Emotion Focused Therapy with Dr Anna Oldershaw

Welcome to the Business of Psychology podcast. In this series, we're exploring the different ways that psychologists and therapists can work in independent practice. 

One thing I've come to appreciate over the past few years is how beneficial it can be for professional fulfilment and building your personal authority to maintain connections to a university. Dr. Anna Oldershaw is a clinical psychologist working independently and as a reader in clinical psychology at the Salomons Institute for Applied Psychology, which is part of Canterbury Christchurch University, and it's where I trained as a clinical psychologist. I've known Anna for a little while, as we've been working together on the marketing strategy for the emotion focused therapy courses that Anna convenes and teaches on at Salomons. Before I met Anna, I really didn't know very much about EFT, but when I started reading up on emotion focused therapy and I heard Anna describe the difference that it's made to clients, I got really excited about the possibility that it holds, especially for clients that might not get the most benefit from some of the talking therapies. So I'm really pleased to have Anna here today to talk to us about emotion focused therapy, EFT.

Full show notes and a transcript of this episode are available at The Business of Psychology

Links for Anne:

Website: emotionspeaks.co.uk

Email: [email protected]

EFT Links:

Salomons; Emotion Focused Therapy

Emotion Focused Therapy (emotionspeaks.co.uk)

Training in Emotion Focused Therapy (emotionspeaks.co.uk)

The next Core Skills Training runs at Salomons from 17th -20th June 2024 and can be directly booked here. Early bird discount is available until 31st March. 

The Advanced Empathy Workshop which focuses on how we communicate empathy and use our empathic resonance in therapy is useful for those who want to explore how to maximise the impact of their therapist empathy on client process. It is online on 25th and 26th April and can be booked here. 

People can contact the EFT Institute on [email protected]

Passive Income Workshop:

The Passive Income Workshop is happening on Monday the 25th of March at 7pm live.

I'm running the workshop on how to bring passive income into your practice, so you can create more space. It's honest, with no get rich quick promises, but I will share what's worked for me and the many psychologists and therapists that I've supported to bring passive income into their practice. Crucially, I'll also share what you need to have in place to make it work so that you can create a realistic plan.

Don't worry if you can't make it live, there will be a recording, but if you can come along I'll make sure that there is a good chunk of time to answer questions, so you'll leave with a plan to bring more flexibility, financial stability and freedom into your practice. If that sounds good, follow the link and I'll see you there:

Creating passive income in your practice: A guide for psychologists and therapists

Rosie on Instagram:

@rosiegilderthorp

@thepregnancypsychologist

The highlights

• Anna gives us an overview of what her working life looks like at the moment 01:27
• Anna talks about how her interest in EFT began 03:40
• I ask Anna about the similarities between EMDR and EFT 12:38
• Anna talks about the groups that benefit the most from EFT 14:48
• I ask Anna about the availability of EFT 18:26
• We discuss how EFT could work for people who struggle to engage with CBT 20:48
• We talk about the benefits of therapy during training 30:12
• Anna talks about the benefits of training and specialising in this area 33:55
• Anna talks about the challenges and support she has balancing her work 38:44
• Anna tells us about the next training cohort for EFT at Salomons 42:09

Thank you so much for listening to the Business of Psychology podcast. I'd really appreciate it if you could take the time to subscribe, rate and review the show. It helps more mental health professionals just like you to find us, and it also means a lot to me personally when I read the reviews. Thank you in advance and we'll see you next week for another episode of practical strategy and inspiration to move your independent practice forward.

TRANSCRIPT

SPEAKERS

Rosie Gilderthorp, Anna Oldershaw

Welcome to the Business of Psychology podcast. In this series, we're exploring the different ways that psychologists and therapists can work in independent practice. One thing I've come to appreciate over the past few years is how beneficial it can be for professional fulfilment and building your personal authority to maintain connections to a university. Dr. Anna Oldershaw is a clinical psychologist working independently and as a reader in clinical psychology at the Salomons Institute for Applied Psychology, which is part of Canterbury Christchurch University, and it's in fact where I trained as a clinical psychologist. I've known Anna for a little while, as we've been working together on the marketing strategy for the emotion focused therapy courses that Anna convenes and teaches on at Salomons, and I have to confess that before I met Anna, I really didn't know very much about EFT and I actually got it confused with the emotional freedom technique, the kind of tapping one, which I hear a lot about in entrepreneurial circles. But when I started reading up on emotion focused therapy and I heard Anna describe the difference that it's made to clients, I got really excited about the possibility that it holds, especially for clients that might not get the most benefit from some of the talking therapies. So I'm really pleased to have Anna here today to talk to us about emotion focused therapy, EFT. So welcome to the podcast, Anna.

