For Adam (Adam Horvath, In Memoriam)

 

   1. I Woke up Yesterday to Find You Gone

 

There is a hole in the world where you have always been.

Your wry, lopsided smile and all your Adam-ness

Now missing, must live inside us, as memory.

 

You always stood a bit outside.

You didn’t join the latest consensus,

You didn’t just march to a different drummer,

You invented a new kind of drum.

 

You took an inventory of Bordin’s common sense

Notion of therapeutic relationship,

And made a simple measure of Working Alliance

Into a world-standard, used to this day.

 

 

2. Grandchild of the Holocaust

 

You always walked just outside the boundary,

Making your own way.

Last summer we spent several hours

Investigating the Krakow ghetto,

Retracing the steps that led to the Horror

From which your father so narrowly escaped.

Without this you would not even have existed,

The world poorer for your absence.

 

But when we said goodbye, I never imagined

I’d never see you again.

Even now I still owe you one last book chapter,

Sitting in my computer half-revised,

Waiting for me to respond to your remaining queries.

 

Although you are gone I still have

Answers to you to frame,

Not wanting to disappoint your high hopes

That I might help you unpack moments of impasse

in our shared labor of psychotherapy.

 

 

3. Oh, Adam, Adam, Adam

 

You always did what you felt was right,

Even when it -- occasionally –

Drove some of us to distraction.

 

But I was always glad to see you, knowing this:

Here is someone who truly understands

This community of those

Who seek the secrets of psychotherapy,

Not forgetting for a moment

How hard yet joyful this work is.

 

In these final years, this took you

Away from numbers and even categories,

Ever closer to the raw talk itself,

On which the whole enterprise is built.

 

 

4. Your Death Unleashes a Flood of Memories

 

You probably thought you were marginal,

A footnote, but it turns out that

You were always at the center

Of the SPR-sphere,

The web of interconnection that

Links all psychotherapy researchers.

 

Many of us are now wondering:

When did I last see Adam?

What did we say? Or do? Or eat?

 

The threads glow like nerve fibers

Trying to hold you in our minds

Before the traces go dark,

Before we go dark.

 

But you’re still there;

The memories of you still live:

Our shared laughter,

Echoing in the theater of our minds;

Your kindness, passed along

And multiplied in many acts of caring;

Your stubborn persistence, refusing to let us

Forget you and what is important in this work:

As if that was possible!

 

                                                -Robert Elliott; 20 – 23 Feb, Lodi, California

New Publication on Empathic Conjectures in Journal of Marital & Family Therapy

 Just published online in open access: A new study, "Empathic Conjectures in Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFCT): A Process Microanalytic Study," by Hamed Fatahian-Tehran, Simran Chatha & me.  In the Journal of Marital & Family Therapy. 

This was a fun project, initiated when Hamed and Simran each separately approached me about doing a research project on EFT. What transpired was an analysis of 12 sessions of Emotionally-Focused Couples Therapy available for training purposes. We decided to study empathic conjectures (therapist responses that guess about previously unspoken client experiences), focusing on characteristics that define empathic conjectures and identifying different types of empathic conjectures. This basically a new type of therapy process research, which we decided to call "Process Microanalysis." I'm hoping that others will take up this approach, replicating and extending our results and applying it to other types of EFT therapist response.

 Fatahian-Tehran, H.M., Chatha, S. and Elliott, R. (2025), Empathic Conjectures in Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFCT): A Process Microanalytic Study. Journal of Marital and Family Therapy, 51: e70075. https://doi.org/10.1111/jmft.70075

 

Blurb notes for A. Pascual-Leone, 2026: Principles of Emotion Change

[Notes: (1) I get asked to write blurbs for forthcoming books, in exchange for getting to read an advance copy. It’s always a challenge to boil a book down to 2 to 3 sentences, and I often end up writing a couple different versions for the marketing folks to pick from, plus some of my other favorite bits. (2) Reference: Pascual-Leone, A. (2026). Principles of Emotion Change: What Works and When in Psychotherapy and Everyday Life.  APA.  Book details: Paperback; Publication date: November 2025; ISBN: 978-1-4338-3660-2; 656 pp; US$54.99]

 

Short blurbs:

Brilliant! Elegant, clear-thinking and highly practical at the same time. Provides the empirical and conceptual foundation for the next generation of Emotion-Focused Therapy theory and practice.

