There are many types of psychotherapy.  Some are focused mostly on relationships.  Some are focused on making irrational thoughts more rational.  Some are focused on unraveling trauma.  I could go on and on but the point is there are many ways to do therapy and get effective results.

I’ve spent many years studying, training and getting mentored in many of the modern approaches to therapy.  For those that are familiar with the world of psychotherapy the main types I’ve trained in are:

• Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT)
• Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT)
• Somatic Experiencing
• Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT)

What I know to be true about effective therapy can be boiled down to one sentence.  

In order for therapy to be truly effective it has to be experiential.

By experiential I mean it has to move beyond the surface level of just talking about the struggles and problems.  As some of my past clients have said after doing some significant work themselves, “venting is not enough.”  

It’s essential to go beyond all the thoughts and mental understanding about what is causing you stress and to be able to drop down into the deeper emotional layers.  

My experience has shown me that Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) is the type of therapy that hits the sweet spot for me to be able to help people to learn how to touch into these deeper levels, work through the uncomfortable emotions and then to transform old self-defeating patterns.  So EFT is mostly what I am doing with my clients. 

Please note there is another EFT out that stands for Emotional Freedom Technique that is based on tapping.  That is something separate.

Emotion Focused Therapy does what the name suggests.  It’s a therapy that helps people to accept, express, regulate, make sense of and transform emotions.  I’ll explain what all this means & you should care about having the ability to do all these things yourself.  Here’s a summary of how to understand what that looks like.

4 Steps to Healing & Emotional Maturity

Therapy can be a mysterious thing to try to understand before you start.  It’s normal for people to feel anxious from not knowing what to expect or have a concern that they won’t know how to use therapy well. 

While it’s normal to feel uncertain or anxious, it’s my job to be the guide so that my clients get the most out of their experience.  Part of that is knowing what to expect.  In order to help do that I’ll break down therapy into four phases.

Phase 1 | Asleep
Phase 2 | Aware
Phase 3 | Active
Phase 4 | Able

Unconscious of Your Emotional Patterns

This first stage is called asleep because the struggles are mostly unconscious.  In this state you know everything is not okay but are left with very basic ideas of what is wrong. 

You’re stuck in your negative patterns and things seem hopeless.  Other people, the world or bad luck feel like the problem from this place.  You are unconscious of your self-sabotaging because you’re unconscious of your emotional patterns.  

This phase tends to end when the pain of staying stuck outweighs the pain of being honest with yourself and taking the risk of letting go of your crutches and distractions.

Waking Up to Your Emotional Patterns

At some point, you become no longer willing to bear the pain of staying stuck and that moves you into this phase.  This is the stage where most people are when they begin therapy.

In this phase, you start to develop self-awareness of how you're caught in your personal self-defeating patterns.

It's much easier to see how other people get in their own way compared to seeing those factors in ourselves.  However, once you take steps toward getting honest with yourself and opening up then a big shift can happen.  This leads to the primary task of this 2nd phase.

Task | Identify the Stuck Patterns

One way someone can become aware of being caught in a stuck pattern is to see that something familiar seems to keep happening.  The stresses are not random. 

A prime place you can see your stuck patterns is in relationships.  Recognizing that there’s a recurrent pattern helps someone see that often it’s not just other people mistreating them, they in fact have a part in it.  You can find some specific examples here.

Whether it’s through therapy or self-help, a big shift can happen in becoming conscious of your negative patterns.  It could be things like recognizing anxiety that is crippling your potential, recurrent patterns that make for bad relationships or possibly negative and critical self-talk that keeps your confidence down.  

Here are some of the common patterns that I am skilled at helping clients work through.

