Rhonda Goldman
Keynote Speech
“The Evolution of Empathic Understanding in EFT”
Description
This talk will describe the evolution and development of different aspects of therapist understanding and responsiveness in emotion-focused therapy (EFT). A commonly held dialectic exists for the emotion-focused therapist that involves balancing being and doing. Starting out within a Rogerian framework, emotion-focused therapy underscored the importance of ‘being with’, moving into the client’s frame of reference, and forming a moment by moment understanding of the client. Over time, emotion-focused theorists integrated more active modes of engagement into the approach. The Experiential Therapy Adherence Measure (ETAM), created and validated in 1991, attempted to capture and describe all the various modes and types of responsive engagement that the emotion-focused therapist adopts throughout therapy. Some aspects of responsiveness are more ‘being’-related such as various types of empathic responses, while others are more ‘doing’-related, such as suggesting tasks in relation to specified markers that present themselves in session.
Emotion-focused therapy has evolved in the last thirty years, and the being-doing dialectic continues to evolve with it. Two important and relatively recent strands of EFT’s development have been the creation of a deliberate practice training manual, and another has been focused on case formulation.