Thanks for having me, Rosie. It's nice to be here.

So I'm really keen to dive into your research and teaching about EFT. But before we do, could you firstly just give us a bit of an overview about what your working life looks like at the moment?

Okay, so my working life. So as you said, I'm employed at the Salomons Institute for Applied Psychology. So I do some teaching on the doctorate in clinical psychology. I do quite a lot of supervision of research, and that's great because I get to have all my research interests involved there. So I do a lot of research into emotion focused therapy and the related theory around emotion focused therapy. I also do training in emotion focused therapy. So we have the Emotion Focused Therapy Institute of England that's housed at Salomons and that's recognised by the international society. So we offer accredited training. So that's usually externally facing, although I do do some teaching on that on the doctorate as well. And then I have a very small private practice of clients and also a bit of supervision that I do, and I also do a bit of training in my private practice as well, outside of EFT.

And how do you find that the two roles complement each other? I mean, do they? Or is it always a struggle?

I think they really do. I, you know, when, when you're working within a particular model, so, using a lot of EFT, I always want to be researching it as well. You know, I don't want to just sort of sit and roll something out. I want to be learning more about it, hopefully moving the field on, so that I feel like doing research as a psychologist is really important and I'm conscious that so few of us do that, and I wish more of us did really, but, yeah, so I love that part of it. It keeps me engaged, it keeps me excited, and it means it keeps me up to date. So when I'm delivering training, I know about the latest research, I know what the developments in the field are, and I can pass those on to the people that I'm training. So I think they go nicely together. And the same would go for therapy. You know, I kind of know what the developments are, so when I'm working with clients, I've got kind of ideas and I'm sort of feeling a little bit more on top of things in terms of what the possibilities that I can offer.

Yeah, I think it's a really lovely balance. I remember feeling that while I was on the doctorate, and this might be controversial, but that felt like my dream job. I couldn't believe I got to do two days in academia and three applied. So yeah, I can totally understand why you'd want to keep that going. Can you say a little bit about how your interest in EFT began?

Yeah. Well, I came to EFT through research, actually. So I, my specialism is in eating disorders. And before I did my clinical training, I did a PhD that was looking at social cognition and emotions for people with anorexia. And I was really interested in that and really interested in how we work with emotion therapeutically. But at that time I wasn't a therapist. So then I went away and I did my clinical training and I continued some of that research. And then after that, I got a fellowship to develop an emotion focused intervention for adults with anorexia. But what I wanted to do was really to build it from the bottom up. So we did a lot of work talking to people with lived experience around what had changed for them, during recovery. So there'd been a lot of work around difficulties with emotion for people with anorexia and how that might compare to healthy people, and also maybe what had changed at the end of therapy, but so little about the process of change. How had they arrived at that change? What had facilitated that? So we did quite a bit of work around that to build this sort of sense of a change process. And then we started to look at, okay, and which therapies would facilitate this change process? And emotion focused therapy was one of the key ones that seemed to really fit with what people were telling us was important for them in terms of change and moving towards recovery from anorexia. So we developed a therapy called Speaks, which draws on emotion focused therapy in particular emotion focused therapy theory, but also pulls on some other therapies as well. So, particularly schema therapy in terms of facilitating a change process. So it was through all of that, that I trained in emotion focused therapy. And then when I trained in it, I loved it. And it felt for me as a therapist, it sort of felt like kind of coming home in a way, because it just felt like a really nice fit for me in terms of how I like to approach my therapeutic work.

That's so interesting. There's so many interesting things to pick up on there. But firstly, just the idea of looking at that process of what makes effective therapy, because I read something recently about kind of differences between the outcomes for different therapists, and they all think they're using the same models, but they're probably doing things in quite a different way. So yeah, what a fascinating topic.

I think that change process research is really important and again, it's one of the things that I really like about emotion focused therapy because that developed very much in that way. So it developed from using tasks from therapy that they developed and looking to see what do people who have good outcomes from those tasks or those therapies do? And what do people who don't have good outcomes do? And literally looking step by step, moment by moment in the therapy session as to what are the steps to resolution of this difficulty and where do people get stuck? And so all of the tasks in emotion focused therapy developed that way from the bottom up by observing client process. So they are very process driven, and change process driven. And I, I think very few, I think we're just so focused on outcome based research and psychotherapy, so few of the therapies actually really know that and look inside, you know, what you might call the black box of therapy. You know, we know where people start, we know where the end, but what goes on in the middle is, is very difficult to, to know about. And yeah, I think so much time has been dedicated to researching that in EFT, and that's one of the things I really value about it as well.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it seems crazy, doesn't it? And we know we've got these big variations between what some therapists output tends to be versus others. Why would we not want to investigate that? Really, really interesting. So, a little bit about what makes EFT different seems to be about the kind of understanding of the process of therapy. Can you say a bit more about what makes EFT distinct from other approaches we might be more familiar with?

