Summary: I
wrote this brief talk for the launch event for the Greek translation of my
book, Emotion-Focused Counselling in Action, co-authored with Les Greenberg and published by Sage in 2021. It was translated by Agathi
Lakioti and Christina Michael and published this month in Athens by Topos Publications. In this presentation I first describe how I
became an EFT therapist before there was any such thing as EFT, including its
appeal to me and my personal journey in the development of EFT while developing
as a therapist at the same time. Then, I briefly turn to my recent interest in
how people learn EFT and what I have learned about how we can do a better job
helping people learn it. Throughout, I hope share my excitement about EFT and
its importance as an key psychotherapy in the 21 century. For more information, go to: https://www.eft.cy/greek-translation-of-the-emotion-focused-counselling-in-action/
Ultimately, I became an
EFT therapist because of my deep curiosity about other people’s experience, a
curiosity stimulated by my father’s emotional guardedness, my loneliness and
insecure attachment style, and my youthful desire to write fiction. In addition, my Mother and Grandmother were
avid followers of Jungian psychology, and so psychology was a key interest in
my family’s home when I was growing up.
When I was 17, at the suggestion of my creative writing teacher, I read
Karen Horney’s Our Inner Conflicts
(1945) and had what can only be described as a conversion experience: I decided
I wanted to be a psychotherapist, so I could understand and help people.
However, my road to EFT
had many sources, as well as several twists and turns. As an undergraduate at the University of
California at Santa Cruz in the late 1960’s I was exposed to a wide range of humanistic
approaches to psychology, studying with Bert Kaplan, Frank Barron, and most
importantly, Ted Sarbin. I read Norman
O. Brown (who was also at Santa Cruz), Søren Kierkegaard, William James, Arthur
Koestler, Joseph Campbell, and Jerome Frank.
I wrote a senior thesis on metaphors for death and rebirth in radical
personal change processes.
My interest in
humanistic-experiential approaches to psychotherapy was further fed during my
graduate studies at UCLA, where I received training in Client-Centered therapy
from Jerry Goodman, a student of Carl Rogers.
Goodman also encouraged my interest in therapy process research, and I
began a career-long exploration of clients’ experiences during therapy
sessions. At the same time, during my
graduate training I was also studied and practiced systemic and contemporary psychodynamic
approaches.
Then, in 1977, I heard
Laura Rice and Les Greenberg present their work on Evocative Unfolding and Two
Chair work at a conference at a conference.
It was an electrifying experience.
I immediately began incorporating experiential tasks into my work as a
therapist, later adding Gendlin’s Experiential Focusing method, along with
Empty Chair work. Thus, by the time I
completed my Ph.D., I was an eclectic therapist who conceptualized clients in
psychodynamic terms and preferred a combination of psychodynamic interpretation
and experiential tasks. During my early
years at the University of Toledo, in the US state of Ohio, I also continued
studying client in-session experiences and began developing qualitative
research methods to represent these more sensitively.
In 1985, while on a
sabbatical year in England, I was giving a conference workshop on qualitative
therapy research when a psychodynamically-oriented audience member confronted
me with a contradiction: He noted that in
therapy I interpreted my clients, but in my research I attempted to stay as
close as possible to the client’s reported experience. Why didn’t I interpret my client’s data
psychodynamically? The very thought
scandalized me, and this intervention had the opposite effect to that intended
by the questioner: I realized that
understanding the client’s internal experiences was a more fundamental value
for me than the thrill of coming up with clever interpretations for my clients. I felt that I would be effective as a
therapist (and researcher) if I were more deeply and consistently grounded in a
particular therapeutic tradition and theoretical approach that centered itself
in the client’s immediate, lived experience.
Upon on my return from
England in 1985, I began working with Laura Rice and Les Greenberg to develop
the marker-guided integration of Client-Centered and Gestalt treatments that eventually
became Emotion-Focused Therapy. First,
however, Laura Rice helped me cure myself of my habit of interpreting my
clients: She pointed out that no matter how clever my interpretations were, the
insights developed by my clients were never quite what I had hypothesized;
instead, my clients’ eventual self-understandings always made more sense and
fit their idiosyncratic experiences better than what I had originally
offered. Why not get out of my clients’
way and let them go ahead and develop their own self-understandings?
