Transformational Therapy Approach: Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT)
The Role of Emotions in Life and in Therapy
Everyone deserves access to effective psychotherapy. All types of therapy can help you feel supported and validated, learn to manage your symptoms, and solve many immediate problems.
We believe that therapy should be transformational.
Therapy should provide profound and lasting healing, not merely manage your symptoms.
For this reason, Dr. Aimee practices an emotion-focused approach to healing. This therapy method takes you beyond the surface level of solving your problems.
types of therapy
Dr. Aimee specializes in the following:
Directly working with emotions can transform how you experience yourself, your relationships, and the world around you.
We don’t view treatment from the medical model’s perspective, which assumes people are broken and need to be fixed.
Instead, we help you increase your emotional skill and fitness, similar to how coaches work with athletes to improve their physical skill and fitness.
Like many people, you may view painful or difficult emotions as something that you need to ignore, forget, or get rid of in some way.
Yet all emotions – positive and negative – are healthy in the sense that they are part of you.
Your emotions help you take steps to get your needs met. They let you know when you’re well-being is threatened, when you need care and attention, and they lead you in positive directions in your life.
When you’re in touch with your emotions and know how to use them to your advantage, they act as wise guides highlighting what is most meaningful to you.
Your emotions can lead you to get in deeper touch with your authentic self and help you create the life you truly want.
THE EFT Process
EFT aims to activate your emotions, to help you to explore them, and in some cases change them. You’ll learn which emotions are adaptive, pointing you towards new experiences and growth.
You’ll also learn to change painful emotions or negative experiences, often residuals from your past, into more positive ones.
During EFT therapy, I will follow and guide your emotional process, emphasizing the quality of our relationship and using EFT skills.
At various times, I’ll walk you through EFT-based emotion exercises designed to deepen your awareness and experience, transform difficult emotions, and give you new ways to relate to yourself.
How Changing Painful Emotions with Emotion Leads to Change
I don’t believe you can change core painful emotions through reason. They are impenetrable to reason.
The way to change a core painful emotion is by having another emotion. The new emotion does not replace the old emotion. It transforms or synthesizes with the old emotion, and then we have a new emotion that we didn’t feel before.
Shame is changed by anger, and what you end up with might be confidence. Fear might be changed by sadness, and what we end up with is calm or relief. One emotion changes another emotion.
– Les Greenberg – Founder of Emotion Focused Therapy
the benefits of efT
EFT is now backed by many research studies showing its effectiveness.
Does the EFT therapy approach seem like it can help you? Book a 20-minute inquiry call with Dr. Aimee.
Together, you’ll decide if it is a good fit. You have nothing to lose and potentially everything to gain.
Dr. Aimee offers sessions in-person in their Washington, DC office and via video teletherapy.