Yeah, I mean, I guess an obvious one is the focus on emotion, where other approaches might be coming at things from maybe a more cognitive place. And, you know, that's not to say that we don't think about a sort of cognitions or thoughts or narratives in emotion focused therapy. I mean, I think there's probably some misconceptions about emotion focused therapy. So people often make the mistake that you did, thinking it's about the tapping and the emotion freedom technique. Sometimes people think it's just about making people cry or some kind of cathartic release, or, you know, we're just going to expose people to emotion and then they won't feel it anymore. But it's none of those things. It's actually got quite a specific approach to working with emotions and some of it does overlap with other therapies. So the idea of sort of trying to regulate emotion or accept emotion, there's a lot of overlap there. But one of the things that emotion focused therapy thinks about is it thinks about kind of, it's almost like different sort of levels of emotion that we might have. So it thinks about how we often might come into therapy with what they would call secondary emotion. So that might be anxiety. It might be anger issues, anger difficulties, and really we think about those emotions as being a reaction to an underlying emotion. So, you know, that's sort of the thing, isn't the thing. And so what we want to do is instead of working at that level, although we validate that and, you know, we want to help people to accept and regulate that as I'm talking, you know, as I'm saying that there's an overlap there. We do want to deepen the emotion process to the underlying emotions that are driving those secondary, more symptomatic emotions that people are coming into therapy with.

Interesting. So what are common examples of underlying emotions?

I mean, any emotion can be at any of the levels. So it's not like some emotions are always secondary and some emotions are always primary. But the idea is, is that underneath a secondary emotion are potentially these primary emotions. And primary emotions can come in two forms. So we can have primary, what they call primary maladaptive emotions, and they're really sort of stuck, bad stuck old feelings, the story of my life feelings. Shame is often a really common example of that. And often those feelings are linked to unmet need from childhood and they’re emotions associated with something we learned about ourselves in childhood. And I often think about them as almost being like ghosts, ghosts from the past, and yet are very easily triggered in the present, and yet they're a poor fit for the current situation that we're in. And often we respond to those emotions because they're so painful and so hard to be with, we respond to those emotions with another emotion that covers them up. So we might feel shame, but we, that's very difficult to be there and experience shame, so we feel anger in response to it, much easier to feel anger, get angry with somebody else than to sit with that shame that we're experiencing.

That makes so much sense. And I can see how perhaps in another circumstance, anger could be that underlying emotion that's too frightening to feel, and so that comes out as anxiety or something that's more acceptable to the person.

Yeah. So then what we're trying to do in emotion focused therapy is to deepen the emotional experience to that primary maladaptive emotion and work with that. So essentially that's linked to it, that's really a core pain for somebody. And what we're trying to do is this additional step that I think is perhaps more unique to emotion focused therapy, which is to transform that emotional experience into a more primary adaptive emotion. So perhaps the emotion that the person couldn't feel in that experience when they were a child, you know, it's a, say, for example, abuse, and people end up feeling shame; there must be something wrong with me. Whereas actually, although they couldn't as a child experience this, an adaptive emotion to that is anger. So you can have anger at the top and anger at the bottom, you know, you can have secondary anger, primary maladaptive shame and then primary adaptive anger, self compassion. And so what we're trying to do is to try and take people to that place to the to be able to instead of feeling shame about what happened to feel angry about what happened in a more regulated assertive way to have self compassion for themselves around what happened. And so there's, there's this whole kind of transformation process that we're looking to facilitate.

Yeah, so I mean, and this might be a tricky question, but one of my primary therapies is EMDR, and obviously we call that sort of reprocessing, but it sounds like this is a really similar process in a lot of ways?

Yeah. So people have, have said to me that they, they kind of, in terms of the theory, they can see the overlap with EMDR, and, and I guess some other therapies as well. You know, I think schema therapy also tries to work with kind of underlying feelings in the, in the vulnerable child and sort of work with those. I think what EFT does is it's quite specific in the way that it tries to work with those and process those through a series of kind of different tasks that you bring into the therapy. And the other thing that it does is, and I don't know, I don't know enough about EMDR to know if this is similar or different, but in EFT, we're very closely trying to work with the client's current experience and the current process. So it's a marker driven intervention. And what that means is when people come into the therapy room, we're listening for what's live, what's active for them. So we're listening for markers that would indicate a particular task is relevant and useful to help resolve that presenting difficulty. And then we make a suggestion around, can we try this task? And we work with that specific process. So that's one of the things that I really liked about EFT when I came across it is that it enables me to work very closely with a client's current process, but it is still structured. I feel like I'm offering something that has an evidence base in doing that. And having, you know, joined training, done lots of CBT, done psychodynamic stuff where CBT felt too directive and psychodynamic felt too open. EFT is a really nice balance for me in terms of following and guiding a client and being with them, being very present in that process.

