Linking Experiential And Systemic Perspectives - EFT Couple Therapy Switzerland

Experiential and systemic approaches both: (more than one correct answer)

Focus on process, inner and outer. Inner and interpersonal realities are fluid systems constantly in the process of being constructed, not fixed entities.

Both focus on the present more than on how the past determines the present.

Both view people and systems as stuck rather than deficient or sick.

Both espouse joining with clients in a respectful, collaborative alliance.

Both focus on triangulation and hierarchies.

Write out in the space below, in your own words, what experiential and systemic approaches add to each other that helps the EFT therapist.

In summary, when experiential and systemic perspectives are put together, the primary theoretical assumptions of EFT are: (more than one correct answer)

All relationship behavior is about attachment. Secure attachment will ensure that no difficult conflicts occur in a relationship.

Emotion is key in organizing inner relational experience and interactions with loved ones, making it an essential target of intervention.

Working with emotional communication also offers the most powerful route to significant change in love relationships.

Attachment theory offers the couple therapist a much needed, coherent, and in-depth map to the territory of adult love.

People’s needs and desires are essentially healthy and adaptive. It is the disowning and constriction of these needs that becomes problematic.

Change involves new emotional experience and new attachment-oriented interactions.

The most powerful route to change is through catharsis, insight, or negotiation skills.

An accepting and nonpathologizing stance is most productive in therapy, and all three of the forerunners of EFT—Rogers, Bertalanffy (or his clinical translator, Minuchin), and Bowlby—actively promoted this.

To stress the nonpathologizing nature of EFT, please link up the following quotes to the forerunners of EFT. Are these the statements of Rogers, the father of experiential approaches; Minuchin and colleagues, systemic therapists; or John Bowlby, the father of attachment theory? Link each statement with a person.

Most often, even negative attachment models, where the self is seen as unlovable
and/or others are seen as untrustworthy are not neurotic “projections” but “perfectly
reasonable constructions” that are adaptive in a particular context. Hopefully they
are then updated and revised. Who said this?
If the therapist is accepting and empathic then the client finds that he is “daring
to become himself.” This results in clients becoming “more self-directing and more
self-confident” and open to emotion that leads to the “discovery of unknown elements
of the self.” Who said this?
“Different contexts call forth different facets of self.…Expanding contexts allows
for new possibilities to emerge.” Changing people’s “position” in a system changes
their subjective experience. Who said this?
“When I accept myself as I am, then I change.” Who said this?

In terms of theory construction and how EFT theory links with empirical evidence, identify and check the correct answers.

In terms of descriptions of marital distress and satisfaction, the experiential foci of EFT—emotions and interactional patterns, such as criticize/distance—fit with recent research.

In terms of predictions of relationship change, especially how to improve distressed relationships, empirical evidence is strong for EFT interventions being on target and powerful.

In terms of explanation, the attachment perspective on adult love has considerable and growing empirical support.

Empirical evidence is not necessary for our ways of seeing relationships, predicting change, and understanding relationships to have a basis in empirical research. All realities are relative and arbitrarily constructed.