Nativity: A Poem for Christmas

 [Note: At St. John the Baptist Episcopal Church in Lodi, for the fourth Sunday of Advent, we were asked to create a nativity scene (also known as a creche).  My nativity scene came out as a poem, drawing on experiences we had 10 years ago when we made pilgrimage to the Holy Land.] 

Nativity, native, natal, nature, natural, nascence.

There is so much to this story we simply do not know.

We know at least that there was a birth.

 

1. Journey

 

Teen-aged girl and thoughtful craftsman,

Holy couple, travelling by foot

Through poky province of Roman Empire.

 

Raised in country honey-combed

With limestone grottos, cave dwellers

From small town in hill country of Galilee.

 

Walked ninety miles until they reached Bethlehem,

Fifteen thousand paces per day

(About distance from Lodi to Santa Cruz).

 

Bethlehem, that’s where they ended up:

Ancient, fertile place of bread,

Home of ancestors, back to David and beyond.

 

2 Manger

 

As a destination, Bethlehem has its disadvantages.

No vacancies: Instead, they are stuck with the animals,

Staying in cave behind house.

 

We don’t know how the labor went,

But when baby came they improvised,

Like new parents must do:

 

Manger, feeding trough for farm animals.

Clean enough: Off the damp cave floor

Away from rodents and rot.

 

3 Star

 

We don’t know how long they stayed there underground

Or where they were when the star found them,

I like to imagine: supernova out of Andromeda.

 

Luke says local sheep herders, working nightshift,

Keeping their flocks safe, saw it first, heard angelsong,

Came down from hills to learn what it announced.

 

Music of cosmos in their ears, astronomers,

Ancient and modern, still search for it.

They give gifts they have, still seek its meaning.

 

                             -Robert Elliott, Lodi, December 2025

Mary's Cave, Nazareth

 

Dear Me

[Flash poem in response to prompt: Letter to Self, 26 April 2025:] 

Dear me!

What are you doing back here again,

After 50-plus years?

Do you think you can go back in time?

Is there something unfinished

From your last time here,

Something that needs fixing,

After such a life in between?

 

Is it that you fear

You might have become,

A dreary me?  A weary me,

Who longs to return

To their source?

Who hopes for a renewal, a restoration

Of the lost time: that lost self?

 

But don’t you know:

You have always been enough,

Then, so many years ago, 

At this college in the redwoods,

And, yes, even now.

 

-Robert Elliott

Crown College, UC Santa Cruz, class of 1972

 

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:

========

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.

How Much EFT Training do I Need to Begin Using EFT Methods in My Practice?

People sometimes ask me about what kinds of Emotion-Focused Therapy training are offered at the University of Strathclyde and what they do can with different levels of EFT training.   This is of course a matter of degree:

(1) EFT level 1 (4 days) provides an overview of EFT theory and practice and an introduction to the key therapeutic tasks.  Most people find this enough to begin experimenting with EFT tasks, although folks without previous systematic empathy training are more likely to find this frustrating.  At Strathclyde the training group usually consists of 20-30 participants.

(2) Advanced Empathic Attunement (3 days) is a new training now required for folks who want to go on to EFT level 2 and who don't have a previous training in a Person-Centered or other humanistic psychotherapy or counselling.  This provides lots of skill practice in the EFT empathy micro-skills that underlie the more complex EFT tasks, which we hope will mean that they will be much more likely to be successful in continuing to develop proficiency and not get stuck or discouraged. (n = 15 - 30 participants)

(3) EFT level 2 (3 X 2 = 6 days) provides a comprehensive training in the wide range of EFT tasks, and is focused on examining blocks to practice and putting EFT into practice with a wide range of client populations.  It's delivered in 3 X 2 day workshops, which are spaced over the course of an academic year Oct/Nov to May, with lots of skill practice. This completes the basic workshop training in EFT; with the addition of 5 hours of EFT supervision of own practice in either individual or group format it meets criteria for EFT Level A recognition: Completion of Basic EFT Training. (n = 15 - 30 participants)

(4) EFT level 3 consists of 6-7 X 1-day group supervision sessions over the course of a year and is focused on developing proficiency in EFT.  This can be repeated and is where participants really begin to develop proficiency in EFT.  (n = 12 participants)

(5) EFT individual supervision: 16 hours of individual or group EFT supervision of own practice by an approved EFT supervisor is required for Level B recognition: Completion of EFT Supervised Practice.