So are there particular groups that you found benefit the most from EFT as opposed to other things you might have used in the past?

I mean, I guess I work across a range of presentations, but primarily for me, I work with people with eating disorders, but there is an evidence base of EFT for people with depression, for people with anxiety, for eating difficulties and, and for other presentations that are associated with, I think, sort of stuck patterns. So, you know, sort of, there is an evidence base also for trauma, complex trauma. So, and some of that is building as well now. So I think where EFT had spent a lot of time doing process research, and then they come to the outcome based research later, but that's coming through thick and fast now. So I, and I think again, one of the nice things I like about it is that because it developed as a series of single sessions, or single tasks, you can offer it as a single session intervention. You know, so if, for example, I was having a bad day and my critic was particularly loud, you could perhaps do a single session intervention with me working with my inner critic and that might be enough for me. But then, so for people with more kind of complex or specific mental health difficulties, you might want to offer something more long term, so like a full protocol based, or you might want to do your existing practice. So if you're doing CBT or maybe EMDR, you can integrate EFT tasks into your existing practice without having to train in the whole model and deliver and say, right, I'm going to do EFT with this person. You can draw on specific tasks. And that's certainly when I first started, how I started integrating it into my practice. So I learned the core skills training, I did that and in that you learn the key to some of the key tasks or the most, um, most widely used tasks. So the chair work with the inner critic being one of those. And I decided just to start with that and find ways to integrate that into my practice. And so I just used to use that task when it felt relevant for people. And there's some research now to show that by using those chair work tasks, although pre to post session change might, is, is large and it's quite similar perhaps to using maybe a CBT task in that session, if you repeatedly use the chair work over time in therapy and keep bringing it in, you end up with better outcomes than if you don't. So I think that shows that actually it can be used in quite a flexible way, across presentations, just going back to your question, you know, I think it, you can bring it in in different ways for different people. And again, I think that's one of the nice things about it. It's not just sort of a whole you have to learn this model for anxiety, for example, and you only only use this particular model, you can be quite flexible in it, which particularly I think when you're working in private practice is useful.

I think that's so helpful because although a lot of us talk about working in an integrative way, and this is something that we talked about when I was at Salomon's, actually a lot of the time what we're actually doing is being eclectic and we're struggling to theoretically integrate all of these different tasks that we might be using from different therapies, because actually I can really see in what you've just described there how you could fit EFT within a, say, you know, EMDR conceptualisation or a CBT or a CFT conceptualisation and, you know, properly integrate the approaches for somebody.

Whilst having the theoretical knowledge around what you're doing and why, because it's very well described.

Yeah, I think that sounds really powerful and not every approach has done that kind of process research that allows you to do that properly. So really exciting. So where are we at with the availability of EFT? You know, are people being offered this on the NHS? Are there many independent practitioners offering it?

I mean, in the UK, EFT is not that well known about. I mean, obviously we've got some very dominant therapy models that tend to be what people train in and I feel like EFT is much less well known about. What is more known about in the UK is the emotionally focused therapy, which is the couples model. So I think there's another thing people say to me, is they get confused between all these different… so there's, we have the emotion focused therapy for individuals, which was the original model, and that's what I'm trained in because I work with individuals, but we have the emotionally focused therapy model which is for couples, which was developed by Sue Johnson with Les Greenberg who developed emotion focused therapy she was his PhD students so that's come out of EFT, but evolved into a model for a specific client group, got emotion focused family therapy, we've got EFT for youth, we've got groups. So there's a lot of different models available and in other places in the world, they're all quite widely used. In the UK, EFT is offered in IAPT services as part of the counselling for depression. So there's an evidence base for that, it's in NICE guidelines. So quite specifically in that context, people will be receiving EFT and I do quite a lot of one day workshop sort of CPD workshops for IAPT services because they feel like they don't get enough training in the EFT bit, and that's the most helpful bit in terms of what they're delivering. So I'll do a one day workshop on a particular task, like to do it with a critic, for example, or I'm doing one in a couple of weeks on emotion regulation and containing. So it's sort of, it's, it's getting out there, but I just feel like it's so well less known and particularly amongst clinical psychologists, as well, which is a shame because as I'm saying, you know, I mean, obviously I'm passionate about EFT, but I'm passionate about it because I'm a psychologist and I find it really useful,so I'd love more people to know about it and to, to look into it and to start using it if they like it.

