001-Supervision Essentials For Emotion-Focused Therapy

Supervision Essentials for
Emotion-
Focused
Therapy
Clinical Supervision
Essentials Series
Supervision Essentials for Psychodynamic Psychotherapies
Joan E. Sarnat
Supervision Essentials for the Integrative Developmental Model
Brian W. McNeill and Cal D. Stoltenberg
Supervision Essentials for the Feminist Psychotherapy Model of Supervision
Laura S. Brown
Supervision Essentials for a Systems Approach to Supervision
Elizabeth L. Holloway
Supervision Essentials for the Critical Events in Psychotherapy
Supervision Model
Nicholas Ladany, Myrna L. Friedlander, and Mary Lee Nelson
Supervision Essentials for Existential–Humanistic Therapy
Orah T. Krug and Kirk J. Schneider
Supervision Essentials for Cognitive–Behavioral Therapy
Cory F. Newman and Danielle A. Kaplan
Supervision Essentials for the Practice of Competency-Based Supervision
Carol A. Falender and Edward P. Shafranske
Supervision Essentials for Emotion-Focused Therapy
Leslie S. Greenberg and Liliana Ramona Tomescu
Supervision Essentials for Integrative Psychotherapy
John C. Norcross and Leah M. Popple
Clinical Supervision Essentials
HANNA LEVENSON and ARPANA G. INMAN, Series Editors

Emotion-
Focused
Therapy
Leslie S. Greenberg and

Liliana Ramona Tomescu
American Psychological Association • Washington, DC

Copyright © 2017 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved. Except
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Greenberg, Leslie S. author. | Tomescu, Liliana Ramona, author. |
Title: Supervision essentials for emotion-focused therapy / Leslie S. Greenberg
and Liliana Ramona Tomescu.
Description: First edition. | Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, [2017] |
Series: Clinical supervision essentials series | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016018806 | ISBN 9781433823589 | ISBN 1433823586
Subjects: | MESH: Psychotherapy—methods | Psychotherapy—organization &
administration | Emotions
Classification: LCC RC480 | NLM WM 420 | DDC 616.89/14—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016018806
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record is available from the British Library.
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/15966-000
Contents
Foreword to the Clinical Supervision Essentials Series vii

Chapter 1. Introduction 3
Chapter 2. The Essential Dimensions of the Emotion-Focused
Therapy Model of Supervision 29
Chapter 3. The Process of Supervision 45
Chapter 4. Handling Common Supervisory Issues:
Alliance and Interpersonal Skills 81
Chapter 5. Handling Common Technical Supervisory Issues 107
Chapter 6. Research 141
Chapter 7. Future Directions 147
Recommended Readings 151
References 153
Index 159
About the Authors 167
Foreword to the Clinical
Supervision Essentials Series
W e are both clinical supervisors. We teach courses on supervision of stu-

dents who are in training to become therapists. We give workshops on
supervision and consult with supervisors about their supervision practices.
We write and do research on the topic. To say we eat and breathe supervision
might be a little exaggerated, but only slightly. We are fully invested in the field
and in helping supervisors provide the most informed and helpful guidance to
those learning the profession. We also are committed to helping supervisees/
consultees/trainees become better collaborators in the supervisory endeavor
by understanding their responsibilities in the supervisory process.
What is supervision? Supervision is critical to the practice of therapy.
As stated by Edward Watkins1 in the Handbook of Psychotherapy Super
vision, “Without the enterprise of psychotherapy supervision, . . . the prac-
tice of psychotherapy would become highly suspect and would or should
cease to exist” (p. 603).
Supervision has been defined as
an intervention provided by a more senior member of a profession to

a more junior colleague or colleagues who typically (but not always)
are members of that same profession. This relationship
77 is evaluative and hierarchical,

77 extends over time, and
1
Watkins, C. E., Jr. (Ed.). (1997). Handbook of psychotherapy supervision. New York, NY: Wiley.
vii
Foreword to the Clinical Supervision Essentials Series
77 has the simultaneous purposes of enhancing the professional func-

tioning of the more junior person(s); monitoring the quality of pro-
fessional services offered to the clients that she, he, or they see; and
serving as a gatekeeper for the particular profession the supervisee
seeks to enter. (p. 9)2
It is now widely acknowledged in the literature that supervision is a

“distinct activity” in its own right.3 One cannot assume that being an excel-
lent therapist generalizes to being an outstanding supervisor. Nor can one
imagine that good supervisors can just be “instructed” in how to supervise
through purely academic, didactic means.
So how does one become a good supervisor?
Supervision is now recognized as a core competency domain for psy
chologists4,5 and other mental health professionals. Guidelines have been
created to facilitate the provision of competent supervision across pro-
fessional groups and internationally (e.g., American Psychological Asso-
ciation,6 American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy,7 British
Psychological Society,8,9 Canadian Psychological Association10).
2 Bernard, J. M., & Goodyear, R. K. (2014). Fundamentals of clinical supervision (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.
3 Bernard, J. M., & Goodyear, R. K. (2014). Fundamentals of clinical supervision (5th ed.). Boston, MA: Pearson.
4 Fouad, N., Grus, C. L., Hatcher, R. L., Kaslow, N. J., Hutchings, P. S., Madson, M. B., . . . Crossman, R. E.
(2009). Competency benchmarks: A model for understanding and measuring competence in professional
psychology across training levels. Training and Education in Professional Psychology, 3 (4 Suppl.), S5–S26.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0015832
5 Kaslow, N. J., Rubin, N. J., Bebeau, M. J., Leigh, I. W., Lichtenberg, J. W., Nelson, P. D., . . . Smith, I. L.
(2007). Guiding principles and recommendations for the assessment of competence. Professional Psychol-
ogy: Research and Practice, 38, 441–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0735-7028.38.5.441
6 American Psychological Association. (2014). Guidelines for clinical supervision in health service psychology.
Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/about/policy/guidelines-supervision.pdf
7 American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy. (2007). AAMFT approved supervisor designa-
tion standards and responsibilities handbook. Retrieved from http://www.aamft.org/imis15/Documents/
Approved_Supervisor_handbook.pdf
8 British Psychological Society. (2003). Policy guidelines on supervision in the practice of clinical psychology.
Retrieved from http://www.conatus.co.uk/assets/uploaded/downloads/policy_and_guidelines_on_
supervision.pdf
9 British Psychological Society. (2010). Professional supervision: Guidelines for practice for educational psychol-
ogists. Retrieved from http://www.ucl.ac.uk/educational-psychology/resources/DECP%20Supervision%20
report%20Nov%202010.pdf
10 Canadian Psychological Association. (2009). Ethical guidelines for supervision in psychology: Teach-
ing, research, practice and administration. Retrieved from http://www.cpa.ca/docs/File/Ethics/
EthicalGuidelinesSupervisionPsychologyMar2012.pdf
viii
The Guidelines for Clinical Supervision in Health Service Psychology11

are built on several assumptions, specifically that supervision
77 requires formal education and training;

77 prioritizes the care of the client/patient and the protection of the public;
77 focuses on the acquisition of competence by and the professional devel-
opment of the supervisee;
77 requires supervisor competence in the foundational and functional
competency domains being supervised;
77 is anchored in the current evidence base related to supervision and the
competencies being supervised;
77 occurs within a respectful and collaborative supervisory relationship
that includes facilitative and evaluative components and is established,
maintained, and repaired as necessary;
77 entails responsibilities on the part of the supervisor and supervisee;
77 intentionally infuses and integrates the dimensions of diversity in all
aspects of professional practice;
77 is influenced by both professional and personal factors, including values,
attitudes, beliefs, and interpersonal biases;
77 is conducted in adherence to ethical and legal standards;
77 uses a developmental and strength-based approach;
77 requires reflective practice and self-assessment by the supervisor
and supervisee;
77 incorporates bidirectional feedback between the supervisor and
supervisee;
77 includes evaluation of the acquisition of expected competencies by the
supervisee;
77 serves a gatekeeping function for the profession; and
77 is distinct from consultation, personal psychotherapy, and mentoring.
The importance of supervision can be attested to by the increase in state

laws and regulations that certify supervisors and the required multiple super
visory practica and internships that graduate students in all professional
American Psychological Association. (2014). Guidelines for clinical supervision in health service psychology.
11
Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/about/policy/guidelines-supervision.pdf
ix
programs must complete. Furthermore, research has confirmed12 the high

prevalence of supervisory responsibilities among practitioners—specifically
that between 85% and 90% of all therapists eventually become clinical
supervisors within the first 15 years of practice.
So now we see the critical importance of good supervision and its
high prevalence. We also have guidelines for its competent practice and an
impressive list of objectives. But is this enough to become a good super-
visor? Not quite. One of the best ways to learn is from highly regarded
supervisors—the experts in the field—those who have the procedural
knowledge13 to know what to do, when, and why.
Which leads us to our motivation for creating this series. As we looked
around for materials that would help us supervise, teach, and research clin-
ical supervision, we were struck by the lack of a coordinated effort to pre
sent the essential models of supervision in both a didactic and experiential
form through the lens of expert supervisors. What seemed to be needed
was a forum where the experts in the field—those with the knowledge and
the practice—present the basics of their approaches in a readable, acces-
sible, concise fashion and demonstrate what they do in a real supervisory
session. The need, in essence, was for a showcase of best practices.
This series, then, is an attempt to do just that. We considered the major
approaches to supervisory practice—those that are based on theoretical
orientation and those that are metatheoretical. We surveyed psycholo-
gists, teachers, clinical supervisors, and researchers domestically and inter
nationally working in the area of supervision. We asked them to identify
specific models to include and who they would consider to be experts in
this area. We also asked this community of colleagues to identify key issues
that typically need to be addressed in supervision sessions. Through this
consensus building, we came up with a dream team of 11 supervision
experts who not only have developed a working model of supervision but
also have been in the trenches as clinical supervisors for years.
Rønnestad, M. H., Orlinsky, D. E., Parks, B. K., & Davis, J. D. (1997). Supervisors of psychotherapy:
12
Mapping experience level and supervisory confidence. European Psychologist, 2, 191–201.

13Schön, D. A. (1987). Educating the reflective practitioner: Toward a new design for teaching and learning in
the professions. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.
We asked each expert to write a concise book elucidating her or

his approach to supervision. This included highlighting the essential
dimensions/key principles, methods/techniques, and structure/process
involved, the research evidence for the model, and how common super-
visory issues are handled. Furthermore, we asked each author to elucidate
the supervisory process by devoting a chapter describing a supervisory
session in detail, including transcripts of real sessions, so that the readers
could see how the model comes to life in the reality of the supervisory
encounter.
In addition to these books, each expert filmed an actual supervisory
session with a supervisee so that her or his approach could be demonstrated
in practice. APA Books has produced these videos as a series and they are
available as DVDs (http://www.apa.org/pubs/videos). Each of these books
and videos can be used together or independently, as part of the series or
alone, for the reader aspiring to learn how to supervise, for supervisors
wishing to deepen their knowledge, for trainees wanting to be better super-
visees, for teachers of courses on supervision, and for researchers investi-
gating this pedagogical process.
About This Book

In Supervision Essentials for Emotion-Focused Therapy, Leslie S. Greenberg
and Liliana Ramona Tomescu present a “supervision map” for supervisors
and supervisees alike. In a straightforward and engaging manner, the authors
provide clear guidance on how to structure and conduct supervision from an
emotion-focused therapeutic stance and using an event-based task analytic
paradigm.
According to the authors, supervision is defined “as the action or pro-
cess of watching and directing what someone does or how something is
done and making certain that everything is done correctly.” Accordingly,
Greenberg and Tomescu have filled the pages of this book with numer-
ous examples of how the supervisor intervenes to provide moment-by-
moment guidance to help supervisees understand, process, and shift clients’
painful emotion schemes. They have designed useful charts to identify the
xi
steps (i.e., markers, task environment, process, resolution) to work on major

supervisory issues (e.g., alliance difficulties in the therapy and in supervision,
case formulation).
The emphasis on specificity and correctness is embedded within a
supervisory relationship that has a triadic focus: The supervisor invites
the supervisee into dialogue about what is happening in the therapy and
in supervision. Using empathic exploration, experiential learning, model-
ing, role-play, and process guiding, the supervisor maintains an attitude
of collaboration and equality with the supervisee.
In sum, the reader will find this is a rigorous approach, with the super-
visor as a “trainer” of specific perceptual and intervention skills. True to
a dialectic process, however, the supervisor is also an empathic collabo-
rator manifesting the utmost respect for the supervisee’s contributions
and growth. This is the type of supervisor that everyone wishes he or she
had—the nonexpert expert (with a heart)!
We thank you for your interest and hope the books in this series
enhance your work in a stimulating and relevant way.
Hanna Levenson and Arpana G. Inman
xii
Emotion-
Focused
Therapy
1
Introduction
Supervision is an opportunity to bring someone back to their own mind,

to show them how good they can be.
—Nancy Kline
How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching

the naked flesh of feeling.
—Claude Debussy
S upervision holds an important place in the education and training

of a psychologist (Russell & Petrie, 1994). It provides the experiential
foundation for the application and consolidation of knowledge, skills, and
values of any developing psychologist. Given the importance of adequate
training in supervision, faculty should teach not only psychotherapy but
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/15966-001
Supervision Essentials for Emotion-Focused Therapy, by L. S. Greenberg and L. R. Tomescu
Copyright © 2017 by the American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.
3
also supervision skills. Moreover, supervisees should receive training not

only in direct psychotherapy competences but also in supervision skills to
equip them for future roles as therapists and supervisors. A well-specified
model of supervision in emotion-focused therapy (EFT) is still lacking.
The purpose of this book is therefore to advance a theoretical model of
supervision in EFT that will clarify the supervision map for supervisors
and supervisees alike. In this book we lay out an events-based model of
supervision and provide examples to concretize the model. We hope that
a well-specified model of supervision will facilitate future research in the
area of supervision process and outcomes.
EFT supervision is based on the same fundamental principles as EFT
(i.e., relationship and work). Supervision involves developing a safe rela-
tionship, a supervisory alliance, which includes the identification of a focus
for each supervision session (the supervisee’s presentation of a dilemma or
difficulty), the identification of supervision task markers (opportunities for
supervisory interventions), intervening at these markers, and the identifica-
tion of a resolution. As such, the EFT supervisor will listen carefully to each
of the supervisee’s recorded sessions, focusing on the client’s moment-by-
moment processing and the supervisee’s responses. The supervisor will help
the supervisee to become more aware of, and attuned to, moment-by-moment
changes, expressions, and reflections by the client that occur in response to the
supervisee’s intervention. EFT supervision focuses on developing seeing, lis-
tening, and empathic skills. This involves perceiving momentary fluctuations
in nonverbal aspects of expression, understanding the way a client experiences
events, as well as identifying in-session markers of problem states and the
client’s micro-processes, which are opportunities for intervention.
THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF EMOTION-FOCUSED

THERAPY AND APPLICATION TO SUPERVISION
EFT (Greenberg, 2002, 2011) is an empirically supported, process-oriented
approach to therapy that has been gaining popularity in the last 2 decades.
It is a neohumanistic experiential approach, involving a unique integration of
humanistic principles with contemporary emotion theory (Frijda, 1986;
Greenberg, 2002), as well as the philosophical position known as dialecti-
4
Introduction
cal constructivism (Greenberg & Pascual-Leone, 1995, 2001; Greenberg

& Van Balen, 1998; Pascual-Leone, 1991). EFT reframes concepts such as
the centrality of experience, personal self-determination, and the innate
tendency for growth in contemporary terms, using emotion theory and
dialectical constructivism. In this view, human beings are seen as pos-
sessing an innate emotion system that lays the foundation for continuous
adaptation, creation of meaning, and growth. Emotion thus is viewed as
the fundamental datum of human experience whereas meaning making
is seen as central in making sense of emotion. This interaction of emotion
and cognition is one of the major dialectical processes.
Research has shown that emotions, rather than sitting fully formed in the
unconscious, exist in an undifferentiated form as sensorimotor schemes that
are pre-ideational and preverbal (Lane, 2008). Implicit emotion, or bodily
felt sensations, can be turned into conscious experiences of specific emotions
by putting the felt sensations into words (Lane, 2008) and feeling is seen as
centrally important in adaptive and maladaptive functioning and in thera-
peutic change. Dialectical constructivism proposes that experience is con-
structed by the interaction of emotion with many psychological processes,
such as memory, attention, learning, and context to create the emergence of
a consciously named feeling. Through this complex dialectically constructive
process an individual comes to feel specific emotions and “know” what it is
that he/she is feeling. Thus, emotion and cognition are seen as inextricably
intertwined, and optimal adaptation is seen as then involving an integration
of reason and emotion by making narrative sense of emotion.
In this dialectical constructivist view, functioning people thus are seen
as constructing what they feel by attending to a bodily felt sense, symbol-
izing this in awareness, and making narrative meanings. Further corollar-
ies of this view are that the client is a dynamic self-organizing system who
keeps on reforming the “self-in-the-situation” (Greenberg & Watson, 2006)
and is an agent in this process by virtue of being able to guide attention and
make meaning. In this dialectical view, human beings are seen as story
tellers who constantly create state-dependent narratives to understand self
and situation. In addition, because multiplicity is seen as important in the
self-organizing process, human beings are seen as having multiple voices,
5
shifting emotional states rapidly, having a number of stories, and speak-

ing with multiple voices in their many stories. Finally, therapy is viewed as
involving acceptance of experience and change in that the client first has
to accept who he/she is before change can occur; the client has to arrive
at a place before he/she can leave that place (Elliott, Watson, Goldman, &
Greenberg, 2004; Greenberg, Rice, & Elliott, 1993).
EFT practice focuses on moment-by-moment awareness, regula-
tion, expression, transformation, and reflection on emotions, with the
ultimate goals of making sense of emotions, creating new meaning, and
strengthening the self (Elliott, Watson, et al., 2004; Greenberg, 2010;
Greenberg et al., 1993). In EFT, people then are viewed as constantly
forming self-organizations by a means of multilevel, multiprocess dialec-
tical interactions of neurochemical, physiological, affective, motivational,
and cognitive components (Greenberg & Pascual-Leone, 1995, 2001). In
this view, clients are not seen as experiencing psychopathology, but rather
as having a dysfunctional style of emotional processing. Dysfunctional
processing can arise through various mechanisms: the activation of mal-
adaptive emotions formed during prior negative experiences, overly
rigid creation of meaning, incongruence between what is experienced
and what is expressed, an inability to symbolize and express emotions,
and the difficulty to change or integrate different (opposing) parts of the
self (cf. Elliott, Watson, et al., 2004; Greenberg, 2010).
The idea that individuals are dynamic, self-organizing systems that
have dysfunctional styles of processing instead of being dysfunctional
themselves also informs EFT supervision. The supervisor helps the super-
visee formulate his/her cases on the basis of these process ideas. When dif-
ficulties arise in therapy, the supervisor refrains from making evaluations
on the basis of the supervisee’s personality. When issues in the working
alliance arise between the supervisor and the supervisee, the latter is not
seen as pathological, with problems that need to be addressed, although
understanding the interpersonal processes by which these alliance rup-
tures arise may be “fair game.” In this case, the supervisor attempts to
understand the difficulties in the in-session process during supervision
and engages the supervisee in an open dialogue about what led to these
6
Introduction
difficulties, while genuinely assuming responsibility as coconstructor of

the problem.
Two important concepts in EFT theory of functioning are emotion
schematic processing and narrative identity. An emotion scheme is a pattern
of mental organization that provides implicit higher order organization of
emotional experience (Greenberg et al., 1993). It is an experience- and
action-producing structure. The client’s emotion schematic processing sys-
tem is centrally responsible for the self-organizing process. This is a complex
system in which a number of emotion schemes coapply to produce a unified
self-organization (Greenberg, 2010). The emotion schemes characteristic
of depression, for example, are organized around feelings of loss, of being
unlovable, and of feeling worthless or incompetent. Narrative identity is
at a still higher level of self-organization than the schematically based self-
organization (Greenberg & Angus, 2004). Narrative is a process of making
meaning, characterized by an initially nonverbal or imagistic representation
unfolding over time. A narrative has a beginning, a middle, and an end, and
contains a plotline with a protagonist whose intentions are engaged in an
action with implications and consequences.
During EFT supervision, the supervisor has a dual focus, helping the
supervisee identify the client’s dominant painful emotion scheme (and
developing a more coherent narrative) and continuously monitoring the
supervisee’s emotional reactions to the client (as well as assisting the super-
visee in making sense of the supervision experience). In supervision there
is always a dual focus—on the client and on the professional identity of
the therapist. This combination helps the supervisee develop greater confi-
dence in his/her practice and more awareness of his/her emotions, thereby
helping him/her create a more coherent, integrated professional identity.
EMOTION-FOCUSED THERAPY PRINCIPLES

