Emotion Focused Therapy

Emotion focused approach connects individuals to their emotional experience in therapy and works to enhance emotional expression. This approach values emotions as adaptive and necessary agents that help us navigate our environment and feel integrated as humans.

Our emotions make up the core of who we are as humans. They help use connect with others and they inform us about our needs and our actions. It is important for us to feel and draw wisdom from our emotions, but the reality is that many of us learn to avoid, distract, and defend against them. This learned pattern of tamping down on our emotions is often formed in early childhood as a way of pleasing our caregivers and maintaining our attachments with them. It is not all bad to tamp down on our emotions, at times we need to. We need to be able to titrate our feelings and discern when is the correct time to fully feel and express. But, patterns of defending against emotion become maladaptive when defenses become hardwired and we can no longer access, feel, or express our emotional experience.

Research in affective neuroscience and neuroplasticity (the brains ability to change) has shed light on the primacy of emotion and the important role it plays in our ability to change. This research informs many psychotherapy practices to privilege emotion as an agent of healing and transformation.