Yeah, absolutely. And it, it feels like you at Salomons are kind of at the forefront of trying to roll this out and get this. Um, and I think that's, that's more in front of the people that would find it useful. So could you kind of give us a bit of an example of how EFT might work with somebody, perhaps who struggled to engage in CBT, maybe for anxiety, because I'm kind of thinking of a client of mine who I worked with recently, who just didn't relate to the idea that thoughts fueled her emotions. So we started doing like the socialisation to the model bit. And she's just like, no, that is not my experience, my emotions come without the need for thought. So CBT made no sense to her, really. Would somebody like her be a good candidate for EFT and how might that look?

Yeah, I think she would be. I mean, you know, I think Les Greenberg talks about how amygdala based emotion is impenetrable to reason. So, you know, kind of coming at it with reason and cognition often doesn't fit with people's experience. And also EFT comes from a place of thinking about emotion as coming first and then cognition coming after. And, you know, again, it's the first thing we experience in the world is emotion. It's not thought. And so I'd have to say from an EFT point of view, I'd be with your client there, that, you know, her emotions aren't fueled by cognitions, they're fueled by other emotions. So thinking about going back to that model I was talking about, she's coming into therapy with secondary anxiety, this is a secondary emotion, and there's a whole bunch of other emotions going on underneath that that are driving it. And so, broadly speaking, what we want to do over the course of therapy is to help deepen her emotional experience, help her get to that primary maladaptive emotion, associated unmet need, transform that, help her to then get in touch with primary adaptive emotions that can better guide her in her life. So there's lots of nice sayings in EFT. One of them is, every feeling has a need, every need has an action. And one of the problems is if you're being driven by anxiety, that feeling is telling you you need something specific and driving you towards action, which is probably maintaining that feeling, you know, and we think about it like that in CBT as well. But what we want to do in EFT is not then work at that level. We want to work to, to get underneath it, because also probably the shame, say, for example, if there was underlying shame, that's probably giving you unhelpful information about what you really need. It's telling you about unmet needs from the past. It's not telling you about what you need in the now. And so, by helping people to get to primary adaptive emotion, which can give them good information about what they need, and can lead them towards more helpful action in their life to get those needs met, we can start to help people get unstuck. Now what that would look like, in terms of how we do that, so that's broadly across therapy, but also within each therapy session, we'd be looking to try and deepen in the person's emotional experience. And initially, it would probably stay at a level of anxiety for a little while, until we can start to then touch on more of the underlying emotions and start to work with those. Probably with someone with anxiety, we'd probably start off with some chair work, to understand more about that process and what goes on for them and put, you know, the anxiety part in the chair. And, because I would think about anxiety as almost being maybe like sort of a form of a critic, or maybe even a coach, you know, that part that says, you know, you have to worry about this, because if you don't, something awful is going to happen, or make sure you do x, y, z, you know, whatever anxiety behaviours that the person's engaging in. So I'd be sort of looking to start there to understand more about the process, and then be trying to sort of work to deepen their emotional experience. There has actually been an RCT looking at EFT and CBT for generalised anxiety disorder, and they found similar outcomes across the two. So this is, you know, a 16 to 20 session intervention, which is quite typical for the EFT protocols. So quite similar to CBT in length. And they found that, so there were very similar outcomes. One thing that interestingly did find was that there were fewer dropouts from EFT. So about 10, only about 10 percent dropout from EFT versus 27 percent in the CBT group. So. I think it shows that it can be a useful alternative for people who've maybe tried CBT or like your client, CBT just doesn't feel a good fit, it's something that we can offer instead and actually might be a bit more engaging for some people as well.

It's really interesting because there are definitely people thinking back through my career, many, many, many people that have disengaged because they don't relate to the cognitive element of CBT. And I think, I would like to think that I'm pretty flexible as a therapist and I try and find ways around that, but I often feel a bit like I'm not being consistent to a model when I go off and sort of do my own stuff for a while. So actually, you know, thinking about having a model that you can apply and feel like you're offering an evidence based solution that is just bypassing that need to, you know, force somebody to believe in cognition if they don't. It's interesting actually, in the UK3P group today, there was, somebody put a poll up about, do you have an inner monologue?

Oh yeah, I saw that. I voted on it.