AS APPLIED TO THERAPY AND SUPERVISION
EFT supervision is based on a set of principles and interventions that are
specific to EFT and that differentiate it from other therapies. These prin-
ciples, which also inform the EFT supervision relationship and process,
7
consist of (a) a following and leading stance; (b) an empathic exploration

style; (c) a process diagnosis rather than person diagnosis; (d) a facilita-
tion of deeper emotional experience and productive emotional processing;
(e) the learning and teaching of perceptual skills; and (f) an understanding
of emotions and needs as crossing various cultures, in spite of differences
in social rules of expression. The theory of dysfunction and the theory of
therapy, however, do not directly apply to supervision, as EFT does not
treat a problem in the supervisee, nor does it attempt to access and trans-
form core painful experiences, but, instead, attempts to facilitate a specific
form of learning. Therefore, the supervisor does not explicitly engage in
therapy with the supervisee in supervision. These EFT principles and the
way they inform the therapeutic effort, as well as the supervisory process,
are detailed next.
The first key principle covers the particular communication stance
adopted by the therapist, which involves a combination of following and
leading. On the one hand, the therapist strives to be present and follows
the client’s internal experience as it unfolds from moment to moment,
staying empathically attuned to the client’s immediate experience at all
times, keeping his/her finger on the client’s emotional pulse and constantly
checking her/his understanding of the client’s experience. Moreover, the
therapist prizes the client’s initiative and attempts to make sense of the cli-
ent’s experience or resolve his/her problems. On the other hand, the thera-
pist is also an active guide in the therapeutic process. This means that the
therapist is an emotion coach (Greenberg, 2002, 2015) who, although not
an expert on what the client experiences, is an expert on how to facilitate
next steps and has a certain degree of knowledge of people’s emotional
processes. The therapist’s aim is not to teach or modify the client but to
guide the therapeutic process. Process guiding refers to how the thera-
pist actively works with the client toward activating a deeper experience
and more adaptive emotional responses (e.g., changing client blame and
hopelessness by activating the more assertive expression of underlying
primary anger), working on within-session tasks (e.g., helping the cli-
ent resolve unfinished business or understand the meaning of a puzzling
reaction), and/or achieving an overall treatment goal (e.g., helping the
8
Introduction
client move on from a past traumatic experience; Elliott, Watson, et al.,

2004; Greenberg, 2002). Following and leading is not a contradiction, as
it may appear at first glance; rather, it involves a dialectic, creative tension
between following the client’s narrative, as the client is the expert on his/
her own experience (i.e., the content), and guiding the process.
The same dialectical position of following and leading is adopted
by the EFT supervisor. Supervisees are seen as possessing the most
knowledge of their client’s experience as well as their own. The super-
visor is not viewed as an authority on the supervisee’s experience, but
supervisors are viewed as process experts, who possess expertise and
experience in the area of how to facilitate supervisee learning and who
are skilled in identifying certain supervision tasks and facilitating their
resolution. Knowledge of supervisory tasks is informed by EFT’s task
analytic approach to investigating psychotherapeutic change events
(Greenberg, 1984). In this approach, supervisee markers and tasks are
defined and the supervisor intervenes to help the supervisee work on
the task.
Another distinctive principle of EFT is its empathic exploration response
style within therapy and supervision. Given that in the EFT framework
the client and the supervisee are seen as the experts on their own experi-
ences, the therapist and the supervisor use an active and engaged, though
tentative, voice in their use of exploratory reflections or questions. These
are aimed to stimulate the supervisee’s own understanding and search
for meaning. Moreover, the supervisor rejects the idea of expertness (i.e.,
deciding independently what it is to be worked on) and rather cocon-
structs process formulations, supervision goals, and ultimately meaning
together with the supervisee. A major role of an EFT supervisor is to facili-
tate supervisees’ attention to their clients’ momentary experiences and to
nurture better intervention responses, which in turn will help clients focus
on their felt sense and emotions.
EFT is process diagnostic (Greenberg et al., 1993) rather than person
diagnostic; thus, instead of focusing on formal diagnoses, the EFT thera-
pist will attend to the client’s processing style, to in-session markers of
problematic emotional states and to dominant themes and ultimately to
9
a formulation of painful emotions, which are arrived at by following the

client’s emotional pain. Markers are in-session behaviors that signal that
the client is ready to work on a particular problem (Greenberg et al.,
1993), whereas therapeutic tasks are immediate in-session processes and
procedures that are collaboratively engaged in as a result of an identi-
fied marker (Greenberg et al., 1993). For example, an unfinished busi-
ness marker is signaled by the expression of lingering bad feelings toward
someone significant in the client’s life and the task in this case is engaging
in the empty chair dialogue with the imagined significant other to resolve
hurt and anger. Therapists can use different therapeutic methods to help
their clients resolve the tasks at hand (e.g., suggesting chair work to work
through unfinished business). By adopting a task-analytic approach to
supervision (cf. Greenberg, 1984), EFT supervision entails identifying
in-session supervision markers and formulating and working through
different supervisee tasks in agreement with the supervisee and accord-
ing to the supervisee’s own needs.
A fourth principle of EFT is to facilitate deeper emotional experience
and productive emotional processing in clients, on the basis of the assump-
tion that this will facilitate the creation of new meaning and eventually
resolution. Given that EFT is a process-oriented, experiential therapy,
therapists are viewed as experts on how to facilitate next steps in the cli-
ent’s experiential process, whereas the client is viewed as an expert of his/
her own experience. The expertise the therapist offers is thus an expertise
in how to facilitate deeper experience; how to help people become aware
of, access, productively process and transform emotion; and finally, how
to create new meaning.
Similarly, EFT supervision thus is a highly process-oriented supervi-
sion that focuses on helping the supervisee recognize the process markers
that are opportunities for deeper emotional processing and the use of suit-
able therapeutic tasks. Rather than only helping conceptualize the client’s
difficulties and plan treatment, the supervisor gives moment-by-moment
feedback to supervisees on how to respond to the client to promote next
steps. The supervisor first and foremost acts as a trainer, teaching skills of
process facilitation involving perceptual and intervention skills.
10
Introduction
In addition to teaching intervention skills, learning and teaching of per-

ceptual skills is seen as a central principle of supervision. It is difficult to
teach perceptual skills in a manner void of context, so supervision is a pri-
mary site of learning how to see and hear important clinical phenomena.
Perceptual skills, as opposed to intervention skills, involve knowing when
to intervene rather than how to intervene. They also involve the ability to
notice certain clinical phenomena of interest when they emerge in sessions.
In essence, perceptual skills go beyond conceptual or theoretical skills which
may equip supervisees with understanding but not the ability to apply these
in situations. To learn how to see and when to intervene, supervisees need
concrete examples to make the necessary types of perceptual discrimina-
tions. Given the role of the supervisor as trainer, supervision will be geared
to the supervisee’s level of skill and training.
One of the key perceptual skills is the ability to discriminate between
different types of emotional processes. The supervisee needs to learn to
distinguish between primary adaptive, maladaptive, secondary, and instru-
mental emotions. This is done by the supervisor pointing out examples as
they arise on tapes and discussing them to understand their function in
that moment. Primary adaptive emotions are responses that result from the
automatic processing of complex situational information to prepare the
person to take effective action. Such responses are referred to as primary
adaptive emotion responses because the emotion is a direct reaction to the
immediate situation and it helps the person take appropriate action. Pri-
mary adaptive emotions need to be accessed and more fully allowed to pro-
vide information and action tendency. To help clients sort out if what they
are feeling is a primary adaptive emotion, therapists respond empathically
and act as surrogate information processors, offering symbols to describe
feelings that clients can check against their experiences for fit. Therapists’
responses that are helpful in accessing primary emotions involve saying,
“Is this what your core feeling is at rock bottom?” or “Check inside; see
if this is your most basic feeling.” Maladaptive primary emotions are also
direct reactions to situations, but they no longer help the person cope
constructively with the situations that elicit them. Rather, they inter-
fere with effective functioning. These emotion responses generally involve
11
overlearned responses based on previous, often traumatic, experiences.

Maladaptive emotions are best handled by helping the client to approach,
access, symbolize, regulate, and explore these emotions. Once accessed
and accepted, rather than avoided, they become amenable to transfor-
mation by accessing a different underlying emotion (e.g., transforming
maladaptive shame with self-compassion or pride) and by reflecting on
them to make sense of them. Therapists help clients access these emotions
by means of empathic exploration of and empathic conjectures into their
deeper experience.
Secondary reactive emotions are emotions that follow a more primary
response. Often people have emotional reactions to their initial primary
adaptive emotion, so that it is replaced with a secondary emotion. This
“reaction to the reaction” obscures or transforms the original emotion
and leads to actions that are not entirely appropriate to the current situ-
ation. Secondary reactive emotions are best responded to with empathic
exploration to discover the underlying primary emotions from which they
are derived (e.g., primary fear under reactive anger).
Finally, instrumental emotions are best explored for their interpersonal
function or intended impact on others. The therapist, after understanding
that the person feels sad or angry, might say, “I wonder if maybe you are
trying make a point or tell this person something with this feeling?” Thus,
people may recognize the intention in their emotional experience, be it the
desire for self-protection, comfort, or to dominate another.
To help the supervisee perform an emotional assessment, the super-
visor might suggest some specific criteria, such as (a) observing non
verbal expression including facial expression, tone of voice, and how things
are said; (b) having knowledge about universal emotional responses
(e.g., people generally feel angry when they are violated, sad when they
lose someone important to them); (c) using knowledge of the super-
visee’s own emotional responses to circumstances to assess the client’s
emotions; and (d) knowing the characteristic ways in which the client
responds to situations and people (e.g., the client feels diminished and
then hopeless when dismissed by another, feels rejected rather than
shame when angry).
12
Introduction
The final EFT principle is in regard to cross-cultural issues and takes

the position that empathy means carefully listening to the person and his or
her concerns, listening for the undertone of emotions and the unarticulated
needs associated with it, over and above the client’s cultural backgrounds.
EFT’s humanistic foundation, as well as research in the area of emotions,
teaches us that all human beings are emotionally alike, and, at the core,
all have the same human needs for surviving, thriving, attachment and
belonging, and being valued and recognized. However, EFT theorists
recognize that the rules of expression and communication about emo-
tions differ from culture to culture and are part of different belief systems,
customs, and attitudes. For this reason, at least some broad knowledge
of these cultural differences is important for a developing therapist and
his/her supervisor. The best ways of gaining this essential knowledge is
through education, curiosity, and direct experiences of differences, as well
as showing high sensitivity and openness to accepting differences and see-
ing them as such. The EFT supervisor will hence help the supervisee get to
the core emotional processes in clients coming from any culture, with sen-
sitivity to empathically understanding the client’s or supervisee’s culture
and being aware of some of the cultural rules of expression, and injunc-
tions. For example, in therapy, Asian clients or those coming from collec-
tivistic cultures may find it more difficult to express anger toward parents
or authority figures because of cultural beliefs related to the respect for
and obedience to older or more experienced people. However, a good
therapeutic alliance, empathy, and understanding of these rules can help
a supervisee get to the common emotional core over time, while over
coming many potential cultural differences.
Tasks as Applied to Therapy and Supervision

EFT has incorporated and studied a large variety of client markers and
therapeutic tasks (Elliott, Watson, et al., 2004; Greenberg, 2010, 2015;
Greenberg et al., 1993). For ease of understanding, they are grouped into
five larger categories: empathy-based tasks, relational tasks, experiencing
tasks, reprocessing tasks, and enactment tasks. Each of these therapeutic
13
tasks is associated with various interventions that are learned and mastered
during supervision.
In applying these tasks, the supervisor does not aim to train the super-
visee how to mechanically follow therapeutic steps but rather encourages
and assists the supervisee to try different interventions, at first only tenta-
tively and, with time, in a progressively skillful and fluent manner. Early in
supervision, the concepts of interventions are introduced as experiments
and as “could do’s” (as opposed to doing things only one “right” way). This
conveys the flexible nature of intervention and shows that the supervisor’s
suggestions are not pronouncements on what is right or wrong but are offers
of possibilities to be tried and eventually adopted by therapists according to
their own style and personality (i.e., personalization or integration skills).
HISTORICAL BACKGROUND
EFT theory grew out of an integration of client-centered, Gestalt, and exis-
tential therapies, viewed through the lens of modern cognitive and emotion
theory. These humanistic/experiential approaches to psychotherapy had
together formed what was called the third force that swept North America
in the 1960s and 1970s as an alternative to behaviorism and psychoanalysis.
EFT has developed beyond these origins by drawing on advances in emo-
tion and cognitive science and on psychotherapy change process research
to propose a neohumanistic, process-oriented, emotion-focused treatment.
EFT drew on Rogers’s view that therapy is effective because the thera-
peutic relationship provides an antidote to the introjected conditions of
worth in that clients have the new experience of being seen, understood,
and unconditionally accepted for who they are as individuals. As client-
centered theory developed, the focus expanded beyond the nature of the
therapeutic relationship alone to what occurs in the client in therapy. What
became important, in addition to relational acceptance, was facilitating in
the client a new mode of experiencing. According to Gendlin (1997), expe-
riencing is the process of concrete bodily feeling; it is what happens as we
live and constitutes the basic datum of psychological phenomena. Aware-
ness of this basic datum was seen as essential to healthy living. Gendlin
14
Introduction
(1997) argued that optimal self-process involves an ever-increasing use

of experiencing as a process in which felt meanings interact with verbal
symbols to produce an explicit meaning, and in so doing moved away
from more structural, denial/incongruence models to a process view of
functioning.
EFT, however, developed beyond its originating theories. Whereas
Gendlin and Rogers take experiencing as the basic datum of existence,
EFT takes emotion as a fundamental given, and sees experiencing as a
complex derivative of emotion that results from a tacit synthesis of many
level of processing. EFT, in its theory of practice, incorporates the impor-
tance of Gendlin’s felt sense, the importance of a bioevolutionary view of
basic emotions (Ekman & Davidson, 1994), and the importance of emo-
tional arousal. The felt sense needs to be attended and symbolized to cre-
ate meaning, whereas categorical basic emotions (e.g., fear, anger, sadness)
need to be aroused and regulated to provide access to needs and action
tendencies that inform people of what is good for them and move them
to adaptive actions.
A second major influence on EFT came from Gestalt therapy (Perls,
Hefferline, & Goodman, 1951). As with Rogers’s work, the holistic nature
of a self-actualizing tendency (to survive and thrive) was emphasized over
any specific drives or needs. Organismic wisdom was seen as working by
a spontaneous emergence of needs to guide action. In this view, life is the
process of a need arising and being satisfied, then another need emerging
and being satisfied. In Gestalt therapy, awareness of functioning is seen as
providing people with the option to choose, if and when, to own their own
organismic experience (Perls et al., 1951).
Gestalt therapy is process directive in style. The therapist makes pro-
cess suggestions and observations. The graded experiment was used as the
major form of intervention. EFT adopted a number of key experiments from
Gestalt practice and specified more clearly when they are best used and what
processes they facilitate that lead to change. Thus, EFT incorporated Gestalt
therapy’s process directive style, its emphasis on accessing and heightening
emotional experience and awareness, and the client-centered emphasis
on provision of safety and the differentiation of experience and meaning
15
making. Making experience vivid in awareness, attending to a body felt

