Processing Emotional Pain using Emotion Focused Therapy

Book excerpt: Emotional pain is part of most people’s reality. For some of us though, that pain can begin to impact on our ability to function in our everyday life. Despite years of valiant attempts to resolve or deny such pain, we may continue to suffer. Before her untimely death early in 2021, Dr Melissa Harte had experienced her own journey through emotional pain that led her eventually to become a counseling psychologist and an internationally accredited Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) trainer. She spent years teaching hundreds of therapists how to use EFT as well as running her own thriving private practice The legacy of her considerable skill and knowledge remains in this book which sets out a framework and model that works gently, effectively and deeply to assist in reversing the psychological, emotional, spiritual and physical damage of unresolved emotional pain. Applicable to a range of practitioners including counsellors and psychologists, this book will help you to help your clients whose emotional pain may be attachment-related, be a single episode, a series of major trauma experiences, or the culmination of many so-called ‘small t trauma’ events. This is a ‘how-to’ book, presenting techniques and concepts to assist practitioners, including investigating the use of the impacts of trauma case studies — an area until very recently often overlooked or minimised when formalising case histories. Chapters also address: • The dilemma with the DSM-5 diagnostic criteria for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). • The value of understanding the importance of emotions and how, as adaptive experiences, they provide essential information that can assist us in our daily lives. • The concept of emotional pain and how to work through it with an extended version of the focusing task, including the influences that helped to shape the task and its significant components. • The challenges around identifying dissociation and how to manage it. • The use of chair work as another element of working through emotional pain. At Melissa’s request, all royalties from sales of her book will go to the Australian Institute for Emotion Focused Therapy.