- Basic premise: Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) for depression builds on Greenberg’s (2004) more general process-experiential approach that was designed to help patients identify, utilize, and process emotions. Depression is thought to involve inhibited processing of emotions and experiences, and the therapist provides a safe and soothing environment to reduce the anxiety and avoidance associated with difficult emotions.
- Essence of therapy: Emotion-focused therapy includes three specific phases: Emotion Awareness, Emotion Regulation, and Emotion Utilization or Transformation. Patients learn to increase awareness of their emotions, deepen their emotional experiences, understand unhealthy emotional responses so that they can be regulated or used to generate more adaptive emotion alternatives, and to use healthy emotions to guide action.
- Length: This therapy typically includes 16 to 20 sessions.
Other Treatment Resources
- Case Studies in Emotion-Focused Treatment of Depression: A Comparison of Good and Poor Outcome (Watson, Goldman, & Greenberg)
- Immersion and distancing during assimilation of problematic experiences in a good-outcome case of emotion-focused therapy (Barbosa et al., 2016)
- Setbacks in the process of assimilation of problematic experiences in cases of emotion-focused therapy of depression (Mendes et al., 2016)
- Assessing client self-narrative change in emotion-focused therapy of depression: An intensive single case analysis (Angus & Kagan, 2013)
- Single-case investigation of an emotion-focused therapy group for anxiety and depression (Robinson, McCague, & Whissell, 2012)
Clinical Trials
- “That chair work thing was great”: a pilot study of group-based emotion-focused therapy for anxiety and depression (Robinson, McCague, & Whissell, 2014)
- Maintenance of gains following experiential therapies for depression (Ellison, Greenberg, Goldman, & Angus, 2009)
- The effects of adding emotion-focused interventions to the therapeutic relationship in the treatment of depression (Goldman, Greenberg, & Angus, 2006)
- Comparing the effectiveness of process-experiential with cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy in the treatment of depression (Watson, Gordon, Stermac, Kalogerakos, & Steckley, 2003)
- Experiential therapy of depression: Differential effects of client-centered relationship conditions and process experiential interventions (Greenberg & Watson, 1998)
Training Materials and Workshops
- Emotion Focused Therapy Clinic at York University
- International Society for Emotion Focused Therapy (isEFT)
Related Diagnosis
Depression
EST Status
N/A
2015 EST Status
Treatment pending re-evaluation
1998 EST Status
Modest