Sneak Preview: Slowing the Process Down: Excerpt from Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy (second edition), in preparation

My colleagues Jeanne Watson, Rhonda Goldman, Les Greenberg and I are well along in our work on the second edition of our book Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy.  We're certainly more than halfway there and hope to have the draft of the whole thing to the editor by the beginning of May.  I recently finished the draft of the Chapter 9, which mostly deals with Focusing. In the process to a piece of training I did recently, I got inspired to write the following text for the early part of the chapter.  Although it's not the final version, I thought it might be fun and useful to share this passage here, because I hadn't seen this written up elsewhere in the EFT literature. As my favorite vloggers like to say, if you feel like, please fell free to jump into the comments section to let me know what you think about this:

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Facilitating the emotional experiencing tasks in this chapter requires therapists to help their clients slow their pace down in sessions. As Gendlin (1981), Cornell (1996) and others have pointed out, emotions need time to emerge. If the client is talking fast, this generally means that their current emotion processing mode is externalizing or purely conceptual (see Chapter 5). In these modes, clients typically stay stuck in secondary reactive emotions, skimming over the surface of their feelings. This leads in turn to the client not progressing into deeper emotions, making for slow therapeutic progress at best. On the other hand, helping the client slow their pace can allow more emotions to emerge, especially deeper, more primary emotions. The greater emotional depth will enable therapy to progress more quickly. Thus, in EFT, we like to say: Fast is slow, and slow is fast!

However, EFT is in general a fast, busy therapy, with many different processes for the therapist to juggle: many things therapists might want to remember, and a many different kinds of work that therapists can help clients with. It’s easy for EFT therapists to feel pressured and rushed by all of this. Probably the most important gift that Focusing has to give EFT therapists is the value of slowing down. This slower pace enables EFT therapists to take their client’s emotional experiences a bit at time, making sure that they understand each aspect of these experiences. More importantly, slowing down helps clients better access to their emotions, especially the deeper, more painful ones.

How can EFT therapists help slow their clients’ pace down? The key to this turns out to be for therapists slow their own pace down when they are with clients (and maybe at other times also). Response matching is a well-established phenomenon in therapy (Harper et al., 1978) and includes reaction time latency (how long before client or therapist start speaking), interruption and duration of utterance. Thus, therapists tend to match their clients’ pace (Rocco et al., 2018), and clients tend to match their therapists’ reaction time latency and interruptions (Harper et al., 1978). Here are some suggestions to help therapists slow their process down:

1. Consider what your natural pace is: Do I generally tend to feel time-pressured or in a hurry?

2. Start noticing your pace in sessions, especially when you feel anxious or in a hurry; or listen to recordings of your practice.

3. Give yourself time before each session to slow yourself down and to make space for your client.

4. Leave the book/model/shoulds/supervisor outside the door and focus to begin with on your empathy.

5. Disclose to your client that you are trying to slow your pace down.

6. If you or you client appear to racing, suggest that both of you take a minute to take a breath and slow down.

7. Realize that this might be difficult for your client and you, and therefore might take concerted or repeated effort.

8. Develop a focusing or mindfulness practice.