• • The “I can’t trust you” pattern (mistrust & abuse)

• • The “I’ll never get the love I need” pattern (disconnection & rejection)

• • The “It’s never quite good enough” pattern (perfectionistic standards)

• • The “I always do it your way” pattern (self-sacrificing & approval seeking)

• • The “I’m worthless” pattern (defectiveness & shame)

• • The “I’m inadequate” pattern (failure)

• • The “something horrible is going to happen” pattern (vulnerability to harm)

• • The “please don’t leave me” pattern (abandonment)

• • The “I don’t fit in” pattern (social exclusion)
    
    
  • The "I can't make it on my own" pattern (dependence)

Starting to see these patterns in your everyday life is the first step to getting unstuck from them.  The awareness alone starts to shift things.  The skills to change the patterns in a meaningful way come later, in the next phase.

Healing Your Emotional Wounds

The active phase is when transformation happens.  With increased self-awareness you’re now ready to get to the root of the symptoms.  

This brings us to the three primary tasks of this phase.

Getting to the Root Causes
The symptoms (anxiety, depression, insecurity, etc) are what bring people to treatment.  They are the outer layer of the onion, not the root cause of someone’s pain and struggles.  Spending your time and energy on trying to fix or control the symptoms is a natural impulse but it typically doesn’t work in the long term.  It’s a perpetual game of whack-a-mole. 

A good analogy is how a gardener takes care of weeds in their garden.  If your garden is overrun with weeds and you simply pull the weeds at the surface level then the garden will look neat and tidy for a short time.  Eventually though, they’ll be back since the roots were left alone.

Just like if a gardener takes the time to dig out the roots of the weeds, if you focus on getting to the roots of your stuck patterns you are much more likely to make significant and lasting change.

This is a unique process for each person but here are three primary tasks this phase usually includes.

Task 1 | Building Emotional Regulation

One of the core reasons someone stays stuck is because they have underdeveloped emotional regulation skills.  When stress becomes too much it dysregulates the nervous system which can lead to two main patterns…

1 | Overwhelmed
When stress starts to get the best of you you can lose the ability to calm down and become overwhelmed.  This is the zone of anxiety, panic, anger and overwhelm associated with the ‘fight-and-flight’ response and desire for control. 

2 | Shut Down
The other route this can go is to shut down.  This is the zone of depression, emotional numbing, distraction and isolation associated with the freeze response and the desire to avoid.

Dysregulation makes it so some form of short-term relief will get chosen over what’s actually effective in the big picture.  This is the core issue with emotional eating and all forms of addiction as well (alcohol, drugs, workaholism, sex addiction, etc).

Task 2 | Building Emotional Awareness

In simple terms, emotional awareness is being able to notice and describe emotions that you experience.  This sounds easy but most people are surprised at how hard it can be to try to name what they are actually feeling when they’re under stress.

Building this awareness to be able to notice and the vocabulary to name what you are actually feeling beyond “bad”, “stressed”, or “like crap” is a key step in processing and developing emotional maturity.  

Once you can let go of the control tower of the mind and drop down into the body to feel your feelings you’ll also begin to see that emotions have layers.  Getting underneath the surface level of your emotions and into the deeper layers will help you to finally get a sense of what keeps your stress and struggles going.

Task 3 | Healing Toxic Self-Talk

All of us are our own worst enemies, our own worst critics.  When you really stop to listen to what you are telling yourself regarding these places in your life where you are stuck you’ll see a very dysfunctional and abusive conversation happening inside.

Until this is addressed and healed the underlying layers of the self-defeating cycle will keep going and continue to keep you battling with yourself.

The New Normal

In the final phase, you support and reinforce the new sense of self that has emerged so that it becomes the new normal for how you feel about yourself and interact with others.  

By this point, you’ve done all the hard work and can shift out of actively working on your emotional life and into maintenance mode.  This is where you are able to effectively navigate life’s challenges without slipping back into self-defeating patterns.  This is not a difficult task because these patterns no longer have the appeal they used to have.  Of course, life will continue to surprise you with challenges but you’ll have a very good sense of the traps to avoid so that you can continue to adapt and grow as a person.