Interview on working with Anxiety

Here is a link to a video of me talking about anxiety and in particular Emotion-Focused Therapy concepts of anxiety and how to work with it: http://bcove.me/txhncnr6 .

Emotion-Focused Psychotherapy 2016 Level 1 Training, University of Strathclyde 30 Aug - 2 September 2016

 

Emotion-Focused Psychotherapy

2016 Level 1 Training

Tuesday 30 August – Friday 2 September 2016, 

09.30 – 17.00

Venue:  University of Strathclyde, Glasgow

Facilitated by Robert Elliott and Lorna Carrick

Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) is a humanistic, evidence-based form of psychotherapy/counselling that integrates person-centred and gestalt therapies, with particular relevance to working with depression, trauma, and anxiety difficulties. It has gained international recognition through the work of Les Greenberg, Laura Rice, Robert Elliott, Jeanne Watson, Rhonda Goldman, Sandra Paivio, Antonio Pascual-Leone and others.  The Counselling Unit at the University of Strathclyde is again pleased to offer Level One professional training in this approach to qualified counsellors and psychotherapists (Postgraduate Diploma/MSc Level or above).

Now in its eleventh year at the University of Strathclyde, this successful, four-day Level One EFT training programme will provide participants with a grounding in the theory and skills required to work more effectively with emotion in psychotherapy. Participants will receive in-depth skills training through a combination of brief lectures, video demonstrations, live modelling, case discussions, and supervised role-playing practice. We begin with an overview of EFT Emotion Theory, including basic principles and the role of emotion and emotional awareness in function and dysfunction; this will be illustrated by Focusing-oriented exercises. Differential intervention based on specific process markers will be demonstrated. Videos of evidence based methods for evoking and exploring emotion schemes, and for dealing with overwhelming emotions, puzzling emotional reactions, painful self-criticism, and emotional injuries from past relationships will be presented.

Participants will be trained in moment-by-moment attunement to emotion, and the use of methods for dialoguing with aspects or configurations of self and imagined significant others in an empty chair. This training will provide therapists from person-centred, psychodynamic, cognitive-behavioural and related backgrounds an opportunity to develop their therapeutic skills and interests, and provides the first step toward certification as an EFT therapist.

• This is the only official Emotion-Focused Therapy level 1 training offered in the UK. 
• This course could be taken for continuing professional education credit.

Cost: On or before 15 July 2016: £445; after 15 July 2015: £495

In order to keep costs to a minimum, catering is not included.

Register soon via our online shop at: http://onlineshop.strath.ac.uk/

Contact: jan.bissett@strath.ac.uk or 0141-444 8415 for further information on this training, the facilitators, ways of applying for this course or other APT events

                                                                                                       

 

Where Can You Find the Supplemental Materials for the Learning Emotion Focused Theory (2004)?

When the new isEFT.org website was set up about a year ago, the supplemental materials for Elliott et al. (2004), Learning Emotion Focused Therapy were supposed to be transferred over to it; however, it has turned out not to be possible to do this so ar, due to lack of technical expertise, at least until we get a webmaster.  In the meantime, here is link to a zip file with all the supplemental materials in it: Dropbox file containing Learning Book supplemental materials

You'll need to unzip the file, which will generate a folder with all the supplemental materials in Word documents by chapter.  Not an elegant solution but hopefully it will make this material available in the meantime until we can do better.  It would be helpful is someone would let me know they have a problem with any of this.

