Forming an Initial Therapeutic Focus and Case Formulation

One of the greatest challenges in the early stages of therapy is determining what to focus on. While clients often present with symptoms such as anxiety, depression, relationship difficulties, or feeling stuck, these concerns are frequently maintained by deeper emotional processes that lie outside of awareness. While it is easy to follow the client into their stories, narratives, and secondary emotional reactions, it is not as easy to co-identify the client’s core problem underlying their presenting issues. Helping clientsbecome aware of the underlying emotional issues that are central to their suffering is therefore a fundamental step in identifying what needs attention in therapy and establishing a therapeutic focus. 

This workshop teaches how to collaboratively establish an initial therapeutic focus on core, unhelpful emotional processes and co-develop an emotion-focused case formulation during the first few sessions of treatment. Through clinical discussion and analysis of therapy videos, participants will observe how experienced EFT therapists collaboratively identify the core emotional processes underlying clients’ difficulties, establish a shared therapeutic focus, provide marker-based psychoeducation and emotion-focused rationales, and use this understanding to guide treatment.

For therapists who are newer to EFT 

With the purchase of this workshop, participants will automatically receive 2-month access to a 3-hour recorded workshop with Dr. Leslie Greenberg introducing Emotion Focused Therapy. We recommend watching this recorded workshop before attending as it reviews foundational knowledge and skills to work with emotion in psychotherapy.

Learning Objectives

In this workshop, participants will learn how to: 

• Establish a collaborative therapeutic focus during the initial stages of therapy. 
• Distinguish presenting concerns from the underlying emotional processes maintaining clients’ difficulties. 
• Facilitate emotional awareness to identify clients’ core emotional pain. 
• Provide an emotion-focused rationale that helps clients understand the source of their distress. 
• Collaboratively connect the presenting problem with core painful emotion and the client’s current presenting issues and difficulties. 
• Develop an initial EFT case formulation to guide treatment.