(Free Workshop) Emotion Focused Therapy to Resolve Unfinished Business: Foundational Skills

Presenter: Dr. Serine Warwar, Ph.D., Psychologist

Overview

Many clients come to therapy carrying unresolved feelings from painful past relationships. Experiences with parents, caregivers, partners, or other important people may leave lasting feelings of hurt, anger, sadness, shame, grief, or resentment. Even when these experiences happened many years ago, the emotional pain can continue to affect how clients feel about themselves, relate to others, and respond to situations in their lives today. 

In Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT), this unresolved emotional pain is referred to as Unfinished Business. Clients may understand what happened to them and have talked about it many times, yet still feel emotionally stuck. EFT provides therapists with a practical way of helping clients go beyond talking about the past to access, express, and work through the unresolved feelings and needs connected to these important relationships. 

This 3-hour workshop teaches therapists how to work with unresolved feelings from painful past relationships using the Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) empty-chair intervention. Participants will learn how to recognize when a client has unresolved feelings toward a significant person, how to introduce and guide the empty-chair process, and how to help clients access and work through emotions such as hurt, anger, sadness, shame, and grief toward greater emotional resolution. 

Through teaching and detailed review of video-recorded excerpts from real therapy sessions, participants will see how the intervention unfolds in actual clinical practice. The therapeutic process will be slowed down to examine the therapist skills and moment-to-moment interventions involved in helping clients work through unresolved emotional pain. 

No previous experience with Emotion Focused Therapy is required. This workshop is designed as a stand-alone introduction to working with Unfinished Business and is suitable for therapists who want to add an experiential intervention to their clinical practice. 

A recording of the workshop will be available to registrants for 60 days. 

Please note that it may take 15–20 business days for the recording to be sent.
 

Learning Objectives

In this workshop, participants will learn how to: 

• Recognize when unresolved feelings from a past relationship may be contributing to a client’s current emotional difficulties. 
• Understand how unresolved hurt, anger, sadness, shame, grief, and unmet needs can keep clients emotionally stuck. 
• Introduce the empty-chair intervention and provide clients with a clear rationale for working experientially with unresolved feelings. 
• Guide clients through the EFT empty-chair process to access and express unresolved emotions and needs toward a significant person. 
• Use therapist interventions to deepen emotional experience and help clients move beyond simply talking about or understanding the past. 
• Help clients work through unresolved emotional pain and move toward greater understanding, acceptance, and emotional resolution. 
• Apply the empty-chair intervention to their own clinical practice with clients experiencing Unfinished Business.

Contact: [email protected]