New Developments in Emotion-Focused Therapy: A two-day Conference

10th – 11th of October 2015

 Dear EFT practitioner,

On behalf of the isEFT-board (Les Greenberg, Jeanne Watson, Rhonda Goldman and Robert Elliott) we are very pleased to invite you to the international

isEFT conference on New Developments in EFT
on the 10th and 11th of October 2015!

For the first time the isEFT-board and EFT-trainers from all over the world come together to present and discuss ongoing research projects and treatment developments in EFT.

This is a great opportunity and unique experience for you to participate!

On the next pages you will find a detailed outline of the program and more details how to register. 

 Program

New Developments in Emotion-Focused Therapy

Presentations and discussion on ongoing research projects and treatment development. Each panel will be 90 minutes in length. The general format for topics below will be brief presentations of the main points (about 5 mins, 1-2 slides), followed by a video, followed by discussion among presenters and then with the audience. Lead discussants listed below.

Saturday, 10 October: New Developments in EFT, Part 1

09:00-10:30      •     Panel: EFT for Anxiety: Jeanne Watson (moderator),
                                   Robert Elliott , Ben Shahar, Laco Timulak, Les Greenberg

10:30-10:45      •     Break

10:45-12:15      •     Panel: EFT for Depression: Robert Elliott (moderator),
                                   Joao Salgado, Carla Cunha

12:15-13:30      •     Lunch

13:30-15.00      •     Panel: Case Formulation: Rhonda Goldman (moderator);
                                   Les Greenberg, Robert Elliott, Jeanne Watson,
                                   Laco Timulak

15:00-15:15      •     Break

15:15-16:45      •     Panel: New coding systems and their implications for
                                   practice: Les Greenberg (moderator), Lars Auszra,
                                   Imke Hermann, Jeanne Watson, Micaela Jimenez,
                                   Lynne Angus

16:45-17:15      •     Plenary: Reflections on the Day: Rhonda Goldman,
                                   Robert Elliott, Les Greenberg, Jeanne Watson

Sunday, 11 October: New Developments in EFT,
Part 2

09:00-10:30      •     Panel: Narrative & Emotion: Les Greenberg (moderator),
                                   Jeanne Watson, Robert Elliott, Lynne Angus, Rhonda
                                   Goldman

10:30-10:45      •     Break

10:45-12:15      •     Panel: EFT for Couples/Families: Rhonda Goldman
                                   (moderator), Les Greenberg, Serine Warwar, Catalina
                                   Woldarsky, Joanne Dolhanty

12:15-13:30      •     Lunch

13:30-15:00      •     Panel: Recent EFT Task Analyses: Rhonda Goldman
                                   (moderator), Les Greenberg, Jason Sharbanee,
                                   Serine Warwar: Shame, Anger, Anxious Insecurity,
                                   Vulnerability, Self-Soothing

15:00-15:15      •     Break

15:15-16:15      •     Panel: Applications of EFT (10 min each): Robert Elliott
                                   (Moderator), Eunice Silva & Susana Almeida (Cancer),
                                   Anna Robinson (Asperger’s), Melissa Harte (Focusing);
                                   Nia Pryde (Sex Therapy), Les Greenberg (Supervision &
                                   Leadership)

16:15-17:15      •     Closing Plenary. Jeanne Watson, Rhonda Goldman,
                                   Robert Elliott, Les Greenberg

Registration and accommodation

To attend this conference you will only pay € 250,--* by advanced registration before 1 Sept 2015. When registering after 1 Sept 2015, we will ask an amount of € 300,-- *.