sense, and searching the edges of awareness to symbolize felt meaning are all
emphasized in EFT.
Finally, existential therapy has influenced the development of EFT
especially in EFT’s broader view of human nature and life’s ultimate con-
cerns. In existential theory, dysfunction has been seen as resulting from
lack of authenticity, alienation from experience, and the resultant lack of
meaning, isolation, and ontological anxiety. For the existentialist, it is the
awareness of ultimate concerns that leads to anxiety and defenses (May
& Yalom, 2005; Yalom, 1980). In existential therapy, anxiety over ultimate
concerns such as freedom, choice, isolation, and meaning is at the center
of personality and psychotherapy. All of these concerns are seen as rel-
evant in EFT, but EFT also places emotion and its regulation and sym-
bolization as ultimate concerns. In view of these background perspectives
and foundational principles, we now shift to discussing supervision.
Definition of Supervision
Supervision is defined as the action or process of watching and directing
what someone does or how something is done and making certain that
everything is done correctly. It involves directing or overseeing the
performance or operation of an activity and watching over it so as to
maintain order.
Bernard and Goodyear (2013), in their definition of supervision,
offered that it is an intervention that is provided by a senior member of a
profession to a junior member or members of that same profession. Their
definition mentions several components of supervision. First, supervision
is an intervention, and there are unique competencies and skills involved
that allow the supervisor to help the supervisee. Second, supervision is
provided by a clinical supervisor who is more advanced, at least in some
important ways, than the supervisee. Third, supervision involves a rela-
tionship that extends over time. An assumption of supervision is that it
will last long enough for some developmental progress of the supervisee to
take place. The relationship is therefore important. Finally, the supervisor
16
Introduction
evaluates, monitors, and serves as a gatekeeper. Supervisors have an ethical

and legal responsibility to monitor the quality of care that is being deliv-
ered to the supervisee’s clients. To enhance the professional functioning of
the supervisee and assure quality of care, the supervisor constantly moni-
tors and provides feedback regarding the supervisee’s performance. This
formative evaluation represents the basis of the work done in supervision.
Supervisor’s Role
In her discrimination model of supervision, Bernard (1997) proposed
three general roles that the supervisor might assume in responding to the
supervisee: (a) the teacher role—the supervisor takes on the responsibility
for determining what knowledge is required for the supervisee to become
more competent, (b) the counselor role—the supervisor facilitates explora-
tion in addressing the interpersonal or intrapersonal reality of the super-
visee, and (c) the consultant role—the supervisor acts as a resource, but one
who encourages the supervisee to trust his/her own thoughts, insights, and
feelings about the work with the client (Bernard, 1997).
EFT supervision adopts all three of the described roles. First, teaching,
or more specifically, training, is an important part of EFT supervision as
many skills need to be learned in an actual clinical situation. EFT supervi-
sion also emphasizes congruence between the supervisee’s needs and the
supervisor’s responses. Congruence is attained when conditions such as
theoretical orientation matching, task relevance, engagement, and goal
agreement are met. These, in turn, depend on the supervisor’s ability to
trust that the supervisee knows the best direction in which the supervision
should go, and to engage in a collaborative effort with the supervisee. For
example, a beginner supervisee expresses a general sense of worry about
an upcoming session; the supervisor follows this important lead and helps
the supervisee deepen the experience, put it into words, and eventually
understand its meaning in a new way—this is a congruent supervision
event. On the other hand, an instance of incongruence would be found,
for example, when a trainee has difficulties with case formulation and the
supervisor assumes the expert role, by providing a diagnosis of the client
17
rather than facilitating and guiding the formulation process (e.g., help-
ing the supervisee identify the client’s core emotions and their sche-
matic organization). In EFT, following and leading are both viewed as
important—each at the right time.
The EFT supervisor, however, should not perceive him-/herself as an
absolute expert, endowed with all possible answers. Therefore, the super-
visor should not attempt to force knowledge or wisdom on the supervisee.
Instead, the stance of the EFT supervisor revolves around the term collab-
oration, an attitude of interested engagement and equality with the super-
visee (Elliott, Watson, et al., 2004). Thus, the supervisor might ask the
supervisee what he/she thinks the client is feeling at particular moments
rather than simply telling the supervisee what the supervisor thinks the
client is feeling. In spite of this collaborative effort, the supervisor is still
responsible for the supervisee and the client, and has some authority from
experience and expertise.
In EFT supervision, a dialectic between the supervisor’s role as an
expert and a collaborative coconstructor must be developed and mas-
tered. Moreover, the status of being a supervisor carries an intrinsic
degree of power and high expectations as an expert. On the one hand,
the supervisor possesses certain skills and experience; on the other hand,
he/she has the power to decide, at the evaluative level, the adequacy of
the supervisee’s performances and areas needing improvement. Master-
ing the dialectic between the supervisor’s expertise and coconstruction
can be translated to his/her ability to convey knowledge from the expert
position, while refraining from shaming or imposing values or solutions
on the supervisee. The EFT supervisor should also be genuinely interested
in finding what each supervisee needs from supervision, together with
what the supervisee finds helpful or hindering in the process of learning.
Accordingly, aside from coconstructing the goals of supervision, develop-
ing a way to achieve those goals, and controlling the balance of power, the
EFT supervisor must be willing to openly admit to errors and misunder-
standings, and assume their own responsibility for the possible difficulties
encountered during supervision. For example, a supervisor might say, “I
guess what I said a moment ago isn’t right; I see now what you were saying
about what the client is feeling.”
18
Introduction
In short, when it comes to the EFT supervisor’s role as a teacher,

instead of assuming the role of expert, he/she strives to cultivate a mutual,
collaborative relationship by entering a joint process of exploration and by
facilitating personal growth and development in the supervisee. Supervi-
sion, in line with EFT theory, involves following and leading. Because EFT
has a highly developed set of specific skills for specific types of in-session
problem markers, EFT supervision involves a lot of leading in the form
of teaching and corrective feedback. However, this is always done in the
context of keeping the supervisee’s relational safety in mind. Dr. Greenberg
has often been told by supervisees that until now they had never received
critical feedback without feeling criticized, and that they really benefited
because it helped them learn. So some of the art of supervision is giving
corrective feedback in a manner that is felt as support rather than criticism.
This is greatly helped by the supervisor being an explorer, modeling the
value of being on the edge of experience, and of not knowing but being
curious and making suggestions that are looking for good ways to facilitate
rather than being an all knowing expert.
The EFT supervisor also has a role as counselor. If the supervisee brings
up personal blocks or problems in his/her personal life that potentially
affect his/her ability as a therapist, the supervisor will, within limits, offer
supportive counseling. This involves being empathic and offering some
process guiding to help crystallize the supervisee’s feelings and clarify the
problem. This, however, should be done in a single session and then, if the
supervisee wishes, the supervisor can provide a referral for a therapist. Any
counseling offered will be more event based than ongoing. For example, if
a supervisee feels anxious or hopeless about learning to be a good therapist,
the supervisor would empathize with this painful feeling and ask the super-
visee if he/she would like to explore it further. If the answer is affirmative,
only then should the supervisor engage in an exploration of the supervisee’s
self-critical processes. This would be ideally done only once, and with con-
cern and sensitivity for going no further than the supervisee is comfortable
and no further than the relationship can sustain.
In addition to engaging in training and personal exploration, the
supervisor is also a consultant who serves as a facilitator of the supervisee’s
development, encouraging the supervisee to trust his/her own feelings and
19
ideas about working with clients. The supervisor, building on the recogni-
tion of the strengths and talents of the supervisee, encourages self-efficacy.
In so doing, the supervisor adopts a collaborative attitude as opposed to
that of being an expert. Engagement and equality are viewed as important,
and the supervisor balances modeling with encouraging the supervisee to
trust him- or herself. At times, the supervisor acts as a process facilitator of
the supervisee’s own in-session experience of the client. Modeling of the
skills being taught to convey emotion-focused attitude (showing respect,
empathy, genuineness, collaborative problem-solving) is also important
and can be done through this work on the supervisee’s own experience. As
a consultant the supervisor is also a resource, providing knowledge and
information when necessary.
Supervisor’s Modes of Participation

The EFT supervisor participates in and contributes to the development and
growth of the supervisee by engaging in certain operations and methods. The
supervisee is seen as an agent in a process of change, as a person endowed
with the innate ability to grow at his/her own tempo. In line with this,
he/she must be given the three Rogerian conditions of empathic understand-
ing, congruence, and unconditional positive regard (Rogers, 1980) during
supervision to change and grow. The supervisor engages in such actions as
empathic exploration, experiential learning, dialogue, modeling, role-play,
and process guiding. The supervisor gently brings into discussion possibly
unacknowledged issues or acknowledges problems raised by the supervisee
and validates the supervisee’s experience. The supervisor invites the super-
visee to openly share his/her views, underlying the reciprocal involvement in
the problem, empathically reflects on its meaning, and engages in empathic
exploration of the problem. The supervisor engages in exploration of each
person’s perception of the difficulty and develops a shared understanding of
the difficulty.
The supervisor listens for conceptual difficulties and helps the super-
visee remember theoretical and research-based background information.
In relation to interventions, the supervisor provides anecdotal examples
or reviews videotapes of good or bad interventions with the supervisee.
20
Introduction
As they listen to excerpts of a session, the supervisor provides feedback

and examples of different interventions that could have been used. The
supervisee is asked to provide specific examples of their difficulties with
specific therapeutic tasks. The supervisee may be asked to do homework
to fill in knowledge gaps. The supervisor and the supervisee listen to ses-
sion segments and pause whenever they find points requiring feedback.
The supervisor works with a notion of “could do’s” rather than right or
wrong, indicating that there are many things that could be done at a given
point and offering possibilities rather than promoting the “right thing.”
Both parties engage in a moment-by-moment exploration of supervis-
ee’s performance and difficulties with a specific task, a step in a task, or a
blending of the two. The supervisor deepens the supervisee’s experience
when there are possible therapeutic blocks. The supervisee is also asked
to think about different intervention alternatives or to practice helpful
therapeutic responses. The supervisor thus uses different methods to help
the supervisee perform responses and interventions.
PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT AS SUPERVISORS

In this section, we discuss the authors’ experience of becoming supervisors.
Dr. Leslie S. Greenberg

I have been supervising for 40 years. I began receiving psychotherapy super-
vision as a client-centered therapist, and this experience provided me with
my main model of supervision. My supervisor, Laura Rice, a student of
Rogers, provided supervision from a client-centered framework but with a
twist in that she was highly focused on promoting the client’s informa-
tion processing, seeing particular interventions as enhancing the client’s
moment-by-moment processing of information. This supervision pro-
cess led to my current focus on moment-by-moment processing events
and tasks.
I never took any courses on supervision or received any training in
supervision. I did, early on, have some supervision other than my client-
centered supervision from Laura Rice—one experience from a supervisor
21
who took a social learning perspective and one from a supervisor who
took a more psychodynamic perspective. I also had some other experi-
entially oriented supervision but my main supervision was from Laura
Rice. At the same time, I was simultaneously engaged in training in Gestalt
therapy, where I received live feedback while working with other members
of the group in client–therapist dyads and in the larger group, which this
was another form of modeling of supervision. From my early experience, I
found supervision of tapes and live supervision the most meaningful, and
this set my framework for what supervision should be and what I wanted
to provide. Right from the start I was imbued with a very strong process
orientation and I did not find case discussions particularly helpful. I also
became highly skeptical about interpretive formulations and preferred
looking at real in-session interactions.
I started doing therapy supervision as a professor in a counseling pro-
gram in which students were trained in Rogerian core conditions. They
were trained essentially using the Carkhuff (1969) model emphasizing the
Rogerian core conditions supplemented by the notion of additive empathy
and other factors like immediacy and confrontation. As I developed as a
therapist and supervisor, I saw acceptance of the other as crucial, and that
acceptance needed to come from a genuinely empathic person. At the time,
there was a controversy in training between Rogers’s view of seeing training
as “attitude training” (an approach that involved more experientially based
personal growth to promote an empathic way of being; Rogers, 1980) versus
learning empathy as “skill training” (a behavioral approach that involved
explicit skill training; Carkhuff, 1969). Believing in the importance of devel-
oping an empathic attitude as a therapeutic way of being, as well as develop-
ing skills, especially the skills of empathy, I integrated these two approaches.
This involved personal growth by helping supervisees experience empathy
in dealing with some of their own subjective experience by providing empa-
thy doing experiential work in supervision. In other words, the empathic
process helped supervisees deal with their own feelings of anxiety, inad-
equacy, and fear of their own emotions, and in discovering their own blocks
and biases. I also supervised supervisees in the development and application
of skills of empathy and highlighted empathy’s role as not only providing
22
Introduction
understanding but also as assisting information processing and emotional

processing. My Gestalt training and orientation also led me to add a focus
on promoting here-and-now awareness in the client. Carkhuff ’s (1969)
notion of high immediacy covered this focus on the here-and-now, as well
as providing an initial framework for ways of approaching relational issues
with the client, by metacommunication. However, I didn’t believe that con-
frontation was useful, especially negative confrontation of discrepancies.
I saw supervision as needing to provide the supervisees with a space
to express and process their own feelings about the client and to better
understand them. So, supervision combined stopping tapes and making
suggestions at the skill level and dealing with supervisees’ anxieties and
blocks, in an experiential fashion. In addition to exploring these empathi-
cally, I would use two-chair dialogues with supervisees role playing their
clients to help the supervisees get more in touch with what might be going
on with clients and with me role playing the therapist to model what the
supervisee might do as therapist.
Initially, my skill-based supervision was focused mainly on promot-
ing the development of skills of empathic exploration and how to facilitate
the deepening of experience. While I was developing as a supervisor, I was
involved in a lot of research on the process of change, and this influenced
me as a supervisor because as I came to see what processes seemed to
promote change. I then began to feed this into supervision. Over time, my
supervision became more technically oriented, and I did more teaching of
different types of intervention skills during supervision.
In general, I would say my supervision method evolved along with
my development of the theory and practice of EFT. As I came to articulate
the role of emotion in change, I focused more on facilitating supervisees’
skills of discriminating different emotional processes and accessing emo-
tions. I would help supervisees learn these interventions as we articulated
more markers and tasks during supervision. As I did more supervision, I
came to see that in addition to focusing on markers, tasks, and microskills,
I was helping supervisees form a case formulation on the bases of cli-
ent themes and core emotions. This development was also facilitated by
process research being done by my students and me. As we developed an
23
explicit model of case formulation, my supervision began to include more

conceptualization of client’s core schemes and themes, in addition to iden-
tification of markers and tasks and the development of empathic skills and
microskills. As the technical side of supervision increased, my supervision
began to focus less on supervisees’ own issues or blocks, and I would refer
supervisees to therapy for more general self-exploration. I saw that per-
sonal work was more necessary to become a truly skilled emotion-focused
therapist, as supervisees needed to have resolved their own issues and dealt
with their own vulnerabilities to be able to deal with these in others. I saw
personal work as important not so much because their personal issues
caused countertransferential interpersonal patterns but because working
with one’s own emotional processes increased one’s ability to work with
other emotions (e.g., one needs to work to resolve one’s own self-criticism,
loss, shame, anger to be able to help others do the same).
In supervision, I give more process and intervention suggestions and
teach supervisees to see markers and engage in tasks. I also provide explana-
tions of how change might occur, tying theory to practice but always in the
context of listening to a segment of process on tape. I thus spend less time
in supervision following and more time guiding, which some supervisees
experience as threatening or critical. However, most of the time, I have
received comments that my critical feedback was constructive rather than
critical. I think an overall relational frame of acceptance and validation
needs to be established to provide this type of more directive supervision.
I also self-disclose about my own personal experience and my experience
with clients, as well as recommend real-world resources and possible refer-
rals, which adds to a feeling of the two of us, supervisor and supervisee,
working together to help the supervisee become a better therapist.
Dr. Liliana Ramona Tomescu

My path to developing a special interest in the issue of supervision started
with simply being a pupil myself in Romania, a formerly communist country.
As a young child growing in an environment dominated by planned brain-
washing, poverty, enforced conformism, and a pervasive fear of expression,
24
Introduction
moving to North America helped me to understand and appreciate the true

value of freedom, individuation, and growth resulting from nonimposing,
collaborative, and genuinely thought-provoking experiences with educators
and supervisors.
At a personal level, I also remember feeling dumbfounded the moment
my mother, a teacher herself, asked me with genuine confusion, “I’m told
you’re great in some classes and almost absent in others. I wonder how
that’s possible?!” That got me thinking: What makes the difference? And
so I noticed that the classes and subjects I loved most were the ones where
my professors made me feel engaged, stimulated, and acknowledged—and
I became best at those subjects. For the rest, I simply wanted to run away as
far as I could and never have anything to do with them—thus, I was
daydreaming of escape (if I had not actually succeeded in skipping the class).
By the time the communist era ended and I had begun my undergradu-
ate studies in Romania, I started to experience supervision firsthand, this
time as something more than just teaching. But what was “it”? The answer
began with observation and wonder: Not only had I had such different
internal experiences of different supervisors, but I wondered about what
it was that they were doing differently, and most important, how were they
imparting their knowledge and skills in a way that made me feel like I was
truly evolving, growing professionally, and marching in the right direction.
In graduate school, the courses on supervision and developing pro-
fessional competency gave me my first formal look into the theoretical
issues of what supervision is or is not, the goals of supervision, research
on the ways to achieve these goals through supervision, et cetera. How-
ever, knowledge about supervision was then supplemented by the expe-
riential learning of being a supervisee once again. Dr. Greenberg was
my first and “ultimate” supervisor: He pushed this curiosity further by
asking aloud, “But what is it that’s happening right here and now? What
was it that just happened?” Then, talking with friends and peers about
what we thought and learned was another venue in the process of under-
standing supervision. The interesting remarks made by some, and then
some clear personality differences in the way things were reflected on or
evaluated, added to my understanding that supervision was ultimately
25
an interpersonal space designed for growth: for supervisees, for supervi-

sors, and for clients.
Finally, it was the test of reality that made the difference. The clients,
through their progress and sometimes direct comments on the thera-
peutic process, made the final evaluation of what was great supervision:
inspired and inspiring mentorship in the art of listening and conveying
that which was so hard to capture with words only. With this account,
it follows naturally that what I am today is at least partly a reflection of
personal history, cultural background and social context, scholarly expe-
riences, and the type of mentors I had. However, things are not entirely
so. Supervision is not only about great mentors but also about dedicated
and tenacious pupils, who often have to face an entire range of emotions
as if reliving their entire relational and social history. That takes guts!
Accepting discomfort while pushing the limits of your knowledge and
skills is frustrating and takes determination. Being aware of the power dif-
ferential and the potentially destructive consequences of misattunement,
while learning to balance standing up for yourself with recognizing great
supervisory interventions and complying, takes sharpening one’s people
skills. For all these reasons, writing this book was an exercise in working
collaboratively with my former supervisor, as well as acting as the voice of
fellow supervisees.
ROAD MAP FOR THIS BOOK’S CONTENTS

