Our Journey
While Katherine’s (Founder & Clinic Director) earlier training was primarily focused on a modality called Dialectical Behaviour Therapy (DBT) and Tara’s (Clinic Co-founder) earlier training was mainly in Cognitive Behavioural Therapy (CBT), both Katherine and Tara independently felt the need to create deeper change with their clients. They both learned, in their separate corners, that Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) created the profound change they were seeking. The change that EFT created went beyond symptom management. It created a shift in deep-rooted emotions that can at times originate from the past, and come out strongly in the present. This shift ultimately freed clients from the need to manage symptoms entirely (we know, it sounds almost impossible, but it is the case). Katherine and Tara then received intensive training in EFT for years by the early pioneers of the intervention. They have now come together to create this program at eFIT, with the aim of helping members maximize their well-being and make EFT more accessible.
How Does EFT Work?: Understanding that not all Emotions are Created Equal
To understand EFT, the first step is recognizing that all emotions are not created equal. In fact, there are different kinds of emotional experiences. For example, some emotions are what we call “secondary emotions”. These are emotions that essentially come from other emotions. As an example, if my partner is deep in their work and doesn’t respond to me when I tell them something, I might feel angry towards them. It may be the case (though we can’t say for certain) that my anger comes from a deeper emotional experience – maybe a feeling of shame (like I’m not of value, or not enough), or aloneness (like I’m dangling in this world on my own, perpetually unseen). We call those deeper emotions “primary emotions”.
Sometimes those primary emotions live in us from the past and get activated in the present. As an example, maybe I’m used to feeling not enough or deficient (a feeling called “shame”), because of messages that my father gave me (which could have been overt messages, or might have even been implied based on his actions). If this is the case, when that feeling of not being enough comes up in the present when my partner didn’t respond to me, that painful feeling of shame can almost feel radioactive (so unbearable), in turn leading me to feel that anger, almost to protect me from that deeper pain.
While many therapy interventions would address my anger, in this case through direct anger management strategies (take a pause before responding, etc.), EFT does something different. EFT addresses that shame underneath the anger, by shifting emotion with emotion (we’ll talk about that process later). Once that shame evolves, the anger naturally dissipates. There are many secondary emotions that have deeper emotional roots. Anxiety is often a secondary emotion (frequently coming from a deeper feeling of powerlessness), and depression, believe it or not, is also often a secondary response (not always, but usually coming from a deeper feeling of shame, like there’s something wrong with me). Secondary responses can hijack our lives, but they’re not the root.
There is one more kind of emotion, which so often gets overlooked in other kinds of therapies – healthy emotional experiences. Healthy emotional experiences, or “adaptive emotions”, make complete sense to feel in light of our circumstances. Feeling profound sadness when my dog died, feeling angry when I experience a micro-aggression, are examples of adaptive emotions. Adaptive emotions should be felt. The thing about adaptive emotions is that when we feel several of them all at once (which is a very common experience), it can feel overwhelming. In EFT we work to give space to and even amplify each adaptive emotion separately, which ultimately brings a sense of relief.
Our Group Therapy Program
We’re truly on a mission to make EFT more accessible to both health-care seekers and health-care practitioners, to help as many people as possible create meaningful psychological change and find a way out of suffering. We originally began conducting EFT in groups because it was…. pragmatic – we could help more people with our time to create that profound change we were looking for. What we saw from this work, though, surprised us. Group therapy seemed to help create deep emotional shifts more quickly than what we were seeing in individual therapy. We’re not 100% sure why, but we’ve started doing research to look into it. It might be how focused we are in a group setting, the powerful feeling of being seen and understood by the other group members, the clarity of self-understanding that emerges from observing others’ processes, the fact that two psychologists put their heads (and hearts) together to help each individual (instead of one), or a combination of all of these things.
Our group therapy program at eFIT is designed to help members progress through a phased process. It usually takes about six months to a year to move through the process and experience that lasting shift in deep-rooted emotional schemas that we’re after. But everyone goes at their own pace and graduates when they are ready. It is the deepest and hardest work you will ever do. We believe it is worth it
Phase 1: Innermap Group
The innermap group is designed to help create a sense of profound self-understanding. Each week we address a situation that brought up negative emotions in your life, and we unpack it fully. We want it to be extremely clear to you and to us what emotions get activated regularly, and what kinds of emotions they are (using the terms described earlier, we explore if they are “secondary”, “primary”, or “adaptive”?). Most of the time all three kinds of emotions come up in any given situation and untangling this gives a sense of relief (and sometimes even some distance from those secondary emotions that we feel so strongly).
It is almost always the case that the same primary emotions (those emotions that stem from the past, like a feeling of not being good enough), tend to come up time and time again in our lives, at the deepest layer of our experience. We spend a lot of time in this group exploring where these emotions came from, given what we’ve gone through in our lives. There’s always a reason, even if it might not be immediately apparent.
Spending that time understanding every member’s unique “innermap” on a situation-to-situation basis not only offers our members an immediate sense of relief in the emotional clarity, but also helps us as therapists to understand you deeply. It gives us a roadmap of exactly what core painful (primary) emotions need shifting. We directly target these emotions in the next group, with the benefit of all the understanding that we’ve now developed.
Phase 2: Trauma and Emotional Processing Group
With the groundwork now paved, in the Trauma and Emotional Processing Group we engage in the work of directly shifting those deepest emotions that are at the route of our suffering. We see it as directly trying to pull out the pillar blocks in a Jenga tower of emotions. Once we move those pillar blocks around and finally pull them out, all the secondary emotions and coping strategies that come from them tend to crumble.
How though do we shift these deeply engrained emotions, like feeling I’m deficient (shame), or feeling shaky in the world (powerlessness)? How (the hell!?) do we shift these emotions that have their roots in the very core of who we are? This is where EFT thrives. We transform emotion with emotion. EFT is based on the premise that certain emotions are incompatible with other emotions. As an example, if I carry a feeling of shame (like I’m deficient in some way) routed in the abuse I endured as a child from my father, this feeling is actually incompatible with certain adaptive emotions connected to my trauma. It’s bizarre to think about, but it is actually impossible to simultaneously feel shame (a feeling that there was something wrong with that child) and say, healthy sadness or anger (feeling for what that child went through and recognizing that what happened to them was wrong). We don’t force it (that’s a pet peeve of ours from other therapy approaches) – but EFT has empowered us to work with you to access these healthy emotions related to your past, as difficult as it often is. Once these healthy emotions are accessed, those core painful emotions, like shame, do, in fact, evolve. The Jenga tower crumbles.