1.      To register to the conference follow this link:

https://www.apanta-ggz.nl/index.php?id=814

2.      The conference will be held at the Hotel&Conference Center NH Koningshof in Veldhoven the Netherlands. NH Koningshof is situated in Veldhoven. It can be easily reached by flying to Amsterdam Schiphol airport. The train station is situated within the airport and there are trains every 30 minutes to Eindhoven, the nearest bigger town. The train journey from Amsterdam lasts 1 hour and 15 minutes. From Eindhoven, it is a 20 minute taxi drive to Veldhoven or a 25 minute drive with public transport (bus). The hotel has two restaurants and the town of Veldhoven itself has several restaurants in the Centre. There is a bus that runs from the hotel to the town Centre.

Book your overnight accommodation using this link:

http://www.nh-hotels.nl/events/nl/evenement-details/23050/apanta_ggz.html

We hope you will be able to attend this unique event. If you know of someone with prior knowledge of EFT who would benefit from taking part, please feel free to provide them with this invitation. We are looking forward to welcome you at the international isEFT conference on the 10th  and 11th of October!

Kind regards,

Apanta-Academy, EFT-training Institute www.apanta-academy.nl

Organising committee

Juliette Becking, CEO Apanta-Group, Clinical psychologist/psychotherapist

Marianne Cairns-Baselmans and Brigitte Pelt - Administrators

Veldhoven

The Netherlands

* travel and accommodation expenses not included                                                                                     Version: 25/07/2015

Pilgrimage 5: An Emotion-Focused Therapy Interpretation of the Conflict between Israel and Palestine

--> Entry for 18-22 May 2015:

This is a continuation of my previous entry on the history of military occupation in Israel.

During the time we’ve been on pilgrimage in Israel, we’ve learned a lot about its ancient and recent history.  As part of this, I’ve reflected on my many Jewish friends and colleagues, whom I’ve known and loved over the years.  I’ve also read up on the history of the 1967 and 1973 wars here.

And I’ve been mindful of the many parallels between the history of Israel and that of the United States and the British Empire, their relationship to native/indigenous peoples, and my part in that as someone who lives within the privilege of a majority culture. For example, I’m aware of the claim (made in 2008 by the SNP) that in East Glasgow, not far from my office, the average life expectancy for men is lower than it is in Gaza (Channel 4 News, 2008). 

What I’m left with about all this is a sense of mutual tragedy and sadness.  My understanding of the psychological basis for this tragedy has several other sources:

• My work as a psychotherapist for many people with trauma histories, especially over the past 30 years of my practice as an EFT therapist;

• My work with people with social anxiety over the past 8 years;

• The study that my PhD student Robin Hinson and I did in the 1990’s on working with prejudice, which we carried using an experimental one-session EFT protocol for working with “difficult people”;

• Charles Eisenstein’s analysis of the ultimately self-defeating nature of what he calls the agenda of control in Ascent of Humanity (2007); and

• Psychotherapist Al Pesso’s analysis of the roots of terrorism in childhood exposure to narratives of injustice and cultural trauma (which I talked with him about last year in Berlin) (Pesso has developed a form of Empty Chair/Self-Soothing Work for addressing this.)

All of these have given me an acute sense that in some way the Tragedy of Israel and Palestine is something shared and deeply intertwined. 

Here is what is emerging for me: The peoples of Israel and Palestine are locked together in a deep, shared history of mutual trauma and injustice, leaving them feeling broken, violated, distrustful, afraid and angry.   Over millennia, each has suffered repeatedly at the other’s hands; and these events have been lovingly preserved and rehearsed from generation unto generation, without understanding or forgiveness. 

For example, in the case of Israel, there is very much a sense of national trauma going back for thousands of years, but reawakened in the 20^th century, first by the Holocaust and then strongly reinforced by the 1967 and 1973 wars.  Human beings are powerfully evolved to learn rapidly and often rigidly from situations in which their very existence is threatened.  One-trial learning is generally sufficient in this case to lead us to put strong protective measures in place so that such threats will “never again” happen.  In the case of Israel, such learning has happened repeatedly in living memory.

These traumatic events and the associated vulnerability have resulted in victims becoming perpetrators, over and over again (as I noted in my previous entry), thus creating a cycle of abuse, which I am hypothesising may have led to a deep sense of emotional and spiritual impurity, whose source is a vague sense of guilt that has been pushed out of awareness.