 

Lovely writing, highly quotable, chock full of concrete, wide-ranging practice suggestions with a range of compelling metaphors and entertaining case examples.

 

  

 

 

Longer blurb:

Serious EFT therapists and practitioners of related emotion-based approaches will want to read this book, because it provides a solid, clearly stated scientific foundation for five key kinds of emotion change processes. The author has produced a tour de force based on a rigorous, decade-long systematic review of a wide range of applied emotion research, producing a fresh look at the key therapeutic tasks such as empty chair work, grounding them historically and in the wider field of applied emotion research.

 

 

Other favorite bits:

 

Antonio has done us an enormous service by developing and putting forward a unified grounded theory of the specific emotion processes that drive change in psychotherapy and people’s lives more generally.

 

One of my favorite things about this book is the humility of the author: At the end of an enormous and masterful review, the client is the hero of the story, choosing the emotion change processes that make the most sense to them and using these to change themselves. This book then serves to help therapists support this process.

 

Favorite quote: “While the therapist chooses the intervention, only the client chooses the process” p. 45

 

 

Additional note: This book is due out a couple of months after the second edition of Elliott, Watson, Goldman & Greenberg. (2025). Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy: A Comprehensive Guide. It’s a great complement to Learning 2, essentially providing the basic science underpinning Learning 2, and maybe pushing its edges in places. Antonio has been working on this book for 12 years, and it’s massive, a real magnum opus!

 

 

Bubbles All the Way Up and Down: A Dream

 [Note: This poem, inspired by Gene Gendlin’s approach to Focusing-oriented dreamwork, is a follow-up piece to “Postscript”, which I posted here last November. It was drafted shortly after that piece, but for various reasons I put it aside at the time and have dipped back into it several times, letting it sit with me, incomplete. Recently it occurred to me that (a) “Postscript”, (b) this poem, and (c) “Seventy-five” (which I posted here in June) combine to form an emotional sequence, with this piece connecting the other two. Together, I see them as marking a “time of turning” in my life.  If you want to read them in sequence, you can do so by following the links at the end of the poem. -Robert]

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

1  A Dream of Fragility

 

Another night, another dream:

 

I’m running a training session,

A small group, about ten people,

In someone’s house, just as we did

In the old days of the approach.

 

And somehow I’m outside

By a busy road

Speaking into a wireless microphone,

With the signal breaking up,

So I don’t know if the people

In the training can hear me.

And then of course my phone rings.

 

So I go to a brief break in the training;

And answer the phone.

You are there, after 50 years,

Phoning at this precise moment

To make contact.

 

I tell you I can’t talk now:

I’m about to do a live demonstration:

A short session in front of all these people,

Which I always begin

By publicly imagining a bubble

Around myself and my volunteer client.

This protects the two of us

From judgement or distraction.

While the audience watches to learn.

 

It’s a good excuse.

But the truth is,

I’m surprised to find in myself

A fragility I didn’t know I had,

As if your phone call

Was the foreshock to an earthquake

Revealing a previously unknown

Fault line in my world.

 

Then phoning you back

Once the live demonstration

And the rest of the training session are done,

I feel my body begin ease

At the sound of your voice:

You are OK, it sounds like.

 

I’ve been so worried about you,

As if I couldn’t afford right now

To lose another foundational

Person in my life.

(Philip and Margaret are both dead.)

 

Then my alarm goes off,

Insistently beeping in the gathered dark,

And the dream of you vanishes

Like the soap bubble

Wish fulfilment dream

That it was.

 

Yet I’m left with:

You are still out there in the dark.

I know where you are,

But I do not know how you are

Or even who you are now.

 

And I don’t even know if this dream

Was about your fragility or mine,

Or even how to tell the difference.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2  Associations: Professional and Personal Bubbles

 

Where this dream of fragility takes me:

 

As a therapist, I’ve long focused

On other people’s fragility:

Anybody’s fragility…

As long as it’s not my own.

The therapeutic bubble,

Well boundaried and one-sided.

 

But this has always been an illusion,

An avoidance of my own fragility,

Another soap bubble fantasy

Of solidity and safety.

 

This makes me wonder about

All the different bubbles

That buoy my life,

Like a fragile raft

In the middle of large ocean,

 

My life like a brief bubble

In the sea of time,

Mostly spent

On all manner of things

Significant and insignificant.