Did you? Yeah, I voted on it too. I definitely do, but there's a lot of people that don't. And I wonder if If you don't, surely CBT doesn't make a lot of sense at all. And that's a large proportion of people that might actually either be shamed into pretend compliance, which I have done as a, you know, client. I've definitely just complied with my therapist at times. I don't really get that, but I'm going to pretend I do, or who have dropped out. So for me, it makes a huge amount of sense that we should have a model, which fits those people that feel their emotions first.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think we, we also work in quite a different way in terms of therapeutic relationship in EFT, which is, I think, quite interesting and, and engages people in a different way. So, you know, in CBT, where you're looking at building rapport and there's lots of socratic questioning, in EFT, it's much more about emotional attunement. So really trying to be where your client’s at, We actually ask very few questions, but we're constantly trying to understand experience. So we're sort of chucking ideas out there. So there's this specific training on this called advanced empathy, which is all about sort of doing empathy, communicating empathy in ways that can guide your client's experience or hold their experience in particular ways. And I think, you know, just thinking about your client and about a sense of maybe not really feeling heard in other models, I think that EFT enables something around that to be sort of, people can really feel heard and you can see we're trying really hard to understand their experience as opposed to sort of make sense of, or kind of in a top down way, kind of theorise their experience. We just kind of want to be there in it with them and and really try and help them understand it and put words to it. And you know, there's a specific task about working with unclear feelings, because that comes up a lot. You know, like you're saying, particularly with probably not very clear inner monologues, they just feel all this stuff and they don't know why, and it makes them do stuff, and they don't know why. And so there's specific ways that we can work with that in EFT as well. And, you know, it's really about us trying to understand their experience and them trying to understand their experience. And we're in it together to make sense of it.

Do you know, this is making me think about bravery as a therapist, and how often in some of the approaches that we take, I think the theorising and the intellectualising and the trying to make everything overly cognitive can be a defence for the therapist as well. And actually, the way that you're describing EFT, it sounds like you've really got to allow yourself to be there with the client during some very difficult emotions.

Yeah. Yeah, no, I agree with that. And I think that can make it quite hard as a therapy to deliver in a way because it, you know, it, it requires a lot of us as a human being in that moment, but it's also for me what makes it so rewarding as well. You know, I've got the sort of intensity, the level of relationship that I build with people and the achievement that I have means that it's, you know, that's what makes it really so rewarding for me. And the bravery thing is a really good point. When I, going right the way back to what I was talking about at the beginning, when we were developing this speaks therapy, before we even started, when I was putting together the plan, to try and apply for funding, I did this like really small focus group with people who had lived experience of anorexia, and asking people what they wanted from a therapist. And one of the clients said, I want my therapist to be brave. I want them to be able to name for me the things that I'm struggling to name. And I think unless we can be in that experience with the client and try and feel it too, and we're actively really working hard to put words to something, then we can't do that for people. But it does, it does sort of take a level of being able to be with your own emotions and be willing to do that.

Yeah, it sounds like, you know, I actually, I'll put my hands up and say, I really believe that we should be mandated to have our own therapy during training. Currently, clinical psychologists are not, but it sounds like with this approach, it might be particularly helpful to have that support for yourself through the process.

Yeah. I mean, I think one of the things that we do, so in the training, we don't do role play. So there's loads of time for skills practice, but you bring yourself and we work really hard to try and make it so that, you know, it's a safe place and people go into groups and they stay in those groups and we're facilitating a lot of the time as well. But I think there's something, and I think you learn best by being the client and experiencing what it's like to go through the emotional deepening process and the emotion transformation process, because you realise how powerful it is. And also, I think it can make you that bit braver to offer it to somebody else, because you understand kind of how it works. And I think that is my experience of sometimes people do worry about taking people to their emotions and what will that be like? And, and actually we've got a very clear conceptualisation, there's very clear rationale, there's a very clear sort of steps to go through, which I think helps with that, but also if you've been and you've experienced yourself, and you've realised what a difference it's made, and actually what it's done is reduce the intensity or the difficulty of your emotions and it's not made it, you know, by talking about them, hasn't made them bigger, I think that's really important. So, yeah, I mean, I think actually doing the training is in itself a little bit of therapy as well and I think that's a really important part of the training. One of the things actually people often say to us that they really valued about it was that they sort of had this process of therapy during the training as well, which is not really what it's there for, but yeah, it's, I think it's quite a unique experience to, to sort of go through that. And it makes it, it's one of the reasons why the core skills training is one of my favourite trainings to deliver because we usually bond really well as a group and, everyone sort of tends to exchange numbers at the end and stay in touch. So it's quite an intense four days, but I think that's one of the things that I like about it.

