Reflections on the 2008 EFT Level 1 Training

Entry for 10 July 2008:

Trying New things. We experimented a bit with this year’s Level 1 EFT training: After helping Les with the Level 1 in Galway two months ago, I wanted to try increasing the amount of chair work, moving it up by a day from last year. Also I want to see what it would feel like to do Systematic Evocative Unfolding after chair work. Another new practice was having the participants self organize into small groups to work together most of the week. I want to see if this will help the students who go on to EFT-2 to get into chair work more effectively.

In the event it did feel like a good idea to spend more time on chairwork, adding energy and depth, and the small groups appeared to work out generally. However, Unfolding got slighted to a certain extent on the last day. Time will tell whether the changes will translate into helping EFT-2 participants more readily “get over the hump” and into more and better Two chair and Empty chair work.

Next time I think it may be a good idea to put Unfolding back in before Two Chairwork. Probably it will make sense to run chairwork from Day 2 afternoon through Day 4 morning.

Task Tracking Questions. An interesting development was the identification and labelling of another important kind of PE-EFT therapist response, the Task Tracking Question (TTQ), for example, “Where are you with your sense of being pulled in two directions?” (for Two Chair dialogue for conflict splits) or, “Where are you with the thing that happened last week? Does it still feel puzzling to you?” (for Unfolding). TTQs are a type of State Check, e.g., “We need to stop in a couple of minutes. Where are you now?” Given that tasks are driven by salient and highly specific client states of distress, TTQs assess whether a task as task is still live for the client, and how far the client has progressed through the tasks, by asking about the distressing experience from which the task derives. They are helpful particularly because therapists often cannot tell these things, which means that they will be less able to facilitate client task resolution efforts, and may even impede their progress.

In the end, Jeanne and I really enjoyed working with this group of participants, who were eager to learn, took the training seriously, and seem less concerned about deviating from nondirectivity than previous groups had. In general, it feels like things are moving forward for PE-EFT training in Scotland. Jeanne and I have already scheduled the next EFT-1 training, for 13-16 July 2009.