broadening and softening CBT, by adding an interpersonal emphasis.

Although I’d known him since the early 1980’s, mu closest interactions with Jeremy were in the 1990’s, when we both were running American clinical psychology doctoral programs.  We were both part of a rump faction of DCTs (Directors of Clinical Training) who tried to resist the rising tide of CBT in American clinical psychology in what felt like a dark time, as CBT advocates attempted to impose this approach as the dominant approach in our courses.  It was good to have an ally and we had lots of interesting talks.

In my opinion, his most important work was with Chris Muran, with whom he initiated a major continuing line of research and practice on therapeutic rupture and repair.  If the phrase “alliance rupture” is in your working vocabulary, there you will find Jeremy in your work as a counsellor or psychotherapist.  Finally, I think, he found a home, or rather several homes, in psychoanalysis and Buddhism, and the dialogue between them.

If you want to learn more about Jeremy Safran and his many contributions, you can go to his website:

http://www.jeremysafran.com/ 

Rest in peace, Jeremy, you are part of us, and live on in us.  We won’t forget you.

In Memorium: Gladys Stands at the Crossroads

Note: Gladys Pearson, my mother-in-law, died unexpectedly a month ago, on 29 December 2017.  She had lived a long and exemplary life, and was 87 when she passed.  A year ago, Diane and I moved to Pleasanton, California, to help take care of her during even-numbered months.  In spite of her gradually increasing frailty, we had settled in for the long haul with the hope of supporting her for several years or longer.  Her death leaves us with an existential vacuum that I think will take us quite some time to work our way through.  For now, we have decided to make no decisions for the next 6 to 8 months while we work with Diane’s siblings to settle Gladys’ affairs. 

I’ve known Gladys for roughly 45 years, and for the past five years since my own mother’s death, she has been like a second mother to me, and more so since we’ve been living near her in Pleasanton.  She was completely different from my mom in many ways, but over the many years I’ve known her, I’ve become quite fond of her and to really appreciate her... 

I wrote the poem below in her memory to try to capture some of what I’d come to know and love about her.  I started from verses 8:1-3 from the biblical book of Proverbs, one of the readings for her memorial service:

Does not wisdom call, and does not understanding raise her voice?

On the heights, beside the way, at the crossroads she takes her stand;

Beside the gates in front of the town, at the entrance of the portals she cries out.

(New Revised Standard Version)

Last Sunday, at church in St Mary’s in Glasgow, the first two hymns we sang were both contemporary John Bell pieces. (John Bell is a member of our congregation and often sits about six rows back from us in church.)  I asked myself what it was that I find so distinctive and appealing about his hymns. I noticed first his use of language: There were almost no long, latinate words in either hymn; instead, he used short, Germanic words, which gives his writing a more direct, earthy quality.  In addition, as is common for him, he used lots of alliteration.

Well, I thought, Gladys was a down-to-earth, plain-spoken person; let me try to write a poem for her in the style of John Bell, and see comes of it. The result is the following poem.  She wasn’t too fond of my recent rewriting of the Lord’s Prayer, which I posted here late last year.  I hope that she would have been pleased by this attempt to honor her, and not too embarrassed. I wish that I’d been able to read it to her when she was still alive. 

Gladys Stands at the Crossroads

(Gladys Pearson, 19 August 1930 – 29 December 2017)

Gladys stands at the crossroads,

Where four roads meet.

She does not cry out, that is not her way;

Instead she waits and watches with us.

Far behind her is the farm, the smell of ash,

The long line of all that is past in her long life,

Those she’s known, loved, protected,

Present and departed.

The road to her left leads to love:

Family and friends, work and church,

Taking in the children of many lands,

Making them family.

She knows this way well,

She’s walked it all her life...

This is the way of the heart.

The road to her right leads to courage:

To do and say what is right,

To face loss, to tend the sick,

To defend the weak and those who’ve gone astray,

To seek truth and grasp understanding...

This is the way of the mind.

The road before her is dark, obscure,

Full of unknowing, a tangled bramble:

Through this there is no clear path,

She must weigh the different ways,

With prayerful thought and care.

Love and courage are helpful there,

But wisdom is what she needs and has...

This is the way of the soul.

We watch her go along that forward way

Into the mist. She has left

A small candle flickering in our hearts,

But it does not go out.

We too stand at the crossroads,

Or at the city gates, or even in a high place,

And perhaps we do cry out, for her.

But she is still there, the candle still burns:

We carry her courage, we live her love,

we walk her wisdom.