In this book, we lay out a task analytically derived events-based model of
supervision and provide examples of the different tasks. Many chapters
include direct transcripts from supervision sessions with real trainees,1
including from Dr. Greenberg’s companion DVD, Emotion-Focused Ther-
apy Supervision, also available from APA Books (see http://www.apa.org/
pubs/videos/4310952.aspx). Chapter 2 discusses the essential dimensions
of the EFT model of supervision, namely, the supervision alliance, the
All case material has been altered to protect the confidentiality of all clients and supervisees.
1
26
Introduction
supervisee’s interpersonal skills, and technical skills. Chapter 3 focuses on

the process of supervision, using several case examples. Chapter 4 looks
at difficulties related to the alliance—between the supervisor and super-
visee, on the one hand, and between the supervisee/therapist and clients,
on the other. Chapter 5 focuses on supervision difficulties related to the
technical aspects of therapy, and Chapter 6 focuses on research related to
EFT supervision. The book ends with Chapter 7, a brief chapter on our
suggestions for future directions.
27
2
The Essential Dimensions of

the Emotion-Focused Therapy
Model of Supervision
To get to your place of victory, intended destination,

and the success you want, you must go through the process.
—Idowu Koyenikan
First achieve small things and you will achieve great things ultimately.
—Bidemi Mark-Mordi
I n this chapter, we present the essential dimensions of the emotion-

focused therapy (EFT) model of supervision. These include a description
of EFT competencies and goals of supervision, the supervisor’s interven-
tion styles/modes of participation, and a general description of the EFT
event-based model of supervision. The model is a process-based approach
to supervision (cf. Bernard & Goodyear, 2013). It is informed by the task
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/15966-002
29
analytic approach to understand psychotherapeutic change (Greenberg,

1984) and is supported by the knowledge provided by the event-based
paradigm proposed by Ladany, Friedlander, and Nelson (2005, 2016).
The general description of the model refers to markers, the task environ-
ment, the supervisee process, and task resolution. Moreover, the main
components of EFT supervision (the supervision alliance and the super-
visee’s interpersonal skills, technical skills, and individualization issues)
are briefly discussed, with a more detailed discussion in the following
chapters. We hope that this event-based model will make the supervision
map clearer. In essence, the proposed model is intended as a template for
identifying, understanding, and ultimately studying critical components
in supervision.
EMOTION-FOCUSED THERAPY COMPETENCIES

AND GOALS OF SUPERVISION
The clear specification of core competencies and goals of supervision in
EFT allows a supervisor to systematically organize and conceptualize vast
amounts of information, so that goals can be met and competencies can
be developed. It also provides the supervisor and supervisee with a com-
mon ground so they can work together in deciding on the most important
aspects of supervision and then selectively attend to these aspects.
Emotion-Focused Therapy Competencies

EFT competencies can be divided into five dimensions.
77 Relationship competencies include the ability to establish and maintain

a positive, growth-oriented, and genuine therapeutic relationship with
clients. Specifically, the EFT relationship competencies are reflected
in the supervisee’s ability to demonstrate presence, personal warmth,
empathy, and compassion.
77 An EFT therapist holds a set of attitudes, called attitude competencies.
These include genuine curiosity, a positive view of human beings (e.g.,
all human beings, regardless of their condition, are worthy of love and
30
Essential Dimensions of the EFT Model of Supervision
respect), and the belief that change can occur. Other attitudes targeted
during EFT training and supervision may include valuing and practicing
openness to experience, high tolerance for ambiguity, and increased
self-awareness, as well as social awareness (e.g., appreciation of diversity
and integrity).
77 Supervision focuses on developing skill competencies: (a) perceptual,
conceptual, and intervention skills, (b) expressive skills (communicating
empathy, engaging others, setting others at ease, establishing rapport, and
communicating a sense of respect), (c) process skills (attuned listening
process diagnostic and formulation skills), and (d) advanced inter-
vention skills (skills used in the accomplishment of different types of
therapeutic tasks).
77 Emotional competencies refer to awareness of emotions and the ability
to enable emotion to inform reasoned action. This involves emotion
awareness, emotion utilization, emotion knowledge, and emotion
management. In other words, the ability to perceive emotions in self
and others, the ability to access and/or generate feelings to facilitate
thought, tolerate affect, understand emotions, and regulate self and
others’ emotions to promote growth.
77 Knowledge competencies include not only expert knowledge of relevant
data and theory in EFT and emotion literature, but most important,
knowledge of self and others.
Goals of Supervision
EFT supervision has the following important goals:
1. To provide a growth-oriented, genuine, and trusting relationship that

will help the supervisee construct psychotherapeutic values and develop
his/her professional identity according to these values.
2. To enhance the clinical competence of the supervisee by building on
the supervisee’s strengths and ameliorating the supervisee’s weak-
nesses. Within the safety of the supervision relationship, the supervisor
helps the supervisee to (a) enhance his/her interpersonal skills (e.g.,
forming a bond and maintaining a collaborative alliance with the
31
client), (b) develop and use process-diagnostic skills (e.g., identify-

ing therapeutic markers during therapy and working collaboratively
with clients toward certain tasks), (c) develop technical skills (e.g.,
intervention, conceptualization, and personalization skills in a dia-
logical exchange; coconstruction obtained by following and leading
the clients), and (d) develop emotion facilitation skills (e.g., enhanc-
ing the ability to perceive, access, understand, regulate, and transform
emotions; providing the supervisee with an experiential basis for their
own future conduct of supervision). The EFT supervisor is aware that
it is the whole of one’s experiences in supervision that influences the
development of attitudes and skills, and hence models what is being
taught, including emotional awareness, empathy, critical thinking,
and growth.
3. To maintain the client’s welfare and promote client change, which involves
a commitment to have the client’s best interests in mind at all times, as
well as to help the client navigate toward the resolution of his/her dif-
ficulties and achieve a level of adjustment that is more consistent with
internal/external states of well-being.
4. To take care that appropriate ethical professional practices are met to
ensure safety and the best possible clinical outcome for the client.
5. Finally, depending on the setting in which EFT is taught, the super-
visor may have the responsibility to evaluate performance. In this case,
the supervisee’s level of development and readiness to go to the next
level of training or professional development is monitored and for-
mative feedback is provided.
When speaking about goals in EFT supervision, two important aspects

need to be considered. First, the relational aspects of supervision are seen
as paramount for building a supervisory alliance as the basis for collab-
orative work. The supervision experience is an encounter between two
human beings, the supervisee and the supervisor, transforming and being
transformed by one another, in a continuous “I–Thou” dialogue (cf. Buber,
1958). This represents the relational experience aspect. The therapeutic
treatment of the client, however, remains the central purpose of their
being together, and the client’s well-being should be virtually facilitated
32
during supervision. This forms the basis for the technical and goal-oriented
aspects of supervision.
Second, an important issue in EFT supervision is evaluation of com-
petence. The supervisee’s learning, growth, and development take prece-
dence over formal evaluation of his/her progress to provide an optimal
learning environment. In line with the belief that every person possesses
the internal resources for growth, and that these seeds need to find fertile
ground to grow, ensuring a safe, facilitative, and creative environment is
necessary for providing the set of tools for the supervisee to enhance his/
her practice. Moreover, EFT supervision involves neither a case review
nor a surrogate therapy for the supervisee. The EFT supervisor’s primary
roles are to provide support and gentle guidance, and to further the learn-
ing of methods of facilitating client experiencing and emotional process-
ing. Supervision is not focused on providing therapy for the supervisee’s
personal issues activated in therapy with the client, nor does it involve an
authoritative, rigid directing of the supervisee’s approach, as may be the
case when implementing and adhering to some manualized treatments
(Ladany et al., 2005).
SUPERVISOR’S INTERVENTION STYLES:

MODES OF PARTICIPATION
The EFT supervisor’s favored modes of participation involve experiential
responses to the supervisee and the supervisee’s concerns about his/her
clients and the therapy process, and helping to explore the supervisee’s
dilemmas. The EFT supervisor uses the following major groups of responses
(cf. Elliott, Watson, Goldman, & Greenberg, 2004).
77 Empathic exploration is used to communicate understanding, while

at the same time it helps the supervisee move from unclear, emerg-
ing edges to a better sense of what the client communicates, feels, and
needs. This exploration may take several forms, including exploratory
questions, fit questions, process observations, empathic conjectures,
and empathic refocusing. For example, a supervisor may say, “I see your
response to the client was validating the pain, not the anger in client’s
33
voice. I wonder what was going on in the moment and what led to that
decision.”
77 Process guiding refers to the EFT supervisor aiming to guide the process
rather than the content. Telling the supervisee what to do to address the
supervisee’s concerns goes against the principle of task-collaboration
and self-development. Instead, the EFT supervisor provides process
guiding responses involving suggestions on how the supervisee may
work productively on certain therapeutic tasks. As such, the supervisor
may use (a) experiential formulations to help the supervisee conceptu-
alize the client’s issues in experiential terms; (b) bookmarking, which
consists of underscoring a particular experience or task as being wor-
thy of future attention and work; (c) experiential teaching responses
that provide information about the nature of experiencing or treat-
ment process; (d) structuring task responses used to help the super-
visee engage in specific therapeutic tasks by either proposing a possible
task or offering suggestions on how to engage in or accomplish the
task at hand; and (e) process suggestions, which are coaching activities
intended to encourage the therapists to try specific interventions in
session (e.g., focusing, chair work). For example, the supervisor may
remark that the supervisee is relying heavily on empathic responses to
help the client, and he may present the following attempt at structuring
task responses: “Although I like the way you convey empathy, I think
you need to use more structure in your responses and keep our task(s)
in mind. You could move to using chair work to evoke the client emo-
tions in relation to his loss.” Awareness homework is sometimes used
by the supervisor, who suggests that the supervisee analyze excerpts of
their recorded session to get a better grasp of the therapeutic micro-
processes by identifying, for example, markers, emotional responses in
the client, possible tasks, and corresponding intervention responses.
77 Experiential presence responses are usually communicated by attune
ment, prizing, authenticity, and collaboration, and are aimed at fos-
tering the supervision alliance. Two other forms of communicating
presence, process disclosure (e.g., communicating the excitement about
a certain therapeutic intervention used by the supervisee) or personal
disclosure (e.g., using personal and/or professional examples and expe-
34
riences) are used as means to teaching. For example, a supervisor could

use small encouragements such as “Good listening/following,” “Great!”
and “I like that!” while listening to therapeutic recordings.
77 Content directive (nonexperiential) responses by the supervisor (e.g.,
problem-solving advisement, expert reassurance, information questions)
are inevitable, in spite of the principle of least content directiveness.
The supervision experience, be it EFT or another kind, involves a cer-
tain degree of case management, and the supervisor has to take the
role of advisor or coordinator when it comes to more practical issues
(e.g., implementation of ethical behavior, establishing the therapeutic
setting, addressing issues of suicidality or poor emotional regulation in
the client). For example, when faced with issues related to addressing
suicidality or boundary violations (e.g., a client’s failing to show up for
sessions, paying fees, offering expensive gifts), the supervisor is first and
foremost interested in providing the supervisee guidance and concrete
ways of addressing these types of issues. In that case, a supervisor may
say the following:
Before moving any further, we need to address this patient’s suicidal-

ity by doing a brief in-session assessment. Do you know anything else
besides his fantasies to die, like are they active or passive thoughts,
how often he has them and does he have a plan, what means he con-
siders using, resilience factors?
Glickauf-Hughes and Campbell (1991) proposed an experiential

approach to group supervision, focusing on blending various super
vision techniques representative of different theoretical foundations (e.g.,
parallel process, dialogue, use-of-self as instrument, the supervisor-as-
therapist, role-play). Their approach is reformulated and adapted here to
fit the EFT framework of supervision.
Accordingly, the dialogue, relying on the recognition that the supervisee
has to be taught to discover the truth from within, calls for the supervisor’s
ability to develop questions in the supervisee’s internal frame of reference
rather than in the supervisor’s frame of reference. So the supervisor might
pose the question “What do you think?” rather than saying, “This is what
it is.” By using this technique, the EFT supervisor does not give answers to
35
the supervisee’s questions, but rather asks questions to help the supervisee
arrive at a personalized answer; thus, the supervisee is encouraged to trust
his/her own feelings, perceptions, and interventions. To get the most out
of this dialogue, the EFT supervisor has to be sensitive to the supervisee’s
theoretical framework (the supervisee may have been previously trained
in a cognitive–behavioral or psychodynamic approach); be sensitive to the
supervisee’s personal, cultural, and professional life perspectives; and find
a language that is common for both.
The EFT supervisor also focuses on the supervisee’s ability to experi-
entially use his/her own self in the session, as an indicator for what might
happen with the client. The supervisor helps the supervisee to identify
what the supervisee was feeling at different points with the client, deepen-
ing the respective feeling and learning from its meaning. This technique
is used to help the supervisee become more emotionally and experien-
tially aware of his/her own feelings, and further use them as means toward
therapeutic ends.
In addition to these more following responses, the supervisor also
guides by giving process suggestions on different ways to respond, what
markers seem to be appearing, and what interventions can be used. There
is a lot of microprocess guiding suggesting what intervention could be
used to deepen experience and emotional processing. Modeling or dem-
onstrating live in supervision, an intervention or a therapeutic response, is
another method used by the EFT supervisor to aid the supervisee. Model-
ing happens not only through direct demonstrations but also at an atti-
tudinal level; the way in which the supervisor approaches and treats the
supervisee, as well as the client’s difficulties, is a form of teaching and
represents the foundation on which the supervisee builds his/her skills.
GENERAL DESCRIPTION OF
THE EMOTION-FOCUSED THERAPY
EVENT-BASED MODEL OF SUPERVISION
This model of EFT supervision, based on the event-based task analytic
paradigm, explains the supervision relationship and process in a tangible
manner. It is intended as a heuristically appealing and meaningful tool
36
for supervisors and researchers alike, providing a specification in terms of

markers, task environment, learning (or change) processes, and resolution
for different supervision components.
The proposed model is based on the assumption that EFT supervision
is a process that involves a series of supervision events or episodes, each
with an identifiable beginning, middle, and end embedded in an empathic
collaborative relationship. More specifically, the sequence in each super-
visory event involves (a) creating relational contact, (b) identifying a marker
of a problematic supervisee state, (c) creating a task environment by the
supervisor that is likely to help the supervisee work through the problem,
(d) supervisee’s processing while learning something new (i.e., the change
or learning process), and (e) the resolution of the problem state.
Supervision starts with relational contact, and further intervention is
indicated by a marker of the supervisee’s state in need of attention that either
the supervisor or the supervisee identify. The markers help establish the
major foci of supervision, which could be related to interpersonal/alliance
difficulties (between the supervisee and the client or between the supervisee
and the supervisor), or a technical difficulty in which the supervisee is hav-
ing some difficulty with a particular intervention skill. This is followed by a
set of supervisor responses to create a task environment conducive to facili-
tate supervisee processes that will lead to a resolution of the issue.
The resolution represents the end of a specific event. Although many
events may begin and be completed within one supervision session, others
may stretch over time and be resolved (or not) over multiple sessions or
may last for the entire course of supervision. We thus construe supervision,
much as we do therapy, as involving islands of work within an ocean of
empathic support and validation. The general model of supervision in
EFT, which includes interpersonal and technical components, is graphi-
cally presented in Figure 2.1. The figure shows the different categories of
supervisee difficulties, intervention skills, and resolutions.
Relational Contact
Supervision always starts with relational contact (see Figure 2.1), followed
by a question of what the supervisee would like the supervisor to focus
37
A. Supervisee’s B. Supervision
presented difficulty alliance difficulty
CONTACT MARKERS TASK CHANGE RESOLUTION

ENVIRONMENT PROCESS
a) Supervisee’s a) Improved supervision

difficulty Supervisor Supervisee alliance
• Interpersonal: operations processes Active and productive
o Low empathy (supervisor’s engagement in the supervision
role and Supervisee relationship
o Weak alliance
intervention engagement b) Improved skills
• Technical: style)
o Intervention • Interpersonal skills:
o Case formulation Empathy and ability to
b) Supervision communicate Rogerian core
alliance difficulty conditions
• Confrontation: Empathic • Technical skills:
o Withdrawal exploration Improved knowledge
o Personalization Experiential Using new interventions,
learning dialogue understanding client’s core
Modeling emotions scheme, and
Role-play developing a personal
intervention style
Figure 2.1
Expanded general model of emotion-focused therapy supervision tasks.
on, unless more urgent issues emerge from the initial contact. Generally,
but not always, the supervisee is asking for help on certain points or dif-
ficulties. Supervision, then, is seen as involving events in which there is a
focus on the behavioral performance of the supervisee, in the session with
the client, occurring in the specific context of a developed relationship
between the supervisor and the supervisee and occurring at a specific time
in supervision (early, middle, or late). This requires that tapes of sessions,
preferably visual recordings, be used in all supervision so that the super-
visee’s actual performance is the focus of supervision.
Supervision begins with the supervisor’s welcoming of the supervisee
into the supervisory space, creating an amicable and safe ambiance, and
engaging in brief exchanges about the supervisee’s present context, state
38
of mind, energy level, or anything that can become a potential roadblock

in the session. It also means that attention is paid to contact before setting
the “contract,” which is achieved by discussing goals and collaboratively
agreeing on the focus of supervision, either in general terms or for a par-
ticular session. For example, a supervisor may start by saying something
like, “Hi, it’s good to have you here again. How do you feel today, get-
ting any better with your flu?” After the initial contact, the working phase
begins by focusing on what the supervisor and the supervisee will do, and
they begin listening to a recording of the session. For example, the super-
visee may say something like, “My cold is much better, thanks. There was
something in my last session with the client that left me wondering” or
the supervisor could say, “Okay, it’s great that you’re back, so what will we
be talking about today?” or “What happened during the last session that
you’d like to talk about?”
It is important to note that prior to, or at the beginning of, the meet-
ing, the supervisor clears him-/herself to become as present as possible,
letting go of whatever was being done before or bracketing any of his/her
unrelated concerns so as to focus on the supervisee and the material at
hand. If the focus of supervision is working with a new client, the super-
visor will ask for some background information, presenting problem, cli-
ent history, some demographic information, and what happened in the
session. The goal of this is not to collect information on which to base
supervision, as the supervision is always done by listening to the process
on tape or video recordings. Instead, the brief description is used as an
orientation to the client and the session.
Marker Identification
Once contact is made relationally with the supervisee and preliminary
information is gathered, a marker of the supervisee problem state usually
arises early in the supervision session. A marker of a supervision event
involves the supervisee’s statement or behavior that signals something on
which the supervisee wants to focus. This might be a dilemma that the
supervisee is having (e.g., “Should I focus on chair work or focusing?”),
39
a verbal or nonverbal indicator by the supervisee of some concern (e.g.,