 

The fragile feeling says:

Now there is far less

Of that life remaining

Than what has already passed;

I’m mostly done.

 

Of course, I pretend this is not the case,

I ignore the truth

That compared to most humans

Who have ever lived

I am on borrowed time,

Beyond my span.

 

I let myself forget

That my life is a debt

That can – and will –

be called in at any time.

 

My little life is like

An aneurysm about to burst,

A blood bubble in my brain,

A fragility on which

My continued existence depends.

 

Many questions bubble up in me,

Have I done enough?

Have I made a difference?

Have I lived a worthy life?

Does anyone care?

Will anyone remember me?

Does that matter?

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

3  Carrying Forward: The Song of the Bubbles

 

I don’t know how

To answer these questions.

They leave me speechless

And empty-handed.

So I wait. And I wait.

 

And this is what comes:

 

All I know is to go with the bubbles,

To dance to the song of the bubbles.

 

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble,

We are all bubbles,

Our little lives and loves.

Bubble after bubble:

Bubbles emerging from

Geothermal vents

At the bottom of the ocean.

It’s bubbles all the way

Up and down.

 

Soap bubbles and soup bubbles;

Financial bubbles propelled by excitement or greed;

Bubble tea: floating tapioca beads,

The fad its own kind of bubble.

We are all bubbles,

Our little lives and loves,

Bubbles all the way

Up and down.

 

Speech bubbles evaporating

Into the next frame of my life.

Hope bubbles bursting into despair

Like broken blisters.

Despair bubbles bursting into hope,

Like geodesic domes on the moon.

Our little lives and loves,

We are all bubbles,

Bubbles all the way

Up and down.

 

My life bubble surrounded by the time

before my birth and beyond my death;

Quantum foam, constantly flickering in and out of existence,

No solidity anywhere, afloat and adrift.

We are all bubbles

In time and space,

Our little lives and loves;

Bubbles all the way

Up and down.

 

 

 

                                    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 -Pleasanton, Oct 2024 (revised,  Lodi, July 2025)

-Images generated by AI using Adobe Firefly Image 4, using selected verses as prompts.

-The whole sequence in order can be read by following these links (paradoxically, the first poem is called "Postscript"):

1. Postscript: https://pe-eft.blogspot.com/2024/11/postscript-2024.html

2. This poem: Bubbles All the Way Down & Up: https://pe-eft.blogspot.com/2025/07/bubbles-all-way-up-and-down-dream.html

3. Seventy-Five: Questions and Answers: https://pe-eft.blogspot.com/2025/06/seventy-five-questions-and-answers.html

 

Postscript (2024)

New, autobiographical poem about my first serious relationship, looking back more than 50 years and described aptly by an early reader as about "love, loss, regret, and learning". There's a fair amount of EFT content also, making it one of a series of EFT poems I've been percolating.

 1  Unfinished Business Marker

Jet-lagged from Greece,

I wake in the middle of the night

Haunted by the feeling of something unfinished

Between us.

 

After so much time,

You’ve appeared to me in a dream.

But all I can do is foolishly

To try to impress you

And your friends

In a callow, callous way.

 

Something is wrong

In the great web

In which my little life lives.

I lay awake for hours.

 

On our morning walk,

I tell some of this to my 51-year life partner,

With half-century of experience

Of people being confused

That I had married her and not you.

 

“Do you regret not marrying her?”, she says,

(A fair question, I think.)

“No”, I say, “But it does feel like

There is something

Unfinished with her.”

 

And just like that, I’ve suddenly crossed

My professional life

as therapist, trainer etc.

With my personal life

As an aging 74-year-old nonbinary person

Dealing with a lifetime of uncertainty and shame

About my gender.

 

In my supervision session later

I talk to Gordon about the dream

And the unfinished business marker,

Unable to say what felt unfinished,

Beyond the sense

That we had injured each other.

 

When I cautiously say,

“I think I may need to put her in the empty chair…”

He asks,

“Is this something you feel you can do on your own?”

(Another fair question)

I say: “I’m not sure.”

After a small pause, he says,

“I could do that with you, if you want…

I’d be happy to do that.”

“Thank you”, I say.

“Let me think about it.”

 

But what comes instead

Is this poem,

Postscript to an earlier, painful, piece.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2  Apologia Pro Vita Mea

 

Last year I plowed through all my files

Of the letters I’d saved

From the important people

In my life.