                                                            -Robert Elliott, 27 January 2018 

The Adaptive Functions of Nonadaptive Emotion Responses

Entry for 7 Dec 2017: FEAR Conference on Brain, Behaviour and Society in Aarhus

Sandwiched between my November Scottish work period and my December California work-and-holiday-period, I’ve just been to a fascinating and challenging two-day conference hosted by the University of Aarhus Institute for Advanced Studies (AIAS).  I found this conference fascinating because it was by the far the most multidisciplinary scientific meeting I’ve ever been to.  I also found it challenging, for exactly the same reason:  The scientific disciplines featured ranged from cellular biology and neurophysiology on one end of the spectrum, to political science and even history and theology at the other extreme, with many gradations in between.  Along this spectrum, I would have to put myself somewhere in the middle.  What all these folks had in common was an interest in understanding fear and anxiety at multiple levels and from different angles.

I’m pretty sure that the work that I’m going to find most useful going forward is that of the largest group of folks in the middle of that continuum: A collection of experimental field biologists/ethologists/neuroscientists, who are essentially doing animal psychology on animals ranging from racoons to South African birds to snails.  These folks, most notably Liana Zanette, Mike Clinchy, Dan Blumstein, and Tom Flower, do naturalistic field research on predator-prey interactions in wild animals, which is a natural place to study fear.  They use a range of relatively new methods such as camera traps (think motion-sensitive or sound-activated CCTV for spying on animals), battery-powered portable speakers (for scaring animals with the vocalisations of predators), and robotic pseudo-predators.  Related to them are more lab-based neuroscientists like Ken Lukowiak and Cornelius Gross, who use new, elegant technologies such as optogenetics to turn particular sets of brain neurons on and off at will, in order to study their behavioural effects and to trace neural pathways.

I found this work, in itself, to be fascinating, and because I read Science News regularly, I felt I was able to follow it pretty well. It also helped in conversations over meals to be able occasionally to ask for translation of the more obscure jargon terms.  So on first approach I loved being drawn into the world of field biology/ethology, which deeply resonated with the young boy I had once been, fascinated by strange animals and the adventure of field work.

However, this work is actually important for Emotion Focused Therapy and our understanding of how human emotion processes function and can go awry, even when they are doing exactly what they are evolved to do. Over the two days, I was able to see many useful connections. This group has identified persuasive analogues for several important clinical/EFT phenomena: 

First, Liana Zanette & Mike Clinchy, from the University of Western Ontario (now rebranded as Western University), have developed an analog for PTSD by subjecting prey animals (eg, chickadees, racoons) to predator stress, created by intermittently playing predator sounds in the immediate vicinity of birds or smaller mammal further down the food chain.  Played repeatedly and predictably over time, this creates chronic stress in the animals, including behaviours that resemble many specific symptoms of PTSD, such as hypervigilance, exaggerated startle response and loss of appetite. Most strikingly, they have shown that these stressed animals have higher mortality rates and fewer offspring; even more strikingly, this increased mortality and lowered reproductive success is passed on their offspring, and also affects species below them in the food chain. 

Yesterday before I left to catch my bus back to Billund Airport, I had one more relatively brief visit with Liana and Mike at breakfast.  They wanted to make sure I got their main message: Trauma-induced chronic fear/anxiety -- which EFT refers to as Primary Maladaptive Fear/Anxiety – is from an evolutionary point of view, not maladaptive but fundamentally adaptive:  By motivating constant vigilance, this reaction to stressful or even traumatic predator exposure increases the probability of not being killed by those predators.  They argued that falling victim to a predator instantly reduces the individual’s chances of survival to zero.  Our emotion system evolved the ability to overgeneralise from single traumatic events because this has survival value, especially in predator-rich environments, which until recently were quite common. As Mike said this morning, this tendency purchases maintenance of life at the cost of quality of life.  Mike and Liana wanted to know if I had heard anything in these two days that was going to affect how I work with clients.  Of course, it’s hard to know exactly with new ideas, but I told them I thought it might.

One thing for sure, however, is that it’s going change how I talk and write about emotion response types: From an EFT point of view, we assume that by and large Primary Adaptive ERs are more adaptive than the others, and that the broad goal of therapy, both within and across sessions, is to help clients reduce Primary Maladaptive, Secondary Reactive, and Instrumental ERs while at the same time increasing Primary Adaptive ERS.  However, it’s now clear to me that all four types of emotion response distinguished in EFT theory evolved because they had useful functions and survival value, especially in social units or groups:

• Primary Adaptive Emotion Response (ER): This is what the emotion evolved for in the first place, eg, danger => fear => flee/freeze.  This is our first, natural and specific emotional response to a particular situation.  Note that in a given situation, our first, most natural response to a situation does not always provide the best way to get our needs met; eg, violation in the form of abuse by a powerful/unsympathetic other => anger => increased danger of further/worse harm.