“I am worried that I am missing something in this client’s presentation”;
shifting in the chair as if uncomfortable when speaking about an issue),
the supervisee’s direct request for help from the supervisor (e.g., “I’d like
if we can focus on my chair work technique today—I’m not sure I’m quite
getting it”), or the identification by the supervisor of a teaching point or a
client state observed on the tape that could benefit from a particular type of
intervention (e.g., noticing markers, therapeutic tasks, emotional reactions
or undertones that remained unnoticed or unaddressed by the supervisee).
The supervisee’s difficulties with the therapy may be either an inter-
personal difficulty with the client or a technical difficulty with interven-
tion. For example, an interpersonal difficulty would be clearly indicated
by statements from the supervisee such as, “I just don’t feel like I’m con-
necting or understanding the client” or, “The client seems wary,” or the
supervisor could make observations of such issues. A technical difficulty
would be indicated by statements from the supervisee such as, “I can’t
seem to help my client deepen their feelings,” “I don’t know how to help
my client put her anger into words,” or in referring to a self-critical dia-
logue, “I can’t quite get at my client’s core criticism.” The observations of
such supervisee difficulties can also be made by the supervisor. In addi-
tion, the supervisee and the supervisor may identify multiple concerns at
the same time, supplying a number of supervision markers simultane-
ously, such as alliance difficulties with the client, the lack of a therapeutic
focus, or difficulty identifying a process marker. In such cases, which issue
to deal with first is decided collaboratively.
The other possible type of supervision marker that might arise is a
marker of an alliance difficulty between supervisee and supervisor. This
might take the form of an alliance rupture in which the supervisee con-
fronts the supervisor about dissatisfaction with supervision. Other types
of supervisory alliance ruptures are indicated by supervisee withdrawal,
helplessness, defensiveness, or opposition. In addition, there may be situa-
tions in which the supervisor feels a need to confront the supervisee about
his or her behavior, such as lateness or some specific personal or technical
weakness that is interfering with the treatment.
40
Task Environment
The task environment is formed by the supervisor’s responses at a marker
to engage the supervisee in working on a supervision task. Such responses
may include helping the supervisee to remain focused on the client’s core
issues or teaching the supervisee the steps needed to resolve a piece of
unfinished business. The supervisor’s performance represents the task envi-
ronment. In this step, the supervisee’s intervention or empathic response
on the tape, or the supervisee’s statement of difficulty to the supervisor,
is followed by the supervisor’s guidance; together, they work on the task
in a collaborative manner to accomplish the desired resolution. In other
words, after the marker is identified on the tape, the supervisor hears or
sees recorded segments of the therapeutic session, thus having a chance
to “directly” witness the interaction between the client and the therapist
and their performances in the session (i.e., what the client and super-
visee actually said, how it was said, what the ensuing responses were). The
supervisor operations of interest are those responses and interventions
made to address the supervision task.
Supervisee’s Process
To be effective, the supervisor’s interventions need to facilitate supervisee
engagement and developmental processes. Thus, it is supervisee processes
in supervision that are the site of change; these are more important than
what the supervisor does. Successful supervision depends on the super-
visor being able to promote the supervisee’s learning. The supervisee’s
processes are what lead to the acquisition of new competencies that will
enhance his/her clinical skills. These new competencies may entail new,
perceptual, intervention, or conceptual skills. For example, the super-
visee may come to perceptually hear how clients’ vocal quality changes
to indicate that the client is entering into more poignant experience. This
involves the supervisee being able to acoustically and conceptually dis-
criminate different patterns of client vocalization, or the supervisee may
come to learn new ways of helping the client deepen experience by acquir-
ing the new skill of how to focus the client on his/her current bodily felt
41
sense. The supervisee may also come to better understand the way the
client often attributes his/her own self-criticisms on others and experi-
ences these projections as coming back at him/her as though the other is
doing this to them. This understanding is facilitated by using a two-chair
dialogue and by having the supervisor point out that the client is doing it.
These complex cognitive, affective, behavioral processes in the supervisee
that lead to changes in their ways of being, seeing, and doing, however
have not yet been clearly investigated or specified.
Resolution
Finally, the resolution, which represents the successful outcome or the
accomplishment of the supervision task, may build progressively during,
or take place by the end of, the supervision session (i.e., event). The reso-
lution of a supervisory event may take the form of either (a) an improved
supervision alliance with active and productive engagement in the super-
vision relationship by both people or (b) enhanced interpersonal skills
(e.g., more present, with better empathy, warmth, positive regard and con-
gruence) or improved technical skills (e.g., being able to use new interven-
tions, understanding the client’s core emotions).
Successful supervision sessions result in a new understanding; an
integration of perceptions, understandings, attitudes, and skills; a plan for
action; and so forth. The supervisee develops, refines, and implements new
skills in one of the following areas: therapeutic alliance (the supervisee
becomes more able to engage actively and productively in the therapeu-
tic relationship), perceptual skills (the supervisee sees client performance
and experience in new ways), case formulation (the supervisee develops
an insightful understanding of client’s themes and working model), inter-
vention skills (the supervisee is more able to use new interventions in a
timely, fluent, and creative manner), or personalization (the supervisee
feels encouraged and inspired to grow). For example, a supervision reso-
lution may take the form of an experiential, new understanding by the
supervisee of the client’s depressive organization, seeing how secondary
feelings of hopelessness and sadness may cover underlying anger, and
42
developing a new view of the adaptive aspect of core anger. Resolution,

or progression toward it, is experienced as a sense of relief and satisfac-
tion on both sides, with renewed enthusiasm for continuing work with
and for the client. Resolution may not be accomplished during a given
supervision session, or it may be fully accomplished during later stages
of supervision (i.e., in subsequent sessions). Less successful supervision
sessions, by definition, have no resolution or no progress toward it; rather,
the unresolved supervision task tends to recur in following sessions, and
if it continues to remain unresolved, the danger of a supervision alliance
rupture is imminent. In this case, mutual goals and expectations have to
be openly and genuinely discussed, and tasks have to be reorganized and
adjusted to new understandings of the difficulty.
43
3
The Process of Supervision
What Washington needs is adult supervision.

—Barack Obama
Supervision can be a place where a living profession breathes and learns.

—Peter Hawkins and Robin Hawkins Shohet
T he three main areas of focus in the process of supervision are (a) the

supervisory alliance, (b) the supervisee’s interpersonal skills, and
(c) the supervisee’s technical skills. This chapter will address these super-
visory foci in order. We first focus on developing a good supervisory
alliance between the supervisor and supervisee. Then the focus shifts to
supervising the supervisee’s interpersonal skills related to alliance forma-
tion, presence, and achieving the core therapeutic conditions (uncondi-
tional positive regard, genuineness, and empathy). Different supervisory
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/15966-003
45
examples are provided for facilitating empathic responses, activating more

affect in the client or better attunement to affect in the therapist. Next,
we address the third supervisory focus (the supervisee’s technical skills),
which involves developing case formulation and intervention skills. This
chapter ends with examples of supervisory sessions with the same client
over time to give an overall sense of how supervision progresses through
treatment.
THE SUPERVISORY ALLIANCE

Alliance formation between supervisor and supervisee can be conceived of
and understood as the initial supervision task. We start with the alliance
in supervision, as this is where supervision begins or fails. Any meeting
between people starts with contact. The initial focus of therapy and super-
vision in emotion-focused therapy (EFT) is establishing “contact before
contract” (Gendlin & Beebe, 1968). We believe strongly that the supervisor
needs to build a warm, empathic, and validating bond with the supervisee.
To do this, the supervisor must be present, in the moment, and respon-
sive to the supervisee’s feeling and needs. From this base, collaboration on
supervisory goals and tasks can be established.
According to Bordin (1983), the supervisory alliance consists of three
components: (a) a strong emotional bond, (b) an agreement on the goals
of supervision (e.g., mastering specific therapeutic skills, expanding con-
ceptualization ability), and (c) a perceived relevance of the tasks of super-
vision (e.g., using empathic exploration or role-play rather than didactic
teaching to achieve resolution of a given issue). This conception of the alli-
ance blends relational warmth and attachment, which is about the bond,
with collaboration, in which the focus is on the task or work aspects of
what the supervisor and supervisee are doing in supervision.
Developing a strong working alliance at the beginning of the supervi-
sion process is considered to be important for the quality and outcome of
supervision. In line with the aforementioned findings on the importance
of the alliance and with the core principles of EFT, the development and
46
maintenance of the working supervisory alliance is considered as a central

pillar in the present model of supervision. It represents the basis on which
the supervision process takes place, including the identification of super-
vision markers, provision of a facilitative task environment, supervisee
change processes, and resolution of the issue brought to supervision.
Although the supervisory alliance is coconstructed, the supervisor,
given his/her expertise and role, takes primary responsibility in facilitat-
ing its development and maintenance. The formation of the supervisory
working alliance is influenced by the same set of personal and professional
factors that play a role in the development of any therapeutic alliance. For
example, Falender and Shafranske (2004) stated that highly rated supervisor
qualities include empathy, a nonjudgmental stance, impartment of a sense
of validation or affirmation, an attitude of acceptance, provision of encour-
agement to explore and experiment, integrity, provision of autonomy, and
an understanding nature. Furthermore, personal qualities such as presence,
genuineness, warmth, and the capacity for empathy and emotional engage-
ment support the development of the bond (Geller & Greenberg, 2011).
A strong supervisory alliance is needed for helping the supervisee develop
empathic exploration skills, as this alliance not only ensures a secure base
for the supervisee but also provides a steady ground for change in which the
supervisor is able to propose alternative, more empathic ways of respond-
ing. With a good alliance, the supervisee is more likely to be receptive to
feedback and perceive constructive criticism as less threatening or shaming.
Another important aspect of a helping relationship is establishing an
alliance by collaborating on the goals and tasks of therapy. This promotes
the experience that the supervisor and supervisee are working together to
overcome the problem. Getting an agreement on goals and tasks is depen-
dent on understanding the client and what might be helpful to the client,
and thereby it is an enactment of empathy. Goal agreement in EFT often is
achieved by being able to capture the chronically enduring pain with which
the client has been struggling, and establishing an agreement to work on
resolving this pain rather than setting a behavioral change goal. The super-
visor guides the supervisee to obtain agreement on the main goal.
47
SUPERVISION OF INTERPERSONAL SKILLS

The supervisee needs to develop interpersonal skills to form and maintain
a strong therapeutic alliance with clients (skills of relating) and to be pres-
ent and empathic (skills of being), which involves being in the moment,
being empathically attuned to affect, communicating empathy to the cli-
ents, and responding with sensitive responsiveness. This helps create a
warm, validating climate that invites clients to explore themselves and
their lives and collaborate on goals and tasks to create a sense of working
together to overcome the client’s problems. Many supervisee perceptual
skills are needed here, as they are the basis of responsiveness and affect
attunement, whereas the therapeutic presence is a requirement for per-
ceiving what is happening here and now.
Therapeutic Presence
One of the fundamental tasks of supervision is related to enhancing the
therapist’s presence and use of the core conditions of empathy, uncon-
ditional positive regard, and genuineness. Geller and Greenberg (2011)
saw the therapist’s presence as a precondition for therapist attunement
and responsiveness, as it allows for a particular kind of sensing, seeing,
and listening to the client that then promotes a response that is attuned
to the client’s present moment. To facilitate this form of responsiveness
the supervisor is continually helping the supervisee see what is going on
nonverbally and to respond.
Therapeutic presence is defined as bringing one’s whole self into the
encounter with the client, being completely in the moment on a multi-
plicity of levels: physically, emotionally, cognitively, and spiritually. Ther-
apeutic presence involves being fully immersed in the present moment,
without judgment or expectation, being with and for the client. This
involves a particular way of being by the therapist.
In the initial stage of their professional development, young therapists
first are encouraged to become present by observing and listening to their
client’s moment-by-moment process. During supervision, the supervisee
further learns how to help the client identify and symbolize his/her own
48
experience, reflect on it, and make sense of it in a new way. EFT super
vision aims at developing high levels of empathic attunement in the
supervisee. Good EFT therapists are responsively attuned at all times to all
the nuances and implicit meanings in their clients’ narratives, as well as to
the present therapeutic relationship. To be fully responsive, the therapist
needs to learn to listen carefully, see clearly, and resonate with the client’s
account of his/her life story, present concerns, and styles of processing in
the session, so that the therapist can actively engage in a dialogue with the
client and synthesize different aspects such as emotion and reason, past
and present, needs, and values.
Core Conditions: Empathy, Unconditional

Positive Regard, and Genuineness
A primary goal of EFT supervision is to enable the supervisee to reach a
point where he/she can productively engage in the baseline task of empathic
exploration. This requires that the supervisee is able to attend to the client’s
experience and explore and symbolize the client’s feelings and meanings.
The therapist needs to start with being present and empathic. This helps
the client focus inward and deepen the experience. The therapist needs to
respond with different types of empathy that focus on helping the client access
and symbolize his/her emotions (Elliott, Watson, Goldman, & Greenberg,
2004; Greenberg & Elliott, 1997). These include empathic understanding,
empathic affirmation, and different forms of exploratory empathy, includ-
ing evocative responses, exploratory responses, and empathic conjectures
(Greenberg & Elliott, 1997).
Empathic understanding is a baseline task. It conveys an understanding
of the client’s experience and involves a checking of understanding. During
supervision, while watching videos of the therapy, the supervisor repeat-
edly points out that the supervisee’s empathic understanding responses
are attempts to distill and convey the essence of the client’s communication
and that they are not intended to push for exploration or to increase the
client’s arousal. Rather, the responses involve following clients’ narratives,
staying present and responsive to clients’ experiences, and communicating
understanding.
49
The second task related to empathy training in supervision is teach-

ing the skills of empathic exploration. This form of empathy is seen as the
fundamental mode of empathic intervention in EFT supervision. Empathic
exploration involves a response that is focused on the leading edge of the
client’s experience and attempts to make explicit what is implicit. By sensi-
tively attending, moment by moment, to what is most poignant in the client’s
spoken and nonspoken narrative, the therapist’s verbal empathic explora-
tion can help capture the client’s experience even more richly than the cli-
ent’s own descriptions. This helps the client symbolize previously implicit,
unformulated experience consciously in awareness. During EFT supervision,
the supervisee learns that when the therapist’s response ends with a focus
on what seems most alive in the client’s statement, the client’s attention is
focused on this aspect of his/her experience. In doing so, the client is encour-
aged to focus on and differentiate the leading edge of his/her experience.
An example of EFT supervision appears in the companion DVD,
Emotion-Focused Therapy Supervision, which shows the supervisor and
the supervisee watching a video of the supervised session with a client.
The supervisor highlights the importance of the supervisee’s focusing on
what is most poignant in the client’s experience when talking about his
mother. In the following transcript, the therapist asks the client to imagine
his mother in an empty chair.
Therapist (on video): If you could just sort of get a sense of her. What’s it
like for you to see her, what happens [for you]?
Client (on video): I feel sadness. But it’s not . . . well I’m sad for her. I’m
sad for her because I realize I don’t actually feel sad or shame or guilt
about my feelings. I guess I loved you but it was very difficult for me to
express that because I wasn’t sure, and also there were things about you
that I found creepy.
Supervisor: This is really interesting because he’s actually naming a fair
number of feelings for someone who’s more rational. But first when he
said, “I love you” I thought it might be helpful to amplify that and say “say
it again” but now he’s coming up with “creepy” and that’s very strong. It
would be good to reflect and explore that.
50
The supervisor’s comments here highlight what is the leading edge of

the client’s experience. In supervision, the supervisor’s helps the super-
visee communicate his/her understanding and reflects that which is most
poignant in the client’s statements and to focus the client’s attention
inward on these aspects of the experience.
In addition, the supervisor, at times, encourages the use of empathic
conjectures, which involve guesses or hunches about what the client is
feeling or suggestions of phrases for the client to try. These are offered
as clearly coming from the therapist’s frame of reference and differ from
exploratory responses, which remain in the client’s frame of reference.
For example, a supervisor might encourage a therapist to use a conjecture
such as “I imagine that you are feeling such and such” or “my hunch is
that . . .” This is particularly helpful to encourage intellectualizing clients
to stay with their feelings.
In another example, the therapist works with a female client and pro-
vides a conjecture which the client validates.
Therapist (on video): We’re in this together and I’m here. And is there
another feeling [that you are] afraid somehow that if [you] walk away this
may actually be [your] only chance?
Client (on video): Yeah, I really feel that.
Therapist (on video): You really feel that. So that if [you] walk away then
[you are] letting go of any option.
Supervisor: That’s a really good empathic conjecture. She didn’t just say
it but you are sort of feeling into it and getting the essences—“I’m afraid.”
In another example, the client is in a dialogue with his mother in an

empty chair in response to the client having articulated that his mother’s
message to him was that she wanted him to be a very good boy.
Therapist (on video): What happens to you when you hear that [your
mother wants you to be a good boy]?
Client (on video): Um . . . It would be interesting if I heard that.
51
Supervisor: Okay, so he’s tapping his fingers. Okay, so this is dangerous, so

to speak, process-wise. So, “it’s interesting”—we want to get what actually
happens inside.
Supervisee: What’s the tapping mean to you?
Supervisor: Well, it just shows that he’s agitated, that he’s beginning to be
activated. So I’m watching [the tapping] and it’s like what are you feeling?
So let’s go back to the video and see.
Therapist (on video): You look kinda sad actually.
Client (on video): Um.
Supervisor: So that’s good you’re picking up, you’re moving to the affect
track, that’s the important thing. And you’re using a conjecture or an
observation right? So that’ll take him more to his attention inwards.
Client (on video): Well, I . . . well I guess I am kind of sad because I think
that those expectations and restrictions narrowed the person that I was
and maybe [that I] could’ve been.
Therapist (on video): Stay with that feeling.
Supervisor: Okay, so that’s very good. He’s going into this hesitant way of
processing, his voice is becoming more focused or internal. I was worried
that he was then going to jump out and go into more explanation but you
hold him [with that feeling]. So that’s what we want do in trying to hold
him there. And he says something about [the expectations and restric-
tions] narrowed so this is a felt meaning where he’s kind of focusing on
what it really [felt] like. So let’s see what happens on the video.
Therapist (on video): [Stay with that feeling] in your body and stay with
that feeling that you have right now. Don’t disappoint, don’t bring shame,
stay within the narrow confines . . .
Supervisor: So he takes a big breath.
Therapist (on video): Like where do you feel it? What’s the quality of that?
Client (on video): Well I guess it’s right here, that’s where I’m feeling it.
52
Supervisor: Alright, so he points to his solar plexus.