Instead, eternal vigilance and readiness to take offense have been the rule.  Each feels threatened at an existential level by the other, and seeks to both make themselves safe and to claim and control what they feel is theirs.  The more they seek to do this, the more they threaten the Other, causing them to become more vigilant and to try to gain more control over the Other.  It is this constant guarding and seeking control that is the heart of the problem, because it continually makes the problem worse by threatening the Other. 

In Emotion-Focused Therapy, with both individual and couples, such negative cycles between partners or between parts of the self are common and feel wholly intractable to those involved (and often to the therapist).  However, according to EFT “the only way out is through”:

• First, we offer a situation in which all parts of the self (or both members of the couple) feel deeply and credibly understood and validated. 

• Second, this enables the person or persons to slow down and become more deeply aware of their core painful, stuck emotions.  In this case, we have among other emotions, lingering anger at old injuries and fear of the Other as dangerous.  These emotions have to be understood and accepted, but by itself this is not enough to change anything. 

• Third, with seemingly intractable problems, it appears to be important to spend time developing an appreciation for the cost that maintaining a stand based on these emotions has had for the person. (I thank Laco Timulak for making this point explicit.) 

• Fourth, for emotional transformation to take place, there must be another step, to identify alternative, more adaptive emotions.  In this case, these include: curiosity about the Other and what they may have to offer; sadness at disconnection and separation; realistic fear at the long term consequences of one’s own intransigence; genuine empathy and compassion for the Other’s suffering; and perhaps even appropriate, motivating guilt for the role that one has played in the bringing about or allowing the Other’s suffering. 

• Fifth, by creating an atmosphere of mutual openness, this emotional transformation makes it possible to begin a process of negotiation and resolution. 

I’m not saying that such a process is easy; it isn’t.  But I’m not sure that I see any alternative other than despair and giving in to a continuing cycle of traumatising interactions, which only perpetuate and deepen the problem.

Wall Art, Wall of Separation, Bethlehem

References

Channel 4 News. (2008).  FactCheck: Glasgow worse than Gaza?  Retrieved 21 May 2015, from: http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/society/health/factcheck+glasgow+worse+than+gaza/2320267.html

            Eisenstein, C. (2007). The Ascent of Humanity: Civilization and the Human Sense of Self.  Berkeley, California: North Atlantic Books.

Questions & Answers about Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) and Social Anxiety

Entry for  26 Aug 2014:
 

 This was written some time ago for a mental health organisation website, but unfortunately never saw the light of day.

1. Can you say a few words about how you became interested in researching social anxiety and about your therapeutic approach?

Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) -- not to be confused with the “Emotional Freedom Technique” – is a humanistic approach to psychotherapy or counseling that is similar to Person-Centred Counselling but is more structured and combines a genuine, caring, empathic relationship with specialized techniques to help clients deal with specific issues that they bring to sessions.  These issues, referred to as “tasks”, include internal conflicts, unresolved relationship issues such as emotional injuries, puzzling personal overreactions to situations, and problems finding the most useful level of emotions.

EFT was originally developed as a treatment for depression in the late 1980’s, before being extended to trauma in the 1990’s.  However, there is a large overlap between depression and anxiety, so EFT therapists have always had to work with anxiety alongside other presenting problems.  Furthermore, many clients who present with traumas such as childhood mistreatment suffer from PTSD, which is usually regarded as a type of anxiety problem.  Building on this earlier work, in the past 10 years EFT therapist-researchers in the Canada, Ireland, Israel and Scotland have begun turning their attention to anxiety as a main presenting problem.

