Transdiagnostic Emotion-Focused Therapy: A Clinical Guide for Transforming Emotional Pain

This empirically grounded, clinical guide for transdiagnostic emotion-focused therapy describes techniques used to transform the deep core emotional vulnerability—sadness, loneliness, shame, and fear—that underlies the diagnostic clusters of depression, anxiety, and related disorders.

Emotion-Focused Therapy is an effective transdiagnostic treatment for the common symptoms that underlie depression, anxiety, and other related disorders. Given the high comorbidity of mental health symptoms and our growing understanding of psychopathology, transdiagnostic treatments are becoming more and more common. This book conceptualizes Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) as a transdiagnostic approach for treating a variety of mental health problems by accessing and transforming the underlying vulnerability of the core emotional pain and, in light of this, examining clusters of symptoms such as anxiety.

The authors use elements of a modular approach that is the culmination of a decade-long research program. They target some symptom-level presentations, as well as the underlying emotional vulnerability that manifests in depression, anxiety, and other related disorders. This approach integrates a range of symptom-level EFT tasks, including tasks aimed at facilitating regulation of emotional distress, as well as tasks that specifically target self-worrying, rumination, perfectionism, and other discrete symptoms. Strategies that target clusters of symptoms, such as two-chair dialogues and self-interruption, are illustrated through richly detailed session transcripts.

This book helps mental health professionals enable their clients to access emotional vulnerability, facilitate emotional regulation, guide emotional transformation processes, and engage in healthy interpersonal experiences.

Ladislav Timulak, PhD, is course director of the Doctorate in Counselling Psychology at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. In addition, Ladislav (“Laco”—read “Latso”) is involved in various psychotherapy trainings in Ireland and internationally. Laco is both an academic and practitioner. His main research interest is psychotherapy research, particularly the development of emotion-focused therapy (EFT). He currently is developing this form of therapy as a transdiagnostic treatment for depression, anxiety, and related disorders. He has written or cowritten seven books, more than 90 peer reviewed papers, and various chapters in both his native language, Slovak, and in English. His most recent books include Transforming Emotional Pain in Psychotherapy: An Emotion-Focused Approach (2015); Transforming Generalized Anxiety: An Emotion-Focused Approach (with James McElvaney; 2018); and Essentials of Descriptive-Interpretive Qualitative Research: A Generic Approach (with coauthor Robert Elliott), published by the American Psychological Association (2021). He serves on various editorial boards and, in the past, coedited Counselling Psychology Quarterly. He maintains a part-time private practice.

Daragh Keogh, DCounsPsych, is an assistant professor in the School of Psychology, Trinity College Dublin, Ireland. He is a counseling psychologist, a certified EFT therapist, and a psychotherapy researcher with a particular interest in EFT and emotional change processes. He has been trial manager on three trials investigating the efficacy of EFT. He directs the Institute of Emotion-Focused Therapy Ireland, where he maintains a private practice working with children, adolescents, and adults.