Emotion-Focused Therapy Training Level One Description:
The Transforming Power of Affect
24 CE unit Hours available for Psychologists, Social Workers, LPCs, and Marriage and Family Therapists.
Educational Objectives
Participants on the training program will learn:
1. The basic therapeutic and change principles of EFT
2. To use key EFT emotion theory concepts, including emotion schemes, emotion response types, and emotion regulation
3. When and how to help clients moderate vs access painful emotions
4. To identify key EFT task markers
5. To help clients reprocess puzzling emotional reactions and unresolved relationships
6. To facilitate emotional processing to resolve internal conflicts such as self-criticism
7. How to apply EFT to range of client presentations such as depression and anxiety
Program Outline 8-Day model (4 hours per day training session)
Day 1: Foundations, EFT Emotion Theory
• Introductions
• Origins and distinctive features of the EFT: neo-humanism & therapeutic principles
• Unproductive and productive emotion processes
• Emotion schemes & their elaboration
• Skill practice
Day 2: Emotion diagnosis, Accessing and Regulating Emotion
• Emotion Regulation & Clearing a Space
• Emotion response types
• Focusing and Clearing a Space
• Skill practice
Day 3: Emotion Deepening through Reprocessing Problematic Experiences
• Emotion change principles and the emotional deepening process
• Therapeutic tasks and process formulation
• Therapist empathic responses
• Evocative unfolding
• Skill practice
Day 4: Emotion Transformation through Empty Chair Work:
• Empty chair dialogue and unfinished business
• Supporting the emergence and letting go of primary unmet needs
• Skill practice
Day 5: Getting Started with Two Chair Work
• Dialectical constructivist models of self
• Process guiding therapist responses
• Using Conflict splits and Two chair dialogue
• Varieties of splits
• Skill practice
Day 6: Emotion Deepening through Two Chair Work
• Working with the collapsed experiencer in self-critical splits
• Accessing core problematic emotion schemes
• Skill practice
•Research evidence for EFT and Humanistic therapies
Day 7: Emotion Theory Review and Identifying Tasks
• Review of EFT emotion theory and tasks
• Strategies for identifying and selecting tasks
• Skill practice
Day 8: Personalized Applications
(More skill practice if desired)
• Practical parameters
• Application to different client populations (e.g., depression, PTSD, social anxiety)
• Question & answers; where from here?
• Processing
About the Presenter
Robert Elliott, Ph.D., received his doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and taught clinical psychology at the University of Toledo (Ohio) for nearly 30 years; during that time, in collaboration with Leslie Greenberg and Laura Rice, he developed Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT). He currently spends half of his time in Scotland, where he is Professor of Counselling in the School of Psychological Sciences and Health at the University of Strathclyde and where he directs its research clinic and teaches counselling research and EFT. The rest of the time, he is based in Northern California, where he is busy with various EFT-related writing projects. His central interest is the change process in humanistic-experiential psychotherapies. He is co-author of Facilitating emotional change (1993), Learning process-experiential psychotherapy (2004), Research methods in clinical psychology (3rd ed., 2015), and Developing and Enhancing Research Capacity in Counselling and Psychotherapy (2010), as well as more than 150 journal articles and book chapters. He is past president of the Society for Psychotherapy Research, and previously co-edited the journals Psychotherapy Research, and Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies. He is a fellow in the divisions of Clinical Psychology, Psychotherapy, and Humanistic Psychology of the American Psychological Association. In 2009 he received the Distinguished Research Career Award of the Society for Psychotherapy Research, and the Carl Rogers Award from the Division of Humanistic Psychology of the American Psychological Association. He enjoys running, science fiction and all kinds of music.