 

When I got to yours

I read again your journey

Through the time

Our lives overlapped.

 

And I saw how you lived the life

You needed to live,

And chronicled it for me.

You offered me that window,

And I understood your trajectory,

The parallels and divergences

From my journey.

You told me your dreams,

Even when they led you away from me.

 

But I also saw

My own meanness of spirit,

The things I said out of spite,

And even the small but pointed missile

Of a poem about Pompei,

Its title a play on your name.

 

 

 

 

 

By Abderrahman Ait Ali from Stockholm - IMG_20190316_160912, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=79059068

 

 

And even now

I feel ashamed of my smallness:

That I was unwilling to resist

The pain-driven, reflexive hitting out,

And the cleverness of the metaphor,

At your expense.

 

 

I have spent much of my career as a therapist

Understanding the struggles of women

In a patriarchal, sexist world,

Supporting them as they seek

To take their power.

 

And as I have done this,

I have become ever more alienated

From my masculinity,

Seeking my own psychological androgyny,

Now, finally, renouncing “he/him/his”

And coming home to “they/them/theirs”.

 

I think these are some of the things

I’d like you to know now.

So even though our lives have since followed

Plutonian orbits of distance,

I send out this small Voyager of a poem,

Not knowing

Whether if it will find you,

But wanting to share my sorrow

For any hurt

That I may have caused.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  NASA/JPL-Caltech

 

 

3   Purple String Thing

 

Another night of jet lag:

You are still on my mind.

I awake very early

Wondering how to proceed,

And what my motives are.

 

Guilt?  Reconnection?

It just feels like piece of my life

That I need to put right.

 

From my bed, in the dark,

I can just barely make out

The Purple String Thing:

The construction of felt,

Multi-colored strings, and nails,

You made for me so many years ago,

Proud of yourself for having done something

So out of character and artistic as this.

 

Regarded ambivalently if at all

By my family,

The Purple String Thing

Has hung for decades in my study,

First in Toledo, then again here in Pleasanton.

 

This metaphor of frayed interconnection

Is now somewhat worse for the wear,

A bit moth-eaten and slightly mildewed from

Its intermittent storage in damp basements.

 

Its state led m partner to wonder,

Several times over the intervening years,

Why didn’t I just throw it away,

This reminder of a previous life?

 

And every time, I thought about it,

And found I couldn’t.

 

So when I moved it

To our hallway a year ago,

I re-secured some of the little nails

And re-attached a few of the strings

That had come loose.

And there it sits today,

A reminder of you that I stubbornly

Refuse to let go of.

 

So now in the early predawn,

As I look at its shape in the hall,

Dark against dark,

The Purple String Thing

Begins to yield it meaning to me,

And I feel a wave of gratitude,

For what you gave me:

 

 

When we met

I was a deeply self-ashamed,

Unknowingly queer person,

Unable to embrace

The culture and norms of masculinity,

Yet deeply drawn to the feminine in others

And myself.

 

Before you, I had had a series

Of one-sided crushes

On young women around me;

It felt there was no place for me,

That no one wanted me.

 

Then in late 1969,

Behind Crown College

At UC Santa Cruz,

At a Sunday evening folk mass,

Between “I will raise you up”

And “The Lord of the Dance,”

I read the two little prayer poems

I’d written for the service.

And at the Passing of the Peace,

You kissed me on the mouth.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And no one had ever before shown me

That they were attracted to me,

That I might in some way be desirable,

And therefore that I did not

Have to live my life alone.

 

A small thing, perhaps,

But this changed my life,

And for that I am even now

Filled with gratitude that you saw me

And wanted me in that moment.

 

There were other gifts you gave me

Before things between us got

Complicated and came undone:

Julian Bream and concerts in San Francisco;

The pride of being your boyfriend

(My friends were jealous);

Your connections to my elders

(My grandmother and Ted Sarbin).

 

But also a view into your inner life

and the company of your female friends,

As women navigating

A time of rapid change in relationships.

 

And perhaps most importantly of all:

A sense of how hard

Relationships can be,

How they sometimes fall apart,

And how painful and terrifying that can be.

 

This might sound like common sense

(Something I’ve been told I lack)

But for one thing:

 

When, ten years later,

My main relationship began to fail,

I invested everything I could,

And discovered what you and I

Were not ready to know before:

That sometimes relationships,

Like Purple String Things,

Battered though they be,

Can be repaired.