Client (on video): I guess I feel [. . .] deprived maybe something . . . I
could’ve had something but I didn’t. I also think though that mostly on
my own but also through the contacts with other people that I really did
strive to find some of those things that I . . .
Supervisor: So this is kind of a critical juncture. So we get to “I felt
deprived” and that’s the sort of core [emotion]. And even notice his lan-
guage, “but I think” and then he goes away now and he’s going to go into
a meaning narrative. Somehow you want to guide by almost interrupting
and saying “but just deprived.” And see here, with someone who’s an intel-
lectual processor, I think conjecture would be helpful at this point, where
you said “just deprived” and you [could] try to enter into what you know
about him and conjecture or guess about what he must be feeling—“Just
deprived and [there] was a whole lot of you that you needed and wanted
to express but it was almost evocative, almost like being cut off at the knees
or just not getting . . .” so you start elaborating the internal and that might
help him to put his attention back on that. So it’s just sort of, I mean you’re
doing a good job, but it’s just sort of closer.
The supervisor also needs to point out to the supervisee that exploratory
empathy needs to be balanced with empathic understanding, as the latter
responses give the feeling of being understood and are what provide a frame-
work of safety, acceptance, and validation. Overall, the supervisor guides the
supervisee to make empathic responses that focus on growth-oriented pos-
sibilities that emerge in the client or are implicit in the client’s experience, but
that also remain within the client’s proximal zone of development, focusing
on possibilities within their grasp. This means the therapist cannot be too
far ahead, nor too far behind the client. Empathic responses can be up to
one step ahead—that is, sufficiently close to where the client is so as to pro-
vide a stepping-stone that the client can use to step out of their painful state.
However, two steps ahead—that is, being too far from the client’s experience,
jumping ahead too fast—may become difficult for the client. On the other
hand, being behind the client is potentially impeding.
53
SUPERVISION ESSENTIALS FOR EMOTION-FOCUSED THERAPY
In addition to different forms of empathy, positive regard and gen-

uineness also are important relational qualities that are addressed and
reviewed during EFT supervision. The supervisee is guided toward being
accepting and congruent in a disciplined way by discussing how to do this
while reviewing tapes and by modeling responses. The overall goal is to be
accepting of all client experiences and to communicate a prizing attitude
in which one values the client and accepts him/her without judgment.
The supervisee is taught through listening and discussing relevant events
in their sessions that the genuine relationship between the client and the
therapist, and its constancy, provides a corrective emotional experience for
the client. Genuineness is key in handling relationship issues that may arise.
SUPERVISION OF CASE FORMULATION

After the therapist has formed a safe, trusting therapeutic relationship
with the client and the client is comfortable disclosing relevant emotional
information, the relationship begins to solidify and the narrative unfolds.
The supervisor now guides the supervisee to focus on hearing how the
client processes emotion and creates meaning, and how the client’s emo-
tional processing styles enhance or hinder access to his/her inner experi-
ence. EFT formulation focuses first and foremost on the client’s emotional
pain (Goldman & Greenberg, 2015). The client’s particular expression
of pain and his/her responses to the therapist’s responses are what guide
intervention. Throughout supervision of the case formulation process,
the EFT supervisor guides the supervisee to focus attention on following
the client’s emotional pain, as seen in the following example of a supervi-
sor’s helpful advice to his supervisee regarding a case in which a female
client mentions problems in a relationship:
Supervisor: You see, somehow [it is] my intuition is if we [can follow]

that very poignant sadness [the client shows], that [would take] us to the
core [difficulty], because you know with case formulation we say “follow
the pain compass.” The [client’s] pain is like a compass and it’ll lead you
to whatever is [at the] core. And that’s why you have to just follow the
54
process. We can’t say what is [the] core [difficulty] until we follow the
[client’s] pain and arrive at it.
Thus, rather than formulating a picture of the client’s enduring per-

sonality, character dynamics, defenses, core beliefs, or relational patterns
that repeat across time, the supervisor encourages the supervisee to follow
the client’s pain, which acts as a compass that will guide them to the cli-
ent’s core difficulty.
The supervisee is encouraged to get a sense of the client’s core emo-
tionally based self-organization. This self-organization is based on painful,
primary, maladaptive emotion schemes and provide an understanding of
the client’s most stable and enduring problematic self-states. This under-
standing develops from following the client’s pain. Does the client, at his/
her core, feel basically insecure because of core feelings of anxiety, unable to
be alone, with feelings of lonely abandonment, or does the client experience a
core sadness accompanying this fear of abandonment, or does the client feel
inadequate and worthless on the basis of core shame or some idiosyncratic
combination of these? The identification of these self-organizations and
emotions are based on the client’s phenomenological experiences, not inter-
pretations or inferences about hypothetical underlying causes. Empathic
attunement to affect will help the client to feel safe and validated, and will
lead the client and therapist to the client’s core underlying painful concerns.
The understanding that this client has core shame, or anxious insecurity,
or sad loneliness or a combination of these helps organize information
and guide treatment.
It also helps to articulate a narrative of the way these core feelings
are connected to and influence the client’s experience, behavior, thinking,
and relating to others. This articulation is a collaborative process between
client and therapist and between supervisor and supervisee. During EFT
supervision, the supervisee learns to follow the client’s pain and formu-
late the client’s problem in terms of a core painful self-organization and
emotion or set of emotions and how these relate to the symptom and to
behavior. For example, in the supervision captured on this book’s com-
panion DVD, Emotion-Focused Therapy Supervision, the supervisor raises
55
the question “So what is the client’s core emotion scheme or core wound?”
and the supervisee and supervisor discuss this in a collaborative manner
and try to get the client to arrive at “If I was myself, I wouldn’t be accept-
able.” This then appears to be a core shame-based organization of not
being acceptable. This guides the therapist, who listens for this as they pro-
ceed. In addition to following the pain, the focus is on identifying markers
for intervention to get at the pain and its source. Thus when markers of
self-criticism or unresolved feelings toward significant others arise, work-
ing on them helps get to the core maladaptive feeling.
Stages of Case Formulation

The two main stages of case formulation and how they are applied in super-
vision are summarized here. The supervisor guides the supervisee to engage
in the steps involved in each stage:
Stage 1: Unfold the Narrative and Observe Emotional Processing Style

This usually takes place in the first three sessions. The steps involved in
this stage are as follows:
1. In the beginning, the supervisor guides the supervisee to respond

empathically to facilitate the client in describing the presenting prob-
lems (symptomatic, behavioral, and relational difficulties).
2. The supervisor helps the supervisee to listen for poignancy and pain-
ful experience as the client presents the problem and the supervisor
points out the nonverbals and verbals of the client.
3. The supervisor helps the supervisee attend to and observe the client’s
emotional processing style.
4. The supervisor helps the supervisee in facilitating the unfolding of the
client’s life story/narrative (related to identity and attachment).
Stage 2: Follow the Client’s Pain, Together With a Sufficient

Understanding of the Client’s Narrative
This is done to begin to identify the core emotion and cocreate a focus.
The steps involved in this stage are as follows:
56
5. The supervisor now helps the supervisee identify markers for task
work as they emerge in sessions and are opportunities for particular
interventions suited to these states.
6. The supervisor helps the supervisee identify the client’s underlying,
core, emotion schemes either adaptive or maladaptive.
7. The supervisor helps the supervisee identify the client’s needs embed-
ded in the emotion.
8. The supervisor helps the supervisee identify the client’s secondary
emotions that obscure primary emotions.
9. The supervisor helps the supervisee identify client blocks to accessing
core emotions and self-organizations.
10. The supervisor helps the supervisee in coconstructing themes with
the client about how the client treats him/herself, how the client per-
ceives he/she treats others, and how the client is treated by others.
These themes are generally intrapersonal or interpersonal in nature.
Sometimes in addition there are existential themes, such as loss, death,
boundaries, and choice.
11. The supervisor and the supervisee coconstruct a narrative that helps
tie presenting problems (relational and behavioral difficulties) to core
emotion schemes by discussing what the client has said during ses-
sions and what feelings seemed most central.
Markers for when to engage in which of the these processes depends

to some degree on the number of sessions there have been in therapy,
and the progress that has been made. For example, the assessing of
emotional processing style and unfolding of the narrative occur at the
beginning of the therapeutic relationship. Listening for poignancy and
pain occur early on but always throughout, whereas a naming of the
core emotions takes place only later after a secure alliance is established.
Tying it all together into a theme and a treatment rationale and estab-
lishing a focus occurs later, maybe by the fourth session in short-term
therapy (12–20 sessions). Provision of a narrative is indicated when a
rationale and focus is needed to strengthen the collaboration, either
because the client asks for it or shows signs of confusion as to what is
happening, or to produce clarity. Case formulation thus moves from
57
an initial deconstruction of the presenting problems in the context

of forming therapeutic relationship to identification of core emotion
schemes and self-organizations.
SUPERVISION OF INTERVENTION SKILLS

The supervision of intervention skills focuses on the following: develop-
ing a theoretical understanding of the change process, developing sharp
perceptual skills, and progressively building on therapeutic tasks. As ther-
apy progresses, the supervisor focuses on supervisee’s theoretical under-
standing of the change process. The basis of any supervision for trainees
who want to learn specific therapeutic interventions is for the supervisor
to inform them of how to access background reading and a theoretical
understanding of the respective therapeutic theory of intervention. One
of the first tasks the EFT supervisor has is to introduce the supervisee to
the theory of intervention and to the research available.
However, having conceptual knowledge is not the same as having
procedural knowledge and being able to use it in context. Knowledge in
which one knows something intellectually but cannot use it when needed
is inert knowledge (Greenberg & Safran, 1986). EFT supervision is not
concerned primarily with imparting conceptual knowledge for intellec-
tual understanding, but with facilitating procedural learning, knowing,
and being able to use theoretical understanding as it is expressed in a
concrete situation to develop knowledge by acquaintance. This all builds
“active knowing how” to apply the theoretical model of intervention in a
particular situation with a particular client. Within the EFT perspective,
therapists develop by observing, listening, and responding empathically
with the client.
Perceptual skills are particularly important here. They refer to the
ability to see what is occurring and construe it in a way that makes it an
opportunity for a particular kind of intervention. Therapists learn most
by accessing and labeling (symbolizing) the experience of an actual client
in therapy, and then finding meaning or making sense of these experiences
in a collaborative, egalitarian effort during each session. As such, EFT
58
supervision focuses on developing seeing, listening, and empathic skills.

This involves perceiving momentary fluctuations in nonverbal aspects of
expression, understanding the way the client experiences events, and iden-
tifying the client’s microprocesses, or the variety of ways of processing
experience in the session.
Goldman and Greenberg (2015) described a number of emotional pro-
cessing microprocess markers by which the supervisor guides the supervisee
in developing the following perceptual skills:
77 Recognizing moment-by-moment process micromarkers, such as verbal

(e.g., “catching” nuances in the client’s language content, poignancy,
client’s rambling; evaluating concreteness, specificity, and vividness
in the client’s language) and nonverbal (e.g., hesitation, incongruent
affect, vocal quality, level of arousal and/or experiencing, pain). This
is done by pointing out such occurrences as they are happening in the
session on video.
77 Attuning to markers of characteristic style, or indicators of how clients
are usually treating themselves and others, usually by accessing infor-
mation about the client’s attachment histories. Is the client self-critical,
self-protective, or self-abasing? Does the client see others as abandon-
ing, persecuting, or supportive?
77 Identifying major task markers, or markers of specific problematic or
distressing psychological states that signal the client’s readiness to work
on a particular issue, and further direct the therapist to propose certain
tasks and interventions.
In addition, the supervisee needs to learn to distinguish between vari-

ous types of emotions, such as (a) primary adaptive, (b) primary mal-
adaptive, (c) secondary, and (d) instrumental. The supervisor also needs
to help the supervisee observe the client’s emotional processing style.
These are made by making moment-by-moment judgments or process
diagnoses (Greenberg, 2010) about how clients are processing emotion.
Client vocal quality, degree of emotional arousal, levels of experiencing,
and the productivity of the particular emotion are all important processes
to be observed.
59
Client’s Vocal Quality

The supervisor can help the supervisee to discriminate between four
types of vocal quality, on the basis of a pattern of vocal features, defined
in a manual on client vocal quality, that reflect the momentary deploy-
ment of attention and energy of the speaker (Rice & Kerr, 1986; Rice &
Wagstaff, 1967). The supervisor does this by pointing out the vocal fea-
tures such as pitch, energy level, tempo, and stress points on the tapes being
reviewed. Each of the four categories—focused, emotional, externalizing,
and limited—describes a particular type of participation. Focused voice
indicates that the client has turned inward, is tracking experience, and is
attempting to symbolize it in words. External voice is indicated by an even,
rhythmic tone and with energy turned outward. It has a prerehearsed,
speech-like quality and indicates a lack of spontaneity. Although it may
indicate expressiveness, it has a “talking at” quality. It is unlikely that con-
tent is being freshly experienced. Limited voice is not on platform, will
often come out squeaky, and has a wariness behind the voice, indicating
that affect is being strangulated and that it is perhaps difficult to trust.
Emotional voice is indicated by emotion breaking through in the voice as
the client talks.
Client’s Experiencing Level

Right from the start, as they listen to tapes, the supervisor uses the Expe-
riencing Scale to bring the supervisee’s attention to the client depth of
experience. The Experiencing Scale is a research tool used by trained EFT
therapists, although they are not coding clients as they sit with them.
This would interfere with the therapist’s capacity to be present (Geller &
Greenberg, 2011) and empathically attuned on a moment-by-moment
basis. Therapists are, however, informed by their understanding of the
scale that is often achieved by practicing using the scale on other therapy
examples and on their own tapes. When clients are continuously low on
the experiencing scale, the supervisor will encourage the supervisee to
notice this and offer empathic deeper exploratory reflections and con-
jectures and subsequently, observe whether clients respond by focusing
60
inward (i.e., “I feel so torn up inside”) or continue to focus outward (i.e.,

“You know, I did not know when he was going to come home”).
Client’s Expressed Emotional Arousal

The supervisor can help the supervisee to understand emotional arousal
using the Emotional Arousal Scale (Warwar & Greenberg, 2000), which
assesses the quality and intensity of client emotions on the basis of an
evaluation of the client’s degree of arousal from voice and body and the
degree of restriction of expression. When assessing emotional arousal,
supervisees need first to evaluate whether the emotion is a primary one
and then assess its overall level of intensity. At midlevel, arousal is moder-
ate in voice and body, and an emotional voice is present; ordinary speech
patterns are moderately disrupted by emotional overflow as represented
by changes in accentuation patterns, unevenness of pace, changes in pitch
and arousal may still be somewhat restricted. At the highest level, emo-
tional arousal is intense and full in voice and body. Usual speech patterns
are completely disrupted by emotional overflow. Arousal appears uncon-
trollable and enduring. There is a “falling apart” quality. Research showed
that moderate levels of emotional arousal in combination with meaning-
making, rather than pure high emotional arousal, predicted positive
outcome in experiential therapies (Missirlian, Toukmanian, Warwar, &
Greenberg, 2005). The supervisee needs to pay attention to when there
is no emotional arousal, even when a client talks about meaningful and
significant events or topics, as this indicates that exploration of bodily-felt
experience is necessary.
Client’s Emotional Productivity

A key assessment that needs to be made, once an emotion is aroused, is
whether or not the way the client is productive in processing the emo-
tion (Auszra & Greenberg, 2008; Auszra, Greenberg, & Herrmann, 2013).
In part, this judgment is informed by assessments of levels of experienc-
ing, arousal, and vocal quality, but it also involves higher level judgments
61
about the nature of emotional expression. Once a determination is made

that the emotion being experienced is a primary emotion, formulation
involves judgments about whether an activated primary emotion is being
processed in a contactfully aware manner. Therapists must consider seven
different dimensions in this regard: attending, symbolization, congruence,
acceptance, regulation, agency (vs. passive victim), and differentiation
(vs. stuck; cf. Auszra et al., 2013). The supervisee learns individually or in
groups how to code videos so they become proficient at it as one way of
learning. Clients may have difficulty on any of these dimensions and this
provides indications of how productive emotion processing is at present
as well as pointing to areas in need of work. An emotion is seen as being
productively processed when all the dimensions of emotion productivity
are met.
SUPERVISION OF THERAPEUTIC TASKS