I just think that's so refreshing. I think, certainly, when I started out in psychology, the idea of acknowledging that you had any feelings, it was still really controversial for somebody that wanted to become a psychologist to admit to having any lived experience of any mental health difficulties. I remember being told, oh, you shouldn't talk about that if you want to work in this field, and you know, it had to be incredibly cut off as though we were like this blank slate going into the therapy room. And I'm so pleased that that is shifting and that people are feeling more confident to talk about their own experiences and even recognising what an advantage it is, to you as a therapist to have those experiences. So it's just wonderful to hear that that is part of the training and, you know, to an extent we do that in EMDR training as well. And that's been the most powerful experience. The reason that I'm so confident to offer EMDR, is because of that experience. So yeah, I think that sounds so powerful.

Yeah. Yeah. This is a recognition that we're all human as well, isn't it? You know, and that we're all, we all beat ourselves up sometimes, we all, you know, there's, we all have stuff going on. And so, you know, for some of us that does go to the point of being potentially diagnosable as a mental health condition, but you know, we are still all human and we've all had life experiences and difficult emotions.

So I guess, you know, you've talked about a lot of the benefits for clients of EFT, but what have been the benefits for you as a professional of really specialising in this area?

Yeah, I mean, I think the things that I've said relating to the flexibility of the approach and also the structure that it's given me. So, you know, where I was talking about sort of having, having trained in CBT and delivered CBT, having also done, I did like a year long, like a psychodynamic placement when I was training. And that was really interesting, but that felt way too open, and I think some of the person centred therapies sometimes feel way too open. And then CBT for me felt really directive, and you know, I didn't, I like to be able to work with people where they're at, and I think as a person, I tend to be quite attuned to what other people are feeling. And I wanted to be able to use that. I think what brings a lot of therapists to therapy is because they feel like they've got a good sense of empathy and attunement. And I think we should be making the most of that and using that skill in our therapy. And so for me that, it was just all of those things, the opportunity to offer something structured, yet very close to process, flexible, and could use my own sort of emotional experience and attunement in ways that would be beneficial to my client were things that drew me, drew me to it. And, and as I was saying that I was really impressed with all the change process research as well, which I think is so overlooked generally in psychotherapy.

So, you know, a lot of people listening to this are in independent practice. What would you think the benefits would be for getting trained up in EFT if you're in independent practice?

I mean, I see it as having sort of a bunch of new things for your, your toolbox that can be very easily and readily drawn upon when a client comes into a session, if they're in a particular place, so that if you spot a particular marker, you've got a task that you know, that you can use that sort of evidence based that you've got step by steps, there's usually six steps associated with each of these tasks, that you can try and guide a client through and be with them in to help resolve the very present difficulty that they've walked into the therapy session with today. And of course it does, if you, if you trained in it, if you did the core skills and you loved it, you can do more like I did and you can learn, you know, the whole kind of disorder specific models. There's also a transdiagnostic model, so this, you can take it to different levels depending on how much you like it, but I think it, it gives you very practical and specific things that can go in your sort of therapy toolkit, if you like, very specific tasks that you can then, then draw on in therapy.

Yeah, I think a lot of the time, because I often help people when they're setting up in independent practice and they're kind of putting themselves out there for the first time, people can feel a bit kind of anxious and de-skilled and you know that imposter syndrome is a big deal for people. And I think sometimes, although I caution people against just doing tons and tons of training to try and make yourself feel better, actually doing the right training can give you a real boost. And it sounds like this would be a really nice way of just knowing, having that inner confidence, that you're going to be able to think of something to do, which can be hard when you start out independently and you don't have any more of that kind of team around you.

Yeah, and I certainly sort of experienced that even having trained in EF,. I think just the something about stepping outside your comfort zone and having been in the NHS and working with quite a niche client group, and then you go into private practice and I'm still quite niche, sort of generally working with people with with eating disorders or sort of complex trauma, but it's, it's a bit broader than what I did before. So I haven't got all my, like, my very specific model to work with X, and yet there are very common processes that people come into therapy experiencing. Like I've been talking about with the sort of the inner critic, sort of beating ourselves up about things, relational difficulties, emotional overwhelm. And so having some of these tasks that you can then, if someone comes in, it isn't your usual… you feel a bit less confident in working with them. You might sort of know what you're going to do, but you feel a bit less confident about it. Having these tasks that you can then go, right, okay, I know what to do with this. I've got something that I feel like will be beneficial here is, yeah, is, is a good confidence boost I think. It does help you keep you on track.

So we've talked a lot about the positive side of learning EFT, incorporating it into your work. But also, I'm really interested in just how you balance this all personally, because you're doing research, you're doing teaching, and you're still doing therapy. It sounds like a lot. Is that challenging? And where do you get support for that?

