Emotion Focused Therapy with Dr. Melissa Harte

It is with sadness that Dr. Harte has recently passed away. Dr Harte was a leader and educator of Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT), an evidenced based therapy mainly used to help people with emotional injury and trauma. Dr. Harte walked us through the identification of emotions during therapy (there are 7 primary emotions, sadness, joy, anger, fear, disgust, interest/curiosity and shame). Dr. Harte explained how a trained therapist emotionally tunes into the feelings of their clients and helps process what they are feeling as well as using other queues to identify the emotions that someone may be experiencing.

For example fear is felt in the solarplex, a restriction in your throat represents words unsaid, weight or pain in your heart represents sadness and a churning or bloating of the stomach is often associated with disgust. Dr. Harte explains how, once identified she helped her clients re-attach meaning to past events and change the future emotional response someone may have as a result of a past trauma.

Dr. Harte new book for clinicians is an excellent professional resource: “Processing Emotional Pain Using Emotion Focused Therapy, A Guide to Safely Working with and Resolving Emotional Injuries and Trauma.”

 

Find Dr. Harte at https://www.melissahartepsychology.com.au/

 

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