Emotion-Focused Family Therapy

This conversation took place the 10th October 2016.
Main Topics were:
1. What is Emotion-Focused Family Therapy
2. What are EFFT distinctive features?
3. What are EFFT clinical Applications ?
4. How difficult can the work with parents be?
5. How is the EFFT training?

Joanne Dolhanty  visits Lisbon in May 2017 for a 4Day workshop training on EFFT. You are welcome!
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Dr. Joanne Dolhanty, PhD, C. Psych, is a supervising and consulting clinical psychologist and trainer for mental health organizations across Canada and internationally. With Dr. Leslie Greenberg she developed the application of Emotion-Focused Therapy to Eating Disorders, and is the co-developer of Emotion-Focused Family Therapy. Her focus is on building capacity and expertise in communities of clinicians. Dr. Dolhanty is known for her lively, warm, and engaging teaching style; for making complex concepts accessible to learning; and for delivering training that facilitates both practice change and personal growth.

Some hits in the conversation:

If you believed you were going to be successful in this treatment program, in recovering from anorexia, you were. If you believed you weren’t, you weren’t
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You guys what is that you feel so not able to do?” And you can guess already... – “Handle the emotions that come back !
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But put that person in the other chair and.. a absolute powerhouse emerges!
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why are we framing self-efficacy has a cognitive variable? Why don’t we frame it as an emotion variable?
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“What happens when you tell the voice to go away, or not obey it?” Everyone will tell the same: “It screams louder!”
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we have never found a parent without an inner voice that says: “You know what you did”. So that conversation, as we know in EFT, is always between the self and the self
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but the real part was .. “process the emotional blocks that keep the parent from engaging in their own natural empathy and natural motivation.”
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And what we found is .. when parents apologized to their children, they forgave
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and he says: “The best gift we can give our children is our own happiness!”
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“If you have a starved anorexic, and a parent whose brain is more or less nourished, which brain would you rather work with?”
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The parent going to their loved one with emotional self-eficacy has power on two levels
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He went in and he said to the nurses: “- Don’t touch the babies. You are now teachers. Teach the parents”.
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when you stop avoiding, when you process emotion, you get healing
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there are three distinct components: recovery or behavior coaching, emotion coaching and relationship repair
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And we know that testosterone and shame don’t go very well together. It’s a toxic combination.
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And it shifts something, because we know the only way to change emotions, is with emotion. Not with lecturing, right?
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“what is the self saying to the self?” Once I hear that conversation, then we have a conversation.
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What would they say? They’ll say: “Please help my dad. Please don’t give up on him.”
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But who is behind the critic, in one way or another? It’s the unfinished business with the parent!
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That’s why I am so obsessed with self-efficacy! If it’s a belief, rather than courage.
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we all think that we know how to validate, but validate again, is simple, but easy not to do!
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Full Transcription and Portuguese version available at Loja Online
Versão em Português disponível na Loja Online