My previous work with
the Unfolding and Two Chair work tasks had been self-taught; I now began a
series of regular visits to Toronto to receive proper supervision and training
on these kinds of work, as well as to develop the EFT model with Laura and
Les. As we developed it, I took it back
to Toledo to apply in the Toledo Experiential Therapy of Depression Project,
the first study of EFT with a clinically-distressed client population. Although
I still had much to learn, for the first time in my practice as a therapist, I
felt grounded and like myself. EFT’s mix of empathy, active work, and creative
practice, fit me perfectly. Les, Laura
and I decided to write a book about the therapy model that was emerging, published
in 1993 as Facilitating Emotional Change. At first, I felt very much like a junior
partner, sometimes mediating between Laura’s more conservative Client-Centered
approach and Les’s more radical Gestalt approach. They had the theory and the experience, but I
was doing the depression study, had spent a long time doing research on
client’s in-session experiences, and was good at organizing and clarifying
ideas. Thus, as we progressed, I began
to make contributions to the structure of the therapy, developing the treatment
principles, formulating the array of therapist responses, bringing in Focusing
as a therapeutic task, and applying a standard six-step structure for all EFT
tasks. The book was completed during a sabbatical year at York University in
1992-93, during which I worked intensively with Laura and Les, and went through
their therapist training process.
After that, I continued
regular visits to Toronto to learn and share new developments. Every time I went, I learned something new. Having finished the depression study, my
students and I developed and did research on a EFT for Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder. Problems that my therapists
had learning EFT for that study led me to examine the training process to see
what worked and how it could be improved.
These learnings were incorporated into my book Learning
Emotion-Focused Therapy.
In 2006, I moved to the
Scotland, where I taught person-centered counselling/psychotherapy for more
than 15 years. Working in this setting helped me deepen my interest in empathy
and relational processes. With colleagues, I developed an adaptation of EFT for
working with social anxiety, a complex client presentation that helped me
further develop my EFT skills and thinking.
Up to this point,
almost all my work as a trainer had been in the context of training small
numbers of graduate students in clinical psychology. However, once relocated in
Scotland, I discovered that there was a great deal of interest in EFT on the
part of practicing person-centered counsellor/psychotherapists. At that point I
began offering regular EFT training workshops, building in part of the training
curricula that Les Greenberg had been developing. In addition, the strongly
intellectual, didactic training methods favored by clinical psychologists were
not a good fit for UK-based counsellors and counselling psychologists, who
learned better using more experiential methods. Theory and didactic
presentation were still important but needed to be slimmed down, focused and
very clear. Fortunately, I enjoy a good challenge, and I had fun developing and
constantly adapting training materials, including lectures and exercises.
One thing that has clearly
emerged from my work as an EFT trainer is a sense of what is required of folks
in order to learn EFT. In the book I
call this the “pre-flight checklist”; here is a very abbreviated, bullet-point
version of it:
(1) Understand and draw
on EFC emotion theory.
(2) Adopt a
person-centred but process-guiding relational stance.
(3) Develop an active,
exploratory way of responding to clients, characterized by friendly curiosity.
(4) Learn to pick up on
client markers in order to offer clients opportunities for productive
therapeutic work.
(5) Realise that the therapy
is not about you; instead, focus on your clients’ personal agency.
(6) Build up your
personal resilience and courage for touching into and staying with your own and
others’ intense and painful emotions.
Today, I continue to
learn from my clients (who have always been my main teachers of therapy), and from
my students and supervisees. The things
I enjoy most about EFT are the opportunities it provides for getting inside
another human being’s experience; the combination of relational and
task-focused elements; and the excitement of helping to develop something
new. The difficulties I still occasionally
run into as a EFT therapist are feeling that it’s up to me to make something
happen; getting caught up in clients’ hopelessness; dealing with clients who
have great difficulty accessing their internal experience; and my tendency to
at first make things too complicated. These things constantly drive me to try
to make EFT clearer and easier to understand while still honoring the
complexity and richness of people’s experiences. I also believe that learning
and practicing EFT is and should be exciting and fun.
I have tried to put all
the things into this book, and to communicate them to readers. I hope that you will experience this excitement
and fun in reading it.
