Trauma Work in Emotion Focused Therapy
Habibe Aykan, Psychotherapy Institute, Turkey, terapistaykan@gmail.com
Trauma is the result of overexposure of emotional experience that is too much for a person to integrate the emotions of the person’s experience or that is too much to deal with it. Exposure to an overwhelming amount of emotional experience, in other words, exposure to trauma, causes some issues such as the person to have difficulties in emotional regulation (irregulation, avoidance, excessive control), depression, social anxiety, PTSD. Unresolved emotions, unmet needs of the person who has trauma experiences causes many physical and mental symptoms. The needs of the traumatized individual are compatible with the therapeutic goals of emotion-focused therapy. Emotion Focused Therapy especially focuses on enresolved emotions (anger, fear, sadness, shame, and guilt and unmet needs about the abuser (negligent/ occupying other).
Emotion-focused therapy is based on the recognition, acceptance, expression, use, regulation and transformation of emotion. Goals of the therapy are empowering the self, emotion regulation and creating new meanings. Emotion- Focused Therapy offers strategies . Emotion-focused therapy offers strategies that make it possible to work directly with emotional processes to heal the effects of trauma, achieve emotional change, and reprocess traumatic feelings and memories. . In order to change the maladaptive feelings of the client, it is necessary to help them access and discover painful feelingsPeople who have traumatic experiences are prone to avoid from painful experiences. Besides subjective differences, people who have traumatic experiences have serious difficulties in making and keeping trustful relationships. Thats why, it is one of the most important steps in working with the people who have traumatic experiences is making interventions much more slower. Empathic interventions, one of the unique intervention methods of emotion-focused therapy, are used to create therapeutic alliance and trust. Empathic interventions may need to be included more in trauma studies. In a safe environment, it is possible to reach painful experinces by following the client momentarily. By reaching to the maladaptive emotions that occured after traumatic experiences such as fear, avoidance, shame; by helping the client to express the anger of being violated, or a helping him/her to express the sadness of a loss, and helping him/ her to reach the self-soothing resources, it is possible to help the client to have compassion to himself/herself. Travma deneyimi ile oluşan korku, kaçınma, utanç gibi uyumsuz duygulara ulaşarak, ihlale karşı duyduğu öfkeyi, kayıp karşısındaki üzüntüsünü ifade etmesine ve kendini yatıştırma kaynaklarına erişerek danışanın kendine şefkat duymasına yardımcı olunur.
In trauma work, when trauma memories and painful experiences are reached, Emotion Focused Therapy offers tecniques that transform maladaptive emotions to adaptive emotions without re-traumatize the person. In this study, the subtleties of doing trauma work with the unique interventions of emotion-focused therapy will be included.
Keywords: emotion-focused therapy, trauma