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.