2. How is EFT different from other approaches in working with social anxiety?

Social anxiety is fear of other people, most commonly fear of speaking or doing things in public and fear of close relationships with others.  The main other approach to social anxiety is cognitive-behaviour therapy (CBT).  CBT focuses on the dysfunctional thoughts or beliefs that generate social anxiety, as well as the avoidance or safety behaviours that maintain it.  EFT sees dysfunctional thoughts and avoidance behaviours as the result of underlying emotion processes, such as “anxiety splits” in which one part of the person tries to induce fear in order to prevent perceived social dangers.

3. What is the evidence that EFT is effective in working with social anxiety?

We’ve just completed a reasonably large study with socially anxious clients, comparing EFT to person-centred counseling.  Clients in both treatments showed substantial pre-post improvements, but clients in EFT improved more, especially on measures of social phobia and the particular issues they wanted to work on.  Our results also suggest that we got better at working with social anxiety as the study progressed, as we developed and refined our approach, especially in the EFT arm of the study.  We are currently writing this study up for publication but a preliminary report was published last year in the journal Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies.

We’ve found that some socially anxious clients benefit from an unstructured nondirective approach; however, we’ve also found that many others have trouble coping with unstructured social situations and therefore seem to do better with more structure and focus in their treatment.

4.What can a client expect to happen when they engage in Emotion-Focused Psychotherapy?

The first few sessions of EFT are fairly similar to Person-Centred Counselling (from which EFT is a development):  The therapist begins by trying to establish a genuine, caring and empathic relationship.  However, for clients with social anxiety who are afraid of unstructured one-to-one situations EFT therapists try to offer more structure at the beginning, until they feel safe with the therapist.  Also, EFT therapists tend to provide more information about the nature of therapy and social anxiety.  As therapy progresses, EFT therapists listen very carefully for what the client is bringing into each session to work on, such as being puzzled about why they get so anxious around other people, or self-criticism, or unresolved feelings from having been bullied when younger.  These are examples of EFT “tasks”, specific pieces of the social anxiety that can be worked on bit by bit, using specific techniques such as “replaying” a social anxiety episode like it was a movie to recapture triggers; or having an imaginary conversation with your internal critic or even with the people who bullied you.  The therapist never imposes these ways of working on the client, but does offer them as things that EFT therapists have found to be helpful with clients.  The therapist also tries to leave time at the end of each session for helping the client set aside any painful emotions that they might have gotten in touch with, and also for reviewing what has been accomplished in the session and what might be next in therapy.  In the end, however, the therapeutic relationship comes first, both because it is healing in itself and because it provides a safe situation for the client to work productively on the difficult or painful experiences that are at the heart of social anxiety.

5. How long is a course of treatment?

The version of EFT that we’ve developed for social anxiety at the University of Strathclyde lasts up to 20 X 50-min sessions.  Although some clients require fewer sessions or more sessions, most are able to make productive use of the available sessions.

6. Do you have a few helpful strategies or tips for someone suffering from social anxiety?

First, the thing about social anxiety is that everybody from Freud to your gran knows that the only way to get over being afraid of other people is to spend time hanging out with them until you stop being so afraid.  The problem, is how do you get yourself to do that, when you’re so scared? 

Second, self-acceptance is a very important part of recovery from social anxiety.  EFT is an acceptance-based therapy, like mindfulness. We say, “You have to arrive at a feeling before you can leave it.” It’s important to accept the fact that you are afraid of other people; this is the starting point.

Third, it’s useful to try to change emotion with emotion, to begin to move past simply focusing on being afraid of the horrible things that might happen with other people.  So it’s very useful to discover other feelings you might have:

·      Self-reflective curiosity about what your underlying feelings are and how this social anxiety stuff works for you

·      Connecting sadness at missing out on human connection

·      Protective anger at past unfair treatment or violations of your boundaries

·      Self-compassion for all the difficult things you’ve been through and the sad and lonely parts of you.

These are a few suggestions for beginning the journey of recovering from social anxiety.  However, because social anxiety comes from and involves relationships with other people, it is best treated within a safe, empathic, genuine relationship, whether that’s a counsellor/psychotherapist, parent or partner.