Transdiagnostic Emotion-Focused Therapy: A Clinical Guide for Transforming Emotional Pain

This empirically grounded, clinical guide for transdiagnostic emotion-focused therapy describes techniques used to transform the deep core emotional vulnerability—sadness, loneliness, shame, and fear—that underlies the diagnostic clusters of depression, anxiety, and related disorders.

Emotion-Focused Therapy is an effective transdiagnostic treatment for the common symptoms that underlie depression, anxiety, and other related disorders. Given the high comorbidity of mental health symptoms and our growing understanding of psychopathology, transdiagnostic treatments are becoming more and more common. This book conceptualizes Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) as a transdiagnostic approach for treating a variety of mental health problems by accessing and transforming the underlying vulnerability of the core emotional pain and, in light of this, examining clusters of symptoms such as anxiety.

The authors use elements of a modular approach that is the culmination of a decade-long research program. They target some symptom-level presentations, as well as the underlying emotional vulnerability that manifests in depression, anxiety, and other related disorders. This approach integrates a range of symptom-level EFT tasks, including tasks aimed at facilitating regulation of emotional distress, as well as tasks that specifically target self-worrying, rumination, perfectionism, and other discrete symptoms. Strategies that target clusters of symptoms, such as two-chair dialogues and self-interruption, are illustrated through richly detailed session transcripts.

This book helps mental health professionals enable their clients to access emotional vulnerability, facilitate emotional regulation, guide emotional transformation processes, and engage in healthy interpersonal experiences.