EFT involves a large variety of markers and therapeutic tasks (Elliott,
Watson, Goldman, & Greenberg, 2004; Greenberg, 2010, 2015; Greenberg,
Rice, & Elliott, 1993), and these are taught in supervision by instruction,
observation of tapes, and practice. Research has demonstrated that
clients enter specific problematic emotional processing states that are
identifiable by in-session statements and behaviors that mark underly-
ing affective problems and that these afford opportunities for particu-
lar types of effective intervention (Greenberg et al., 1993; Greenberg,
Elliott, & Lietaer, 1994; Rice & Greenberg, 1984). Client markers indi-
cate not only the type of intervention to use but also the client’s cur-
rent readiness to work on this problem. EFT therapists are trained to
identify markers of different types of problematic emotional process-
ing problems and to intervene in specific ways that best suit these prob-
lems. Each of the tasks has been studied intensively and extensively by
Greenberg (2010, 2015) and the key components of a path to resolu-
tion and the specific form that resolution takes has been specified. Thus,
models of the actual process of change acts as a map to guide the therapist
intervention.
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The following main markers and their accompanying interventions

have been identified (Greenberg et al., 1993):
77 Problematic reactions expressed through puzzlement about emotional

or behavioral responses to particular situations. For example, the cli-
ent may say, “On the way to therapy I saw a little puppy dog with long
droopy ears, and I suddenly felt so sad and I don’t know why.” Prob-
lematic reactions are opportunities for a process of systematic evoca-
tive unfolding. This form of intervention involves vivid evocation of
experience to promote reexperiencing the situation and the reaction
to establish the connections between the situation, thoughts, and emo-
tional reactions, to finally arrive at the implicit meaning of the situa-
tion that makes sense of the reaction. Resolution involves a new view
of self-functioning.
77 An unclear felt sense in which the client is on the surface, or feeling
confused and unable to get a clear sense of his/her experience: “I just
have this feeling, but I don’t know what it is.” An unclear felt sense calls
for focusing (Gendlin, 1996) in which the therapist guides clients to
approach the embodied aspects of their experience with attention and
with curiosity and willingness to experience them and to put words to
their bodily felt sense. A resolution involves a bodily felt shift the cre-
ation of new meaning.
77 Conflict splits in which one aspect of the self is critical or coercive toward
another aspect. For example, a woman quickly becomes hopeless and
defeated but also angry in the face of failure in the eyes of her sisters: “I
feel inferior to them. It’s like ‘I’ve failed and I’m not as good as [them]’.”
Self-critical splits like this offer an opportunity for a two-chair enact-
ment. In this, two parts of the self are put into live contact with each
other. Thoughts, feelings, and needs within each part of the self are
explored and communicated in a real dialogue to achieve a softening
of the critical voice. Resolution involves an integration between sides.
77 Self-interruptive splits arise when one part of the self-interrupts or con-
stricts emotional experience and expression: “I can feel the tears com-
ing up, but I just tighten and suck them back in, no way am I going to
cry.” In a two-chair enactment the interrupting part of the self is made
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explicit. The client becomes aware of how they interrupt and are guided
to enact the ways they do it, be it physically (choking or shutting down
the voice), metaphorically (caging), or verbally (“shut up, don’t feel, be
quiet, you can’t survive this”), so that they can experience themselves
as an agent in the process of shutting down and then can react to and
challenge the interruptive part of the self. Resolution involves expres-
sion of the previously blocked experience.
77 An unfinished business marker involves the statement of a lingering
unresolved feeling toward a significant other such as the following
said in a highly involved manner: “My father, he was just never there
for me. I have never forgiven him, deep down inside I don’t think I’m
grieving for what I probably didn’t have and know I never will have.”
Unfinished business toward a significant other calls for an empty-chair
intervention. Using an empty-chair enactment, the client activates his/
her internal view of a significant other and experiences and explores
his/her emotional reactions to the significant other and makes sense of
them. Shifts occur in the views of the significant other and of the self.
Resolution involves holding the other accountable or understanding or
forgiving the other.
77 Vulnerability calls for affirming empathic validation. Vulnerability is a
state in which the self feels fragile, depleted, deeply ashamed, or inse-
cure: “I just feel like I’ve got nothing left. I’m finished. It’s too much
to ask of myself to carry on.” When a person feels deeply ashamed or
insecure about some aspect of his/her experience, above all else, clients
need empathic attunement from the therapist who must not only cap-
ture the content of what the client is feeling but also note the vitality
affects of the client mirroring the tempo rhythm and tone of the expe-
rience. In addition, the therapist needs to validate and normalize their
experience. Resolution involves a strengthened sense of self.
77 Emotional suffering and anguish is helped by compassionate self-
soothing. Typically, the anguish occurs in the face of powerful inter
personal needs (e.g., for love or validation) that were not met by others.
Intervention involves imaginally reentering the scene of deprivation
or invalidation and asking the client to provide some soothing where
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none was available before. This is done by imagining the self as an

adult reentering the evoked scene and providing a reparative response,
or a dialogue, in which the client is asked if they, as an adult, could
soothe their wounded child. The goal is to evoke compassion for the
self. Self-compassion and self-empathy also develop from internal-
ization of these qualities from an attuned empathic therapist. This
internalization may take years of therapy. This can be facilitated more
rapidly by suggesting that the client, as an adult, offer compassion to
the suffering self.
After the client marker is identified by watching the video during super-
vision, the supervisor and the supervisee engage in clarification of the
most appropriate intervention for the identified marker. Task supervision
involves the supervisor assisting the supervisee in working through dif-
ficulties with a specific task, a step in a task, or blending tasks fluently. In
another example from the companion DVD, Emotion-Focused Therapy
Supervision, the supervisor guides the supervisee to get the client to enact
the mother by having the therapist saying, “Okay, so actually be your
mother and how did she make you feel that she was needy. Was it the look
on her face?” and later the supervisor points out how the client’s voice
changed when he was enacting the mother and said, “I wanted you to be
a very good boy.”
In another example of supervision, the supervisor clarifies the two
voices the client uses in the two-chair dialogue and their function in
the split:
Supervisor: Okay, so here it’s better I think to keep the structure of the
two chairs and keep contact between two chairs. You’ve lost the chairs
now. And it’s kind of becoming a discussion. And you lose the power of
working on the split. Essentially this chair should be saying to that one:
“There’s no hope. End it. Get out.” And then it’s going to activate more
emotion but now it’s going into more exploratory and differentiating the
facets of the conflict but not expressing the criticism to get an emotional
reaction from the other chair. We want to sharpen the conflict to see if
something kind of transforms, right?
65
The supervisor suggests to the supervisee that she needs to reestablish

the two sides of the dialogue and even sharpen the conflict by getting one
side to say to other side “end the relationship.”
Examples of Intervention Supervision Statements

Excerpts of the supervision of different types of interventions are given as
follows. Because of the length of the interactions between the supervisor
and the supervisee, some of their comments are summarized.
Decisional Conflict
The client, a 28-year-old woman, is working on a decisional conflict split:
whether to go to a new job or stay in her existing job. The supervisor and
the supervisee are watching a video of the supervisee’s therapy session
with the client in his private practice. The client says, “If I go I don’t know
how it’s gonna be, [but] on the other hand I’ve got a job, and I have admin-
istrative and practical work. I have to think about it, because on one hand
it’s good [and] on the other is bad. It’s complicated.” The therapist at this
point invites the client to engage in a two-chair dialogue and has the client
sit in the one chair while giving direction of what to say from the other:
Therapist (on video): Can you tell her, on one hand it’s good [and] on the
other it’s bad? Tell her also this “always is complicated”?
Supervisor: Okay. Good. You are getting that there is a split but now you
need to get more differentiated about what each part is saying. Right now
you’ve restated that there is a conflict but you need to identify the two
voices clearly and set them up in a dialogue. What are the two parts, [what
are] the two voices?
Supervisee: I see, yes, one part is saying “go,” the other “I’m reluctant.”
Client (on video): Yes, hmm, okay, on one hand if you go to England
you might be really happy, but it might be not as wonderful as it seems,
day after day, a lot of work during the day and you [might] end up
being really tired. Here it’s the same. Perhaps you are now happy with
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the job, but after some weeks you might start to get tired because it’s
always the same.
Supervisor: Good. Fortunately, the client identifies the two voices herself
and begins speaking in the cautioning voice.
Therapist (on video): It’s always the same “you’re going to get tired,” isn’t it?
Client (on video): Yeah.
Therapist (on video): Tell her.
Supervisor: Good you are supporting this voice.
Client (on video): Yeah, you’re going to get tired, and you have to think
about it. You really don’t know what it will be like. Anything could hap-
pen. It’s unclear.
Therapist (on video): Very well, change if you will. How do you feel when
you hear this, “you’re gonna get tired, you don’t know what it will be like”?
Client (on video): I would say, “Let me alone, you’re such a pest.”
Therapist (on video): Tell her. Tell her.
Supervisor: Good. Yes, support her assertion, but the goal is not to get her
to assert at this point but to get to her core painful emotion of anxious
insecurity. So it is best to say or ask first “what do you feel in your body.”
Client (on video): Leave me alone, You’re a pain in the neck?
Therapist (on video): What do you feel when you say this?
Client (on video): Like a freedom, a relief.
Therapist (on video): Say it to this part of you, it’s like “I need to post-
pone, let me alone, I need to postpone my decisions because I need to feel
okay” can you express it to her?
Client (on video): Yes, but I think it’s not good, because I should say
(snaps her fingers), like that.
Supervisor: Okay, so now it’s shifting to a more general process of her
postponing and that’s okay, but you need again to get the two sides clear.
67
Do you see this? It probably would [be] good here to change chairs for her
to be the driving part that [snaps] her fingers, as that would be following
her cues because she had just said that.
A few moments later the client is speaking from the chair position of the
one who feels pushed:
Client (on video): Okay, well J, don’t push me, I will see what I want on
the way.
Therapist (on video): What do you feel when you say this, “leave me.”
What are you feeling right now?
Client (on video): Yes, it’s like a relief, because in the other [chair posi-
tion] is a lot of pressure, it’s like leave me, because I am really tired. It’s like,
it’s Sunday, “what do I do, what do I do, what do I do” . . . It’s all the time
thinking what do I do? Give me a rest.
Client (on video): What do you feel right now (therapist placing hand on
forehead mirroring what she did), because it’s like “I’m exhausted because
all this pressure . . .”
Supervisor: Good. It would be even better to have had her do more pres-
suring because her saying “what do I do” repeatedly was quite animated.
Then after intensifying the pressure you would ask her to come back to the
experiencing chair and then again ask what do you feel.
Client (on video): Yeah, it’s like I don’t care, I am really tired.
Therapist (on video): Tell her.
Client (on video): It’s like I am tired by the situation, you are weighing
me down. Let me think about it later. But it’s the people who ask you for
an answer—“decide it”—or my friends [say] “I want you to answer me
about Saturday’s plan.”
Therapist (on video): Change. Here is the part that pushes, and here is
Joanne saying I need time to decide and think about it, don’t weigh me
down, I want to be calm. Because it seems to me that in a way this part is
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saying [it] is not a good idea to postpone decisions, it’s better to decide, I
need you to decide.
Supervisor: Good. [You] might add “pressure her.”
Unfinished Business
In this example, the client is a 24-year-old student. In the 12th session, she
is talking about her aunt and uncle who had been very important to her
during her childhood, and especially after her mother rejected her. Her
uncle also, all of a sudden, rejected her, saying he never liked her and didn’t
want anything to do with her. The therapist asks the client to engage in a
two-chair dialogue with her mother:
Therapist (on video): So what is it that you feel seeing her there?
Client (on video): I love her so much.
Therapist (on video): So much love.
Client (on video): Yes.
Therapist (on video): And you get sad.
Supervisor: Good. You are moving from content to her emotion process.
Therapist (on video): Yes.
Therapist (on video): So imagine her here. If she’s here [in this chair],
what do you want to tell her?
Client (on video): [I want to tell her] I’m so sad that things are like they
are. I feel so powerless about it. So powerless. It wasn’t fair and I feel badly
treated.
Client (on video): Yes. You never saw that my needs were different from
yours. We have children, and we have been in a difficult situation where
we [have] had to manage to survive. I don’t think you’ve seen this. I have
been thinking that I wanted to write you a letter. But I never took the time,
[I] never saw the point as it felt like we couldn’t see eye to eye. Our worlds
are quite different.
69
Therapist (on video): Yes, so if you move over here [asking her to change
chairs]. So, play your aunt like, she’s represented in your head.
Therapist (on video): So as your aunt, how do you respond to hearing this?
Supervisor: This is a point that needs a more specific intervention;
remember, you want to play the negative other to evoke even more painful
memories and emotion. The open-ended question you asked often pulls
for the aunt’s imagined defensive response. The best intervention over
here is to say, “As your aunt, make her (pointing to the client in the other
chair) feel unfairly treated. Treat her unfairly!”
Supervisee: I see [that I should] play the negative other. Yes, I remember
you saying that in the training. It’s hard to do.
Supervisor: Yes, but it’s important because you want to use it to stimulate
the feeling.
Client (on video): You mean talking to myself?
Client (on video): [My aunt would say to me] you have never understood
us, that we needed a lot more time than you have given us. We find you too
pushy, insisting. You stressed us. We need more structure and more time
to make decisions and do practical stuff.
Supervisor: You see, she defends.
Supervisee: I see [it] now.
Therapist (on video): Yes, and then she says [from the empty chair] that
she feels that she is missing you strongly.
Client (on video): Yes, but we can’t relate to that.
Therapist (on video): So like, we don’t want [you], like we reject you?
Therapist (on video): Like, we don’t want you here?
70
Supervisor: Yes. It would have been best to have started this side [of the
two-chair dialogue] like this. The purpose of this exercise is to play the
negative other being negative to evoke the painful memory.
Client (on video): Right, like you are too different, strange.
Therapist (on video): So that just feels so . . . so hurtful.
Supervisor: Good.
Client (on video): [It feels] very hurtful.
Therapist (on video): [It is] like you can really feel this.
Client (on video): Yes, it feels like I’m not approved.
Here, the client expresses further anger at being unfairly treated. The
supervision session picks up again at the end of this sequence:
Therapist (on video): So there is this anger, but the pushing away also
leaves you hurt?
Client (on video): Yes, the feeling [of hurt] always comes. [It is] like the
feeling that it started with, [the feeling] you got out of me.
Therapist (on video): [It is] like it’s sad, but also like [it’s anger].
Client (on video): I feel it is just a defense.
Supervisor: This is a self-interruption. Although it’s fine to go to what do
you feel inside, it might be good to work in the two-chair [dialogue] with
this self-interruption.
Supervisee: You mean like [have her] come over [to the other chair] and
stop her from feeling sad.
Supervisor: Yes.
Therapist (on video): Okay, so what’s the feeling inside right now?
Client (on video): [I’m feeling a] shortness of breath, a bit tight [through
my chest].
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Therapist (on video): So what happens on the inside that conveys that?
What is it that you don’t want?
Client (on video): Why is this so difficult? I feel like, I don’t want to see
them. I feel so wronged.
Therapist (on video): So tell her [in the empty chair] I don’t want to see
you, I don’t want to put myself through this.
Client (on video): Yes, I actually am a bit afraid of your husband. He’s
saying such hurtful things. I don’t want to put myself through that again.
Therapist (on video): So what happens as you say that?
Client (on video): I feel calm. [I feel] like I’m handling the situation.
Supervisor: But all this I think is a protective process, protecting against
the pain of her sadness and anger. So this is an important choice point
depending on how you see it. It seems like regulation, but this is the type
of regulation in service of avoidance. So how do you see it?
Supervisee: Yes, I did see it as shutting down. I think the client actually
sees it as unsatisfactory, but as a type of last resort effort at coping.
Supervisor: So this is a self-interruption and you can work with it by say-
ing, “Let’s change” and “Can you come over here?” We will take your aunt
out of the chair, now it’s a part of you.
At the end of the supervision session, the supervisor says that although
he understands that it is hard for the client, it appears that she really has to
grieve the loss of the aunt she wished she had and that will help her let go
of the unmet need. The supervisor and the supervisee discuss the case for-
mulation and confirm that the client’s core maladaptive feeling is one of
lonely abandonment and that grieving followed by self-soothing or asser-
tive anger as opposed to defensive anger will probably be the way she will
resolve her unfinished business. It will also lead the client to transform her
core emotion scheme of sadness and reorganize her feelings of loneliness
and abandonment to feelings love in her current family and appreciation
of whatever love she did get in her past.
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Intellectualizing
In this next example, the supervisor is helping the supervisee keep his 53-year-
old female client at the experiential level rather than intellectualizing.
Therapist (on video): We can go one step further; can you tell me what
are you missing? Because the sadness may be talking about things you
have lost.
Client (on video): Well, [I’m missing] a lot of things. For example, I miss
[being able] to smile more and to wake up in the morning with the smile
[on my] face, instead of waking up [feeling] serious.
Therapist (on video): You are moved when you say it, right?
Client (on video): Yes, I am about to weep.
Therapist (on video): It’s okay, you allow the emotion to be there, if
you need.
Supervisor: Good, you are keeping the focus on her emotion.
Client (on video): And then I miss being spontaneous.
Therapist (on video): Spontaneous?
Client (on video): Yes, I have the need of a pattern of action that I impose
[on] myself. It is an everyday thing, but I miss [feeling] calm and relaxed,
and to be responsive.
Supervisor: It’s important to focus her back on her weeping or tendency
to weep. Go to her emotion and get its message rather than into higher
level conceptual meaning.
Client (on video): Right, also to enjoy it, not only because I have decided
it, or because I’ve spent so much money on it. Because at the end it’s
like everything has to be like it is, without a reason, and that life is very
grave and I do not know at what point did I get this story but I do not
like it.
Supervisor: This is all more philosophical or abstract. You need to get at
her core feeling and need. What is it?
73
Supervisee: Yeah I see it’s probably sadness.
A few minutes later:
Therapist (on video): It’s like you say, “Well, I’m not happy and it hurts
to be unhappy.”
(Client begins to cry.)
Supervisor: So what is the real painful issue here? What is her core pain?
Therapist (on video): It worked for many years, [it was] maybe useful at
some point, right? But [it is not useful] now.
Client (on video): Yes, many times it was useful, but what bothers me is
that what might be useful long time ago, may be now part of my character
and I do not like it.
Therapist (on video): Many years ago, it was useful, during a period of
time, since what?
Client (on video): Since the accident.
Therapist (on video): What was his name, the name of your partner?
Supervisor: Good, moving it to something more concrete.
Client (on video): Peter.
Therapist (on video): Since Peter died, a new way of being appeared in
you, and you say “it was useful at the beginning, but it is not useful at the
medium term, you are not happy.”
Client (on video): Yes, but it’s funny because I spent two years feeling
really bad, and then I started to face things, and I felt good because I was
facing things and it was a more or less quiet period, and it was over time
that I’ve begun to realize that things were not working too well. In fact, last
year when I moved I could see things from [a] distance, I think I actually
started to feel depressive and I did not realize it.
Therapist (on video): And it has to do with taking perspective.
74
Client (on video): Yes, because maybe with some distance I started to see
things from a different point of view, and [because] I felt protected at my
hometown, things seemed to go well, and I also had a job which I don’t
have now. But with distance I’ve realized that at an emotional level things
are not going well.
Therapist (on video): It also happened that [your current partner] Brian
had an accident and that somehow seemed to activate something.
Client (on video): Totally!
Therapist (on video): And that emotion, you are somehow lucky to get
[to] step back and see that there are things you need to express. I do not
know if it is sadness or regret.
Supervisor: Good, more clearly focusing on emotion.
Client (on video): I think it’s sadness, and caused by a lot issues. First
caused by losing my previous life and losing Simon, and afterwards, sad-
ness caused by losing all the personal characteristics I have lost, that I
didn’t realize I was losing, such as the joy [of] that illusion. I just realized I
wanted to be okay, but I was not aware of [the] things I’ve lost.
SUPERVISION OF ONGOING CASE MATERIAL