It does feel like a lot, yeah. I also work part time as well, you know, sort of having young kids. And so, yeah, I think I don't always get the balance right, for sure, and I think there's, I think there's something about, so at Salomons, obviously, because it's the doctorate program, there's certain deadlines at certain times. It's something about having anticipation and knowing what's, and so timing things right. So, you know, for example, the core skills training, we always offer that in June now because that's a good fit for all the other things. So for me, it's about planning, knowing what my balance is going to be, and sort of preparing for that and trying not to say yes to too many things but then when you're enthusiastic and you really like you just kind of want to keep just, yeah, and I keep every year I keep taking on more research projects for trainees, not that I have to but like people just keep coming up with more ideas and I’m like yeah, let's do that let's do... So, I think, sometimes I need to have a word with myself about just pulling back a little bit. And then I think, you know, just really trying to make sure I have time that's very boundaried, that I don't encroach into. And I've, I've learnt over time to do that. In the past, I'd be like, Oh, well, it's just one meeting, it is my day off, but it is just one meeting. I will say yes to that. And now I've tried to get a lot more strict about that, and that's really helped my head as well because otherwise it can feel like you're all over the place. And so now I'm, I'm very specific. I know what I'm doing, when, in the week, but also across the sort of the calendar year, I kind of know roughly sort of where my work's going and I find that helpful. And then in my boundary time is just really trying to have time out and time out with family and friends.

So important, especially when you're doing such emotionally connected work. I think we often think, Oh, it'll be all right if I just do a little bit of work on that time. But actually the brain needs a total reset. It can be very difficult to do though. So I'm glad that you've been honest that it was difficult to do that in the beginning. Because often we give the advice, I'm guilty of this ‘hold your boundaries’. But actually it took me a few years. So get the annual plan and the big boundaries and the little boundaries, right? And I still slip up sometimes when I'm excited. Yeah, it's good to be enthusiastic about your work, but also good to acknowledge the challenges that that brings.

Yeah, definitely. And I mean, I think it shows that probably we're in the right job and, and we, you know, we should still be doing what we're doing because we're still enthusiastic about it. So I think it's a really nice thing. It's not everybody feels that way about their work. And, you know, I think, yeah, I really like that aspect and I really like the fact that I can bring myself and my being human to my job across all elements of it. So in the therapy, in the EFT, but also, you know, I think I guess sort of training clinical psychologists of the future, sort of having space to reflect on that with them and sort of hopefully guiding them in terms of setting boundaries and managing life as a qualified psychologist.

Anna Oldershaw:

Yeah, so important. So when is the next cohort happening for EFT at Salomons?

Okay, so our next training is going to be in June, and that's the level one, which is core skills. And that's the one that I always recommend people start with, really. You learn there all of the key tasks that are relevant to the most common processes that people come into therapy with. And it's just a really fun training, it's my favourite one. It's four days, it's in person because of what I talked about, about having that experience where we sort of all work together and we bring ourselves. So that's a really nice training. So that's 17th to the 20th of June, and I think the early bird runs out on the 31st of March.

Okay, I'll make sure that we've got links in the show notes to that. Is there anywhere else that people should go to find out about the trainings offered at Salomons or just more about EFT in general?

Yeah, I mean, we do have a webpage on the Salomons page, but with it being a university webpage, we can't add to that very readily, so I also hold more information on my website. So there's a whole page about EFT and what is EFT and a bunch of videos with like Les Greenberg and other people on there as resources. And then there's information about all the trainings on there. You can contact me through my website or I'll also put the email address in the show notes. I'm always really happy to have a one to one chat with people to tell them more about EFT. You know, I like to get that chance to meet people and to hear people's questions and hopefully answer them. So if people want to, just give me a shout, I'm more than happy to meet up and, and help you try and figure out if EFT is the right, right thing for you.

Brilliant. I'm sure lots of people are going to be really interested in training in this approach. I know I am. And if you do make it to the training, you'll be in beautiful Tunbridge Wells, which couldn't be a nicer place to take a few days out to really focus and develop yourself. And I have to say, this is a vote for in person training. I did my EMDR level three in person and because of the pandemic, it had been the first one that I'd been able to do in person and it was so much radically better than the online training that I've done. I know online training has its place, and I'm somebody that really struggles to access in person training for a whole variety of care and responsibility reasons. So I'm glad that it's there, but in person is just a different level I think, I learned so much more that way.

Yeah, I agree, I agree. And I think especially for this first step into EFT, it's so nice to have it in person.

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for your time today, Anna. I'll make sure all those links are there so that everybody who is now desperately interested in EFT can flock to the website, get themselves booked on that training.

Oh, lovely. Thanks for having me, Rosie. It's been great.