Middle Phase of Therapy: Working with Blocks to Allowing and Expressing Emotion
In the second phase of therapy, once therapists have ensured that clients feel enough support and safety to enter into their painful emotional experiences, the next step is to activate and deepen these painful and problematic unhealthy emotional experiences. Working with avoidance and blocks to accessing emotion is an important task of working with depressed clients, and clients in general. Blocks to allowing emotional experience occur during the early and middle phases of therapy and need to be addressed directly, so that primary unhealthy emotion schemes can be accessed and worked with. For example, once safety was established in the therapeutic relationship and John had some skills for regulating himself, he still reported that he found it difficult to stay with his painful feelings in therapy as he expresses frustration with how he stops himself from going into his painful feelings, “I desperately want to and need to go there, but my body just shuts down.” In EFT these emotional blocks are called self-interruptions, often longstanding and initially healthy, having developed from painful, early developmental experiences. Over time, these self-interruptions become automatized actions in which people stop themselves from feeling and expressing their emotions. Working with blocks and interruptions to accessing and expressing emotional experience is related to the emotion utilization principles of awareness, and expression.
The therapist helps John work through his self-interruption by responding empathically to his fears and using a two-chair enactment for self-interruption, where clients become aware of how they stop their emotions as well as the current painful impact of this, which is now longer helpful or adaptive; this process helps them to de-automatize the interruption and allow their emotional experience to be felt in awareness and expressed. John describes the interruption more specifically, “I can only get so far. I am afraid to let myself go there… I am afraid I will get swallowed up. … My body stops. It’s like a blind comes down and says, ‘that’s a window to hell, and that’s enough of that!”’ After enacting the interruption, the therapist helps guide John to experience the painful impact of having his feelings interrupted: “What’s it like inside to have this part stop you from feeling every time you want to work on your childhood?” John says tearfully, “it is painful, it’s like the key to stop my suffering is behind the blind, and I won’t have a chance if I can’t go there, and I just want a chance to feel better.” He expresses the healthy need to the interrupting part of himself tearfully, “I just need you to give me a chance to go there and to trust that it will be okay.” In response, the interrupting part of him starts to soften and responds, “I’m just trying to protect you from getting hurt, and I don’t want to hold you back from feeling better… maybe it would be okay.” The therapist provides psychoeducation and a rationale about the experiential in-session work, and collaborates on between-session awareness and practice work that would be helpful, linking the proposed homework to the current in-session work:
T: I can see from our work today how painful it is that you stop yourself from experiencing your emotions, and today you were able to really bring alive how that part of you stops you from going into your painful feelings.
C: Yes, I didn’t even realize I was doing that.
T: Mmmm Hmmm. It makes so much sense that you needed this protective part to protect you from going into your feelings as your childhood was so painful. But now, as you said, it’s holding you back from going forward, but it almost doesn’t know how to behave any differently.
C: Yes, I want to move forward….
T: … If it fits for you, over the course of the week, can you try to pay attention to when you stop yourself, and try to be aware of what the part that interrupts you is saying? And, how that makes you feel? Today in the session, you said that it was very painful, and that pain is so important to listen to …. That part that feels the pain of being interrupted doesn’t usually have a voice and it’s important to hear what it feels and what it needs …. Also, we have been talking about fostering an attitude of acceptance and curiosity towards your feelings. If it fits, can you practice being accepting and curious towards the part that gets interrupted, recognizing that it has an important message? … We can continue to work on this next week.
C: Yes, sounds good
The following session, John reported a greater awareness of the part of himself that interrupts him as well as the pain caused by it and starts to explore the origins of the self-protection needed in his childhood. A few more in-session dialogues are facilitated, and John starts to feel less blocked and to allow and express his feelings; other related between-session exercises are co-constructed and tailored to John’s moment-by-moment in-session process.