• Primary Maladaptive ER: Predisposes us to develop quite general, long-lasting learning from single traumatic episodes, “because I can’t afford to wait for a second chance”; increases sensitivity/strength of response to danger, but also anticipation of possible danger => anxiety => pause/orient/prepare.  In fact, “generalised primary emotion response” might be a more accurate term for this kind of emotion response.

• Secondary Reactive ER: Gives us the ability to respond in complex ways (such as inhibition/interruption) to our emotion responses; eg, violation => anger => fear of possible damage to relationships => partial inhibition of anger allowing time to develop more nuanced useful responses

• Instrumental Emotion Display: Gives us the ability to influence others, behave appropriately, or preserve relationships even when we are not feeling the relevant emotion; eg, danger from manageable adversary (eg, mountain lion or bully) => instrumental anger display to intimidate.  Drongo bird (South Africa) example (from Tom Flower): Opportunity to steal food => give danger alarm cry to scare or distract the other.  This works bests where the instrumental emotion display is the expected response or, failing that, where the other lacks the ability to detect the true emotion, or can’t afford to get it wrong.

The implication of this analysis is that the judgement of adaptiveness requires more than just identifying the type of emotion response; some further consideration of two kinds of context is required:  First, the emotional context of our key needs in the situation; second, the interpersonal context of others’ likely responses to our emotion responses.  Taking these further factors into consideration requires a fairly high level of emotional intelligence, both awareness of the range of our important emotions in the situation and reasonably accurate simulation of others’ likely reactions to our emotion responses.

This is why in EFT we don’t talk about maladaptive emotions (except when we are speaking carelessly), but only about maladaptive emotion responses:  This emotion response was useful originally, in the presence of danger, but isn’t here and now, in this particular situation.  Liana and Mike’s research suggests that the tendency to form overgeneralised, automatic fear responses is deeply embedded in us in an evolutionary sense, and research by others (such as Cornelius Gross) indicates that it is very likely to be mediated by the limbic system (especially the amygdala and the hippocampus).

To conclude, when a client with PTSD presents with a stuck feeling of constant fear of being revictimised that is causing them a lot of emotional pain and ruining their ability to get on with important life projects (as in the video I showed at the conference), it is clearly not true that their fear has always been maladaptive. It’s also the case that their continuing hypervigilance and strong response might very well be adaptive in some situations in their current life, more adaptive than a more relaxed view. Thus, it is only in particular situations, in which the person finds themselves unreasonably afraid when they and others’ carefully assess that this is not the case, that we would be justified in concluding that the person’s emotion response of fear is maladaptive, because it doesn’t fit the current situation. However, the fact that they have this response is completely natural, understandable and in the broad evolutionary sense adaptive. 

Ten Petitions: A Prayer

1. Dear Lady of the Universe,

You hold all things in your hands,

All peoples, times and places;

Help me recognise you 

In all your many names and many faces.

2. Help me to know that this is what you want for us:

To meet you in each other,

Here and now, and in the future,

With wisdom, courage and love.

3. And help me find each day

Just what it is that will sustain me;

And enlarge my spirit

And the spirits of those around me.

4. Please understand and contain my limitations,

Just as you help me to understand 

And contain the limitations of others.

5. Help me to listen to and accept all the parts of myself,

However wounded, lost or scared,

Seeking to heal my own and others’ injuries,

Transcending my limitations and theirs.

6. In the end, help me to know 

And truly love myself and those I meet,

Knowing us all to be little bits of consciousness 

Floating on the sea of time.

7. Because I am such a little bit of consciousness,

It’s all too easy for me to feel 

That I’ve come from from nothing 

And will soon disappear;

Therefore help me to accept 

That I can’t really know 

Where I came from or where I go.

8. Also, therefore, help me always know

Each moment, day and year as a gift to me,

And to appreciate how everything I have and am

Comes from you and those who came before me.

9. And help me also see how everything I have and am

I am already passing on to those around me

And those who will come after me.

10. Finally, help me know all this as so,

Each day, and ever here thereafter.

 

 

Notes: This poem is a very loose and highly personal paraphrase of the Lord's Prayer, drawing on previous pieces I've written.  I wrote it in the middle of two sleepless nights in Singapore while I was suffering from the cumulative effects of 15 hours of jet lag over 10 days. The views expressed here are not necessarily those of any particular religious denomination or system of theology. The stanza numbers enumerating the petitions are not to be read aloud but are meant to echo verse numbers in spiritual texts.

A (Hopefully) Wise Old Therapist on On Beginning Professional Practice

Our new MSc in Counselling began a couple of weeks ago, the culmination of a couple years of planning.  So far the course is going really well, with an enthusiastic group of students and energetic, talented new tutor team. However, I've only had bits and pieces of time with them because of travel and being ill last week.  This was their third week, and I'm away in California again, but they are on my mind.

