In Chapter 2 I expand on three client factors and the empirically validated EFT therapist interventions that are needed to follow the EFT map for change.
Basic Client Factors
Three client factors that process research has identified as being central to successful outcome are task alliance, emotional depth, and affiliative sharing (TEA).
Task alliance: The most important aspect of the alliance is that partners feel the tasks of therapy have value and relevance to their concerns.
Emotional depth: EFT therapists strive to engage clients at a level where they attend to a felt flow of present moment internal experiencing. Depth of emotional engagement is shown to positively impact therapeutic change.
Affiliative sharing: Emotionally engaged self-disclosure, and understanding, warm, and caring responses between partners, contribute significantly towards reshaping distressed relationships into secure bonds, thus EFT therapists choreograph direct sharing (enactments) between partners.
Therapist Interventions
The two sets of EFT interventions that are used repeatedly through EFT are described and illustrated. They include
- Interventions for accessing, deepening, and reprocessing emotion, function to form and maintain the therapeutic alliance, and also to reprocess emotion. These interventions are:
- Empathic reflections
- Validation
- Evocative responses and questions
- Heightening
- Conjectures (include interventions Johnson metaphorically calls catching the bullet and seeding attachment)
- Interventions for tracking cycles of interaction and creating new interactions are:
- Tracking and reflecting interactions
- Reframing
- Creating new interactions, with enactments.
The EFT tango
The EFT interventions are synthesised into five basic moves used repeatedly throughout all the Steps and Stages of EFT. This synthesis is metaphorically known as the EFT tango. The five moves are:
- Reflecting within and between.
- Deepening emotion of one partner.
- Shaping an enactment to share newly accessed emotional experience.
- Processing the disclosure with each partner.
- Summarising and integrating the new experience of contact.