In this section, we provide an example of an ongoing supervisory case to
provide perspective on what can happen in supervision over time. Notice
how in all sessions, the supervisor starts with asking for a brief description
of what occurred in the session, asking if there are any issues the super-
visee wants to deal with, and then asking what the supervisee wants the
supervisor to focus on during supervision. The supervisor and supervisee
have watched tapes of all of the therapy sessions together. The following is
a summary description of what occurred in the therapy session.
An Anxious Female Client: A Focus on Unfinished Business

The client is a 26-year-old female student who came to a university coun-
seling center with anxiety and depression. She has formed a good bond
75
with the therapist and the client was readily talking to the therapist at a
moderate level of experiencing. The supervisor watches the video of the
second session with the supervisee. The client described in a fairly clear
manner how in her mind she experiences other people as judgmental, and
this leaves her anxious. She says she goes blank in social situations and
cannot speak. She says she then gets angry at herself for remaining quiet
and not contributing or participating.
The supervisor asks the supervisee how he understands this; if he hears
a marker. The supervisee says he understands that the client is socially
anxious and that he hears this as a marker for an anxiety split where one
part catastrophizes and scares the other part (Greenberg, 2010). Here the
supervisor is teaching by asking questions and also is highlighting the
model through a recognition of the marker. They discuss how the super-
visee will set this up, and the supervisor suggests that often it is most
evocative to begin by asking the client to enact the judgmental “others”
in the critical chair rather than the person’s own critic. This is done in
the third session and evoked a lot of feeling. The critic emerged as very
harsh and blaming and the client said this makes her feel small and weak.
She felt sad about being stuck in this loop. Overall, however, the client is
engaged with her experiences, so it felt like the dialogue was going in the
right direction. The supervisee and the supervisor agreed that if a marker
arises for further anxiety work, that it would be good to differentiate the
critic further to reveal the core judgment, and also to try to make the criti-
cisms more specific as this will help the client to access the core emotion.
The client started the next session saying that she realizes that her
own self-judgments were more painful than the anticipation of others’
judgments. The therapist started chair work and the work was quite pro-
ductive. The client was able to articulate a number of criticisms. The critic
was harsh, but the supervisee was not able to help her articulate very spe-
cific criticisms. The client as the critic said, “I put you down so that other
people won’t.” This, the supervisor commented, is more insight-oriented
than enactive.
The supervisor discussed how to help the supervisee get the critic to
enact the criticisms and to do this in a concrete and specific manner—like
76
getting the critic to say such things such as, “Yesterday in class when you
asked the person sitting next to you what the assignment was, you were so
stumbly and anxious, you made a fool of yourself.”
In the “self ” chair, the client accessed a lot of pain. The therapist vali-
dated her pain, but the supervisee said he couldn’t find words to help dif-
ferentiate her feelings and find meanings.
The supervisor and the supervisee explored possibilities and together
decided that the client’s core maladaptive feeling seemed to be feeling
unloved, although it wasn’t clear yet if this was shame based (i.e.,“I’m flawed”)
or a feeling of lonely abandonment (i.e., “I can’t survive on my own”). They
discussed what the client’s core emotion seemed to be and what conjectures
the therapist could use to help her to express her feelings. The supervisor sug-
gested a more mixed conjecture including shame and sad loneliness to keep
it a bit open-ended until it became clear what her most painful maladaptive
feeling was, something like, “It’s kind of like feeling I am sad and lonely and
afraid that I am just not acceptable the way I am, that no one has ever really
loved me or valued me and made me feel good about myself.” It seemed like
her needs were needs for validation and closeness. The supervisor suggested
that in the next session the supervisee finds out more about how these feel-
ings potentially originated in her family of origin.
In the fourth session, the client described some more background
issues: She was an only child and her father was pretty volatile and expressed
a lot of anger. She recalled a memory of him chasing her and she was able
in the last minute to reach her room and lock herself inside. She was very
afraid, but other than a couple of “spanking incidents,” she says, he wasn’t
physically abusive but that his anger was scary. However, he clearly was
emotionally abusive and said some pretty mean things to her. Her mother
usually ignored her father except for one incident in which she was hit by
him and told her daughter to ignore it and “not make a big deal out of
it.” The client also recounted that they never came to any of her plays or
school activities when she was a child and she felt unwanted because she
wasn’t sure they really wanted a child. Now she is rather distant for them.
In supervision, the supervisor discussed that it seemed like the unfin-
ished business was the place to focus and that, depending on what marker
77
emerged, it would probably be the unfinished business with the father that
was most central.
In the fifth session, the client put her father in an empty chair. She
talked about her current relationship and how it is difficult for her to
deal with her boyfriend’s past relationships and that it evokes the fear
and sadness of not being loved, of not being the most important per-
son to him. This is connected, according to her, to her father, and so the
therapist begins an empty chair dialogue with her father. She experiences
and expresses the sadness, isolation, and loneliness that he has caused her.
She elaborates different experiences of her sadness of abandonment and
weeps freely, expressing how lonely and unwanted she felt.
As the supervisor and the supervisee listen to the tape, the supervisor
notes that there is a small shift in what she is saying and how, when she
says in a more internally focused voice, “It is too late for him now.”
The client expresses disappointment that her father couldn’t find
more time for her during his life and says that there was no excuse for
what he did. She then gets a bit angry at him. The supervisee asked if he
should try to facilitate intensifying her anger at him about that.
The supervisor points out that although the expression of anger is
important, the client’s anger is currently more rejecting or destructive
when she says, in a more “lecturing” voice, things such as, “You were a
bad father and you should never have had children because you were too
selfish, you were a coward.” The supervisor suggests that it is good that she
is accessing her sadness and anger, but that after a certain amount of this
outer directed anger, the supervisee needs to guide the client to experience
and express more empowered anger by using “I” language and that this
could be done by maybe guiding her to say, “I am angry at you for this” or
even “I’m furious that you did this.” This would help the client focus her
attention on her own feelings and express these rather than on the nega-
tive evaluations of her father.
In the dialogue, the client holds her father accountable for not being
more in contact with her and says it was not because she was unlovable,
but that he was really incapable of love. She says she wants to have children
of her own and break the circle of bad childhoods. She then, however,
78
expresses doubt about being able to feel entitled to be angry and to be

happy in the future. The supervisee said he didn’t know what to do, so he
simply empathized with this.
The supervisor then suggested that this was a marker of self-interruption
and that it could be helpful to work on this in a two-chair enactment for
self-interruption. One side could act as an active agent stopping the other
side from feeling angry and maybe even the right to be happy. This would
help the client access her blocked feelings of anger and her right to feel
happy.
CONCLUSION
A good supervisory alliance between the supervisor and supervisee is the
sine qua non of supervision. Once this is established, the focus shifts to
supervision of the supervisee’s presence, unconditional positive regard,
genuineness, and empathy as well as the supervisee’s interpersonal skills
related to alliance formation with the client, while remaining attentive
to alliance maintenance over time. Examples of supervisory ways of
facilitating these and other skills are provided in Chapter 4, in which the
management of issues with the therapeutic alliance and the supervisee’s
interpersonal skills are discussed.
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4
Handling Common
Supervisory Issues: Alliance
and Interpersonal Skills
All actual life is encounter.

—Martin Buber
The origin of all conflict between me and my fellow men is that

I do not say what I mean and I don’t do what I say.
—Martin Buber
I n this chapter, we address two sets of difficulties in supervision. The

first set contains those that may arise in relation to alliance ruptures,
either between the supervisor and the supervisee or between the super-
visee and the client. The second set of supervisory difficulties results from
the therapist’s inadequate interpersonal skills. A major difficulty that may
arise in emotion-focused therapy (EFT) supervision combines both sets
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/15966-004
81
of difficulties and occurs when the supervisee has problems learning to

access, be comfortable with, and empathically attuned to affect.
ADDRESSING RUPTURES
IN THE SUPERVISORY ALLIANCE
A major difficulty that will impede any supervisory relationship is an alli-
ance rupture. Safran, Crocker, McMain, and Murray (1990), using a task
analytic approach to study the therapeutic alliance, identified seven potential
markers of a break in the alliance that can also be seen in a supervision setting.
These are (a) overt expression of negative sentiments, (b) indirect commu-
nication of negative sentiments or hostility, (c) disagreement about the goals
or tasks, (d) compliance, (e) avoidance maneuvers, (f) self-esteem–enhancing
operations, and (g) nonresponsiveness to intervention. All of these are
relevant to supervision, and we use them as a framework for addressing
ruptures. Two major categories of supervision alliance difficulty markers
can be distinguished: confrontation markers, which involve the supervisee’s
making a complaint or offering an explicit expression of concern in
the form of disagreement; and withdrawal markers, where a more covert
expression of the problem is present, such as hostility, avoidance, compli-
ance, or nonresponsiveness to supervision. Normally, a rupture is marked
by the supervisee initiating a complaint or withdrawing, but it is impor-
tant to recognize that the power intrinsic to the supervisor’s position gives
them the upper hand in initiating dialogue without fear of consequences
or reprimand. The EFT supervisor should be aware of this power differ-
ential and thus constantly monitor the relationship, search for incipient
signs of rupture, and initiate a discussion of the relationship if they feel
it is needed. In such cases, the supervisor’s initiative to address the issue
even when the supervisee does not verbalize his/her discontent is advis-
able and necessary. The supervisor’s adoption of a more leading approach
where, for example, the supervisor encourages the supervisee to take a
more influencing approach or use a specific intervention with the client,
even though the supervisee wants to take a more following exploratory
approach, can lead to conflict between the supervisor and the supervisee.
82
Handling Common Supervisory Issues
The supervisor should show heightened sensitivity to possible rup-

tures of this sort, and prevent or address them by listening carefully
and nondefensively and by empathically reflecting them when they occur.
By adopting a task-analytic approach to specifying the components of
events, supervision alliance difficulties can be conceived of as involving task
markers, a task environment, supervisee change process, and resolution. The
two major supervision alliance markers, which parallel client–therapist rup-
tures, are summarized in Exhibit 4.1, as well as the task environment, the
supervisee process, and the resolution of these tasks. After an alliance rup-
ture marker is identified, the supervisor needs to acknowledge the diffi-
culty and present the difficulty as a shared responsibility and encouraging
dialogue about it. The supervisee and the supervisor start an exploration
of each person’s perception of the difficulty (i.e., deepening). At this stage,
the supervisor models and facilitates the process of rupture resolution by
genuinely considering and disclosing his/her own role in the difficulty.
Supervisee processes involved in coming to resolution may include vari-
ous initial emotional responses (e.g., feeling less tense, more at ease, heard,
validated), reflection on self and the supervisor (e.g., understanding the
relationship with supervisor as a coconstructed experience, formulating or
reformulating the problem, reflecting on own misperceptions/limits or those
of supervisor), or development of new action-driven/motivational tenden-
cies (e.g., affirming needs, taking responsibility when necessary, outlining
or planning improved interactions and negotiations in the future). In
the stage of partial resolution, the shared understanding of the possible
sources of difficulty is summarized by the supervisor and confirmed by
the supervisee, and both participants move further into the exploration of
practical solutions. By expressing reciprocal needs, looking for an agree-
ment on goals, and matching expectations, the supervisee and the super-
visor enter the stage of full resolution of the alliance rupture, in which both
experience a genuine sense of satisfaction and renewed enthusiasm for the
process of supervision.
As a general principle, almost all types of relational difficulties are
dealt with in EFT by means of therapist genuineness. In this section,
we focus on supervisor/supervisee ruptures. In general, supervisors use
83
Exhibit 4.1
Tasks for Alliance Difficulty in Supervision

Markers of supervision alliance
difficulty/rupture Task environments Supervisee processes Resolutions
Confrontation: Overt expression of Empathic attunement: Supervisor gently brings Emotional reactions: tense Genuine sense of
alliance difficulty by supervisee’s dis- into discussion the possibly unacknowledged or more at ease. satisfaction and relief
agreement on goals or tasks or by the alliance issue in a tentative manner, acknowl- Reflective processes: reflec- experienced by both
supervisee’s self-esteem-enhancing edges his/her own contribution to the prob- tions on self or super- participants.
operations. lem, and adopts a collaborative stance using visor’s differences or Renewed trust and
Withdrawal: Indirect communication “we” language; acknowledges the problem limitations. willingness to con-
of negative sentiments or hostility, as “our” problem and validates supervisee’s tinue working on
84
Motivational, action-
avoidance, compliance, and/or non- experience. supervision goals.
driven tendencies: need
responsiveness to supervision. Self-disclosure: Supervisor discloses his/her own for affirmation, planning Development of a
feelings and thoughts in an open and honest, of future interactions. shared understand-
genuine manner, maintaining respect for the ing of the difficulty.
supervisee and nonjudgmental stance.
Exploration of practical
Task exploration: Supervisor engages in empathic solutions for future.
exploration of the problem, invites supervisee
to openly share his/her views, underlying the
reciprocal involvement in the problem, and
empathically reflects on its meaning.
Deepening: Supervisor and supervisee engage
in a dialectical exploration of each person’s
perception of the difficulty.
the same means in working with their supervisees as EFT therapists use
with clients. In addition to empathy and acceptance, congruence and
therapeutic genuineness are important notions in an EFT relationship.
These, however, are global constructs for dealing with complex relational
issues. They provide global guidelines but do not specify clearly how
an emotion-focused therapist deals with interpersonal difficulties
(cf. Greenberg & Geller, 2001). To be congruent in EFT, therapists need to
engage in disciplined genuineness, which means that rather than reacting
in the moment with a feeling that may be a secondary or nonfacilitative
feeling, the therapist must deeply explore his/her own reactions before
speaking from his/her experience. This is a skill that is developed through
training and therapy.
Supervisors, we hope, have developed the capacity to be aware of what
their underlying feelings are and so these are available in the moment for
adequate, nonthreatening expression to the supervisee. Thus, when dif-
ficulties are arising between the supervisor and the supervisee, the super-
visor, once clear on what he or she is feeling, should disclose this to the
supervisee, if and when it is deemed it will be helpful to the supervisory
process. So a supervisor who is aware that he feels angry at a supervisee
for not using what the supervisor has suggested, after exploring what he
is feeling, between sessions, the supervisor recognizes that his anger is
secondary to his more primary anxiety, based on the threat of not being
an effective supervisor, and might say something like “I notice myself feel-
ing anxious, I’m sensing that what I’m saying isn’t being very helpful as I
see you not being able to fit it in with how you see things.” This form of
disciplined genuineness is a major way of dealing with the supervisor’s
personal reactions to the supervisee.
If this feeling of inadequacy or any other feeling is chronic, the super-
visor would seek supervision of his/her supervision or therapy to help
explore the problematic feeling. In line with this, there are various fac-
tors that may negatively influence the formation or maintenance of the
supervisory alliance. First, difficulties in the alliance may occur when the
emotional bond is weak or the agreement on goals/tasks is poorly negoti-
ated. The supervisor, if feeling unsure of the bond, might say, “I’ve been
85
wondering how we are getting along? I haven’t been quite sure if I have
helped you to feel safe enough” or “If there is something not right in our
relationship, could we talk about what’s happening or whether my feel-
ings are more my own anxiety?” On the other hand, if there seems to be
a collaboration difficulty the supervisor might say, “Maybe what I’m sug-
gesting to you doesn’t quite fit how you see what needs to be done or would
be most helpful” or “I’m wondering if this focus on your client’s underly-
ing emotion as the target of change doesn’t quite fit with what you see as
needing to change.”
Second, there may also be cultural and gender-related alliance issues,
where the supervisee or the supervisor may feel there is some form of
gender or racial bias that emerges between the supervisor and the super-
visee or between one of them and the client. How the social contexts, such
as discrimination, and the larger social systems (e.g., nationality, class,
religion) intersect with people’s multiple identities and influence their
experience and knowledge within the client–counselor–supervisor triad
needs to be addressed (Inman & Ladany, 2014). There also may be issues
of sexual attraction between participants that have to be resolved. In all
cases, respectful discussions of feelings and boundary clarification and
maintenance are needed.
Misattunement and sociocultural and gender insensitivity are some
of the many concerns that may cