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Dr. Robert Elliott, Co-Founder of Emotion Focused Therapy received his doctorate in clinical psychology from the University of California, Los Angeles, and taught clinical psychology at the University of Toledo (Ohio) for nearly 30 years; during that time, in collaboration with Leslie Greenberg and Laura Rice, he developed Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT).
He is Professor Emeritus of Counselling in the School of Psychological Sciences and Health at the University of Strathclyde and where he directed its research clinic and taught counselling research and EFT. He currently lives in Northern California, where he is busy with various EFT-related writing projects as well as conducting EFT trainings internationally and supervising and guiding EFT supervisors. His central interest is the change process in humanistic-experiential psychotherapies.
He is co-author of Facilitating emotional change (1993), Learning process-experiential psychotherapy (2004), Research methods in clinical psychology (3rd ed., 2015), and Developing and Enhancing Research Capacity in Counselling and Psychotherapy (2010), Emotion Focused Counseling in Action (2021), as well as more than 150 journal articles and book chapters. He is past president of the Society for Psychotherapy Research, and previously co-edited the journals Psychotherapy Research, and Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies.
He is a fellow in the divisions of Clinical Psychology, Psychotherapy, and Humanistic Psychology of the American Psychological Association. In 2009 he received the Distinguished Research Career Award of the Society for Psychotherapy Research, and the Carl Rogers Award from the Division of Humanistic Psychology of the American Psychological Association. He enjoys running, science fiction and all kinds of music.
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What Is Emotion Focused Therapy?
Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) has evolved in recent years to have a significant impact on the field of psychotherapy. Its increasing popularity and the growing support for its efficacy with a wide variety of problems have made EFT an important approach to psychotherapy treatment. Emotion Focused Therapy is an empirically-supported humanistic treatment that views emotions as centrally important in human functioning and therapeutic change. EFT involves a therapeutic style that combines both following and guiding the client’s experiential process, emphasizing the importance of both relationship and intervention skills. It views emotion as the fundamental datum of human experience while recognizing the importance of meaning making, and views emotion and cognition as inextricably intertwined.
EFT proposes that emotions themselves have an innately adaptive potential that if activated can help clients change problematic emotional states or unwanted self experiences. This view of emotion is based on the view, now gaining ample empirical support, that emotion at its core is an innate and adaptive system that has evolved to help us survive and thrive.
Emotions are connected to our most essential needs. They rapidly alert us to situations important to our well-being. They also prepare and guide us to take action towards meeting our needs. Individuals and couples benefit from therapy with the help of an empathically attuned relationship with their therapist, who seeks to help them to better identify, experience, explore, make sense of, transform, and more flexibly manage their emotions. As a result, persons receiving EFT treatment become stronger and are more skillful in accessing the important information and meanings about themselves and their world that emotions contain, and become more skillful in using that information to live vitally and adaptively.
