Are you hard on yourself and always beating yourself up?
Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT)
Do you experience uncontrollable emotional outbursts? Or are you maybe prone to numbness and dissociation?
Do fulfilling and meaningful relationships feel out of reach?
All of the above experiences are linked to how you process your emotions.
Emotions are an Integral part of Your Life Experience
With Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT), we use feelings as a compass to direct us to what is important for you. Big feelings tend to have big important messages. A lack of feelings across the board, can mean that expressing your emotions feels dangerous, pointless, or burdensome. Instead of shying away from your experience, suppressing or shaming your feelings, in EFT we lean in, clear space, and attend to them.
The Science of Emotions
The broadly accepted theory is that emotions have evolved because they help us to survive. Your emotion system can process huge amounts of information in a matter of milliseconds and trigger actions and decisions aimed at keeping you safe. The way you jump and are on high alert after a loud sound or that feeling in your gut telling you something bad is going to happen are examples of your emotion system quickly interpreting and giving you signals about the situation. Your emotions are also an important part of making daily decisions, like “which shirt should I wear today” and provide direction for bigger decision, like “should I stay at my current job?”.
Your brain uses a complex network of millions of neurons to work. The more a neuron is used, or is “firing”, the more connections it will make with other neurons. This is the basis for understanding how Emotion-Focused Therapy can facilitate change. You can feel stuck in old patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving. In EFT, we can help you to activate these neurons and open the opportunity for new, more adaptive and helpful connections to be made. The more these new connections are activated, the easier it becomes to break the old pattern. Neurons that fire together, wire together.
WHY AM I SO ANGRY ABOUT THIS?!?!
Your thoughts and emotions represent two separate systems. Sometimes, you might notice you are feeling anxious, frustrated, angry or down on yourself and KNOW that it doesn’t make sense and isn’t a helpful reaction. Even so, knowing this doesn’t stop it from happening over-and-over again. Your emotions don’t necessarily care what you think, because while your thoughts are trying to figure out what makes sense based on evidence and facts, your emotions are trying to tell you about what you need and what is good or bad for you.
“This disagreement is such a small thing, I shouldn’t be angry”
“I should just enjoy this party, why am I so anxious?”
“I’ve had a pretty good life, why aren’t I happy?”
These thinking/feeling misalignments are all examples of emotion suppression, minimization, or interruption. Ultimately, they tell you that something needs your attention here and in EFT we will get to the root of this confusion.
EFT for Feeling your Feelings
What if I don’t know how I feel, or I can’t seem to feel much at all?
This is a common issue that makes it hard to have healthy relationships and to ultimately know what you need. You know something doesn’t feel right, but figuring it out feels impossible! You might find yourself engaging in unhelpful or self-destructive behaviours like alcohol, unhealthy eating or sex, gambling, overuse of internet, or self-harm to try to cope or just to feel better temporarily. With EFT, you can learn how to access, label, and express your emotions. Patterns of suppressing, invalidating, avoiding or minimizing can be shifted to allow a more holistic, authentic, and genuine version of yourself to shine through.
EFT for Relationship Issues
Maybe you find yourself prioritizing the needs of your partner and carrying the brunt of the weight of the relationship. While it may seem like you are being a “good partner”, this pattern often leads to feelings of resentment, deprivation, or exhaustion.
Or, maybe you have trouble empathizing with your partner and they express feeling like they aren’t being considered enough or aren’t a priority. This might leave you feeling selfish, self-absorbed, or like a “bad partner”.
Both of these relationship dynamics can be rooted in difficulty accessing and expressing emotions. In EFT, you will learn how to make your feelings and needs a priority while also making space for the feelings and needs of your partner. Healthy relationships occur when all parties can bring their genuine selves while acknowledging, accepting, and validating the other.
Your emotions don’t have to be a liability, they can be a key to your healing.
How EFT can Help
EFT has been shown to be effective in treating a wide range of psychological problems, including depression, anxiety, trauma, and relationship difficulties. The benefits of EFT include:
Increasing your emotional awareness.
EFT can help you to identify and express your emotions, leading to greater emotional awareness and insight into your emotional experiences.
Improving your emotional regulation.
By processing and expressing your emotions in a safe and supportive environment, you can learn to regulate your emotions more effectively, reducing the impact of old unhelpful emotional patterns on your life.
Increasing your self-awareness.
EFT can help you to gain insight into your internal experience. This increased self-awareness can lead to greater self-acceptance and greater access to the emotion information which can guide you towards more fulfilling relationships and meaning and engagement in your life.
Using your emotions for healing sounds all well-and-good but the reality is that lots of folks have some fears about treading into emotional waters. Some common worries that we encounter are…
-
If you’re used to suppressing your emotions, shaming yourself for having them at all, and living in constant fear that they are wrong or bad, then of course there will be a fear of opening up. Vulnerability with our emotions isn’t something many of us have seen modelled in our lives, so knowing how another person will react to you is scary. But an emotion focused therapist knows that there is no such thing as a bad or wrong emotion. They will never judge you for feeling anything , all they want to understand is what’s going on underneath the surface of that emotion and how they can help you move into a deeper understanding of yourself and your needs. No judgement, just support.
-
Logic is an important tool at our disposal, however, trying to rely on this tool to navigate issues related to relationships, self-growth, and meaning/fulfillment in life is like trying to use a hammer to put in a screw - it just doesn’t work and will likely be a very frustrating and damaging endeavour. Emotions carry messages about what we really need in relationships and in life and help us move towards getting those needs met, even if it’s not a logical or rational decision.
-
Emotions can be big and scary; there’s a reason you are resisting them. The feeling of being afraid of emotions, overwhelmed by them, or fragile when you feel them are important experiences worthy of acknowledgement. Part of our work will be building a sense of confidence, resilience, and safety into the process of accessing difficult emotions.
