History and Development

EFT was developed primarily by Leslie Greenberg. A humanistic approach to treatment, it is designed to help people better accept, regulate, understand, and express their emotions. Greenberg did not set out to develop the approach intentionally. Rather, he studied how people change. The process of the treatment's development encompassed more than four decades. The first related materials were published in 1979. 

EFT is an empirically-based approach that draws from principles of cognitive behavioral, person-centered, and Gestalt therapies. It also incorporates aspects of Piaget's studies on how people solve problems. When directed toward treating a couple, EFT also references interactional systemic perspectives.

What is Emotion-Focused Counselling? (Elliott & Greenberg, 2021) 

Emotion-Focused Counselling (EFC), more commonly called Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT), is a contemporary form of the Person-Centred-Experiential (PCE) Approach, and has as its most important sources Carl Rogers' and Fritz Perls' deeply humanistic visions of therapeutic change.

EFC is, as its label clearly says, focused on emotion, not emotion as an abstract entity, but emotions in all their concrete, embodied, messy confusion, including the range of our immediate, moment-by-moment emotions: the small, subtle ones as well as the big, powerful ones. Emotions fill our lives and give them meaning, flavour and direction. Without emotions, we strongly believe, life would be colourless, empty and without meaning.

EFC is a humanistic therapy, embodying centuries of humanistic values, such as authenticity, growth, self-determination, creativity, equality, and pluralism. These values have often put humanists at odds with authority and power structures, but in their hearts humanistic therapists want to help their clients live fuller, more meaningful lives of mature interdependence with others (Fairburn, 1952; Lewin, 1948).

EFC is an integrative approach, pulling together key forms of practice from across the humanistic therapy tradition, including not just the Person-Centred approach of Carl Rogers (1951, 1957, 1961), but also the dramatic, active approach of Psychodrama (Moreno & Moreno, 1959) and Perls' Gestalt therapy (1969; Perls, Hefferline, & Goodman, 1951). Other key humanistic influences are existential psychotherapy (e.g., Schneider & Krug, 2017), with its focus on what is most important in lived, human existence, and narrative therapy (Angus & Greenberg, 2011), which recognizes the key role of context, story, and story-telling for human beings.

Finally, EFC is evidence-based. It emerged out of the careful study of how clients change in sessions and is supported by a strong and growing base of outcome research, both quantitative and qualitative (see reviews by Elliott, Watson, Greenberg, Timulak, & Freire, 2013; Elliott, Watson, Timulak, & Sharbanee, in press; Timulak, Iwakabe, & Elliott, 2019). This also includes the development of a wide range of useful research tools that can be used to support practice and evidence-based models of how clients accomplish specific kinds of work in sessions.

Greenberg, L., & Elliott, R. (2021). Emotion-Focused Counselling in Action. SAGE Publications Ltd