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Emotion-focused Therapy: The Transforming Power of Affect

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Abstract

Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) is an empirically supported humanistic treatment that views emotion as fundamental to experience, as contributing to both adaptive and maladaptive functioning, and as essential to therapeutic change. EFT combines both following and guiding the client’s experiential process, emphasizing the importance of both relationship and intervention skills. Utilizing markers of particular emotional processing difficulties at the core of client problems, therapists intervene with matched interventions aimed to resolve the emotional processing difficulty. This process helps clients access new adaptive emotional resources, transform maladaptive emotional responses, address emotional interruption and regulation, make sense of experience, and construct new meaning and self-narrative.

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Pos, A.E., Greenberg, L.S. Emotion-focused Therapy: The Transforming Power of Affect. J Contemp Psychother 37, 25–31 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10879-006-9031-z

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