A couple of days ago I got a draft of the input for the session on first sessions, which are first sessions both for their clients and also for them as counsellors.  Here is what I wrote back to my colleague:

Thanks for this. I'm just thinking about what we want to say to them about their psychological contact with the client in all of this and their own anxiety with all the details.  Can we help them balance the need to cover the details with the importance of establishing psychological contact with the client.  As Gendlin used to say: "No contract without contact".  But that's basically impossible for them at this stage, because they haven't mastered the details yet and they are understandably highly anxious. 

As a wise old therapist, I am wanting two things for them somewhere in this process of beginning:  First, that they take a moment right before the session to make some space for themselves to say hello to their anxious parts; second, that they somehow write into their schedule of all the first session things to cover a couple of moments for making genuine contact with their client: Maybe once near the beginning of the session: a short state check and a bit of empathy for the client (and themselves); then maybe later on in the session or at the end, another similar moment. It's like remembering to stop and appreciate the flowers alongside a busy road. Sometimes, it's important to add these little moments of meeting to the big long to-do list that is our only hope of not forgetting something important. 

Cancelled: Emotion-Focused Therapy: Masterclasses

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CANCELLED: Mondays, 9:30-17.00, 13 Nov 2017 – 14 May 2018

University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

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Facilitated by Professor Robert Elliott & Lorna Carrick

The Emotion-Focused Therapy Masterclass Series is open to counsellors and psychotherapists (Diploma level or above) who have completed Level Two or Level Three training in EFT.  If it’s been a while since you did EFT training, it can serve as a refresher course and enable you to catch up on more recent developments in EFT theory, practice and training.

Each day will feature a mix of EFT Practice Check-in (mini supervisions), brief presentations of specialist material on EFT; video or live demonstrations; in-depth supervision of client work; small group skill practice; and group processing. Emphasis will be on putting EFT into practice and examining blocks to effective practice.  Participants are expected to bring client case material to each session, in the form of either session recordings or process notes.  Robert and/or Lorna will facilitate each session.

Sessions can be signed up for either individually or as a four-day package.  All four masterclasses will be day-long Monday sessions, from November 2017 to May 2018, and held in the main city centre campus of the University of Strathclyde. This course allows participants the opportunity to work toward the expert-supervision-of-own-work criterion for EFT-Individual Certification Level A (Completion of Training, 5 hrs) or Level B (Completion of Supervision, 15 hrs) and can also be taken in place of EFT Level 3.

	Topics
13 Nov 2017	EFT Case formulation:  Case formulation is a rapidly developing topic within EFT. This session will focus on  formulation of key emotion processes and tasks for your clients featuring both Five-Dimensional and 14-Step models.  Participants are required to bring client material for case formulation work.
29 Jan 2018	EFT for Trauma:  Research indicates that EFT is a highly effective treatment for post-trauma difficulties, including both single episode traumas and complex trauma.  In this session, an overview of EFT trauma theory and the application of EFT to trauma is provided, emphasising Narrative Retelling, emotional regulation work and Meaning Protest.  The session will feature video or live demonstration, supervision of client work, and small group skill practice.  Bring in material from your trauma clients.
12 March 2018	EFT for Psychological Contact Difficulties:  A recent development for EFT is the incorporation of psychological contact work into EFT, opening up the possibility of using EFT for clients with psychotic, dissociative or autistic processes.  We will focus on the psychological contact task, including videos or live demonstration, supervision of client and small group skill practice.  Bring material from your clients who may dip in and out of psychological contact during sessions; if you don’t work with such clients, bring in material on clients who may be hard to reach in other ways, such as externalising process, silence or emotion dysregulation.
14 May 2018	EFT for Anxiety: There is now an integrated EFT for working with social anxiety and other forms of anxiety difficulty.  In this session I will provide an overview of anxiety difficulties, a review of different person-centred-experiential theories of anxiety difficulties, and the EFT approach to working with anxiety, featuring videos or live demonstration, supervision of client work, and small group skill practice, emphasising anxiety split work and self-soothing.  Bring in material from your anxious clients.

·      Enrolment is set for a minimum of 10 and a maximum of 15.  The balance between supervision and skill practice will depend of number of participants.

·      Course fee: Regular price: Three weeks before each session: Sign up for individual sessions at £95 each or get a discount by registering for the whole series at £350 by 15 Oct 2017.  Late registration (less than 3 weeks before each session): £120.

·      The course could be taken for continuing professional education credit.

Contact: claire.mcconnell@strath.ac.uk or 0141 444 8417 for further information on this training, the facilitators, ways of applying for this course or other APT events