 

 

And so at last I know,

With gratitude,

Why I’ve kept the Purple String Thing,

That you made for me,

For all these years:

 

It is the door of connection

Linking me to you,

And you to me;

And not just us,

But all of us,

Linking each to all,

And all to each.

More real than the illusion

Of all our sad separateness.

 

                                    -September/October 2024; Pleasanton, California

 

 

Two Poems About the World PCE Conference Athens 2024

Note: For me, poetry is a way of speaking truth, sometimes painful truth. In this entry, I offer two poems about my experiences of the World Person-Centred Psychotherapy and Counselling Conference in Athens, September 2024. I thank Gillian Proctor for the diffraction image used in the second poem.  I hope that readers will find something in them that resonates.

 

1  The Honouring of Ornery Elders

 

As the conference opens, I hear:

-- We honour the elders, past and present

 

But I want to protest:

-- I didn’t ask for this.

I want to go back to being

A bright younger,

Full of anxiety and promise.

 

It seems only a second ago, I complain,

-- How did I get here?

 

And answer myself:

-- Like everyone else, I guess:

One year at a time.

 

But time’s forest fire

Has burned through this community

Of the children and grandchildren of Carl Rogers,

And the remaining tall trees

Are rarer every year:

The elders are passing.

 

Those of us who are left

Are more brittle and cranky

Each time we meet.

 

We ask ourselves:

-- Is this the last time?

A final time to be heard?

 

And we reply to ourselves:

-- If few listened before,

Why should they listen now?

 

People look at me, talk about me,

As someone whose kind is in short supply,

Some kind of ghost

Of a lost, brilliant, golden age.

 

And I, newly retired, am aware

Of my own new fragility:

The osteoporosis, the fading vision,

The stiffness to stand;

I take the amphitheatre’s descending steps

Slowly, carefully.

 

Though I hate it, I inhabit the part,

The role into which

I find myself cast, unwilling.

 

 

2  The Sharp Edges of Our Differences

 

The light that shines

Through these approaches

To the healing of souls

Is split into a spectrum of colours:

Person-centred, emotion-focused, focusing-oriented, and more.

 

These make space for many ways of being

With ourselves and our clients.

Like a deep gene pool,

Filled with many waters,

To equip us to meet

The many challenging moments

That lie in front of us.

 

And yet this rich variety

Can be difficult and challenging,

Leading us to wish

For simplicity and an easier life.

 

Holding these tensions can make us tense,

Can hurt and be hurtful to each other.

 

And so, in deep conversations

With my therapeutic siblings

I hear with sadness how some

Feel diminished and pained

By my beloved ways of working,

By focusing and chair work.

 

Perhaps at times I proclaim these things,

Too loudly or too proudly,

So my fellows hear me as belittling them,

Leaving them behind, judging them,

Threatening their beloved ways of working,

 

They tell me that this

Makes them doubt themselves,

Imagining themselves from my point of view,

Imagining me as a critical audience

To their ways of working.

 

I can well understand

How this erodes

The firm ground they need

To be present to their clients:

My active, intense ways of working,

Such a function of who I am,

Are sharp edges for them…

And these sharp edges hurt.

 

Of course, it’s in our nature

To turn hurt to fear,

And thence to anger, contempt, and judgement:

More sharp edges, like broken glass,

That can hurt me and make me feel unwelcome.

 

Because of this, I have

Often tried to make myself smaller;

Hoping I’d be less threatening

If I put away my EFT hat,

And spoke instead of research:

 

Research is a thing I love

For its methods and craft,

Its findings, by turns

Enriching and perplexing.

As I tell myself yet again,

“The facts are friendly”,

I hope that this is true.

 

But for all my love of careful study

I am also an EFT therapist,

Who sometimes doubts his welcome here,

And who sometimes, without meaning to,

Makes others feel unwelcome too.

 

I don’t think this is what any of us want:

To dismiss or to be dismissed;

To hide ourselves, or to make others hide.

 

We know well what it feels like

To be sent way or overlooked

In the wider world of psychotherapy,

When all the while

We could be keeping

Each other company

And shining with all the colours of rainbow.

 

                        -Athens/Pleasanton, September 2024

The Process of Becoming an EFT Therapist in Action: Brief Book Launch Talk

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.