The Use of Homework in Emotion-Focused Therapy for Depression
Serine Warwar, Ph.D.
Director, Centre for Psychology and Emotional Health
Director, Greenberg Institute of Emotion-Focused Therapy
Director, Emotion-Focused Therapy Clinic, York University
Mailing Address: 403-1200 Bay Street, Toronto, ON, Canada, M5R 2A5
Email: swarwar@cpeh.ca
EFT (Emotion-Focused Therapy) was developed through the perspectives of modern emotion theory, affective neuroscience, and dialectical constructivism. Although EFT has been assessed for its efficacy in the context of various diagnostic groups, EFT did not originally emphasize diagnostic categorization. Traditionally, EFT was developed as a generic therapy where the therapist is attuned to a client’s presenting difficulties and underlying pain and suffering and uses a process-diagnostic lens, that is what is happening moment-by-moment, to determine which interventions would be beneficial in resolving a client’s issues. Due to the demand for research on specific diagnostic populations, EFT was first empirically validated for the treatment of depression in adults. EFT integrates person-centered, gestalt, and existential therapies (Elliott et al., 2004; Greenberg, Rice & Elliott, 1993) and is now recognized as a comprehensive, evidence-based transdiagnostic therapy (Greenberg, 2021; Timuluk and Keogh, 2021), treating a wide range of client populations (individual, couples, families) and many types of emotional issues (Greenberg & Goldman, 2019). It focuses on emotional processing of underlying emotions to transform emotional pain and suffering. Emotional processing has been recognized as an important mechanism of change and has been shown to predict outcome across therapy modalities (for a review, see Pascual-Leone et al., 2016). Emotional processing in EFT involves approaching, accepting, tolerating, symbolizing, regulating, making meaning of, and utilizing or transforming emotions. In therapy, healthy emotions (referred to as adaptive emotions in EFT) are accessed to transform unhealthy (maladaptive) emotion schemes, and this process supports the development of more secure relationships as well as positive identity and relationship narratives (Greenberg, 2015, 2021). Throughout the course of therapy, in-session work and moments of change are consolidated and expanded using homework and experiential teaching guided by the EFT principles of emotional change, the client’s emotional pain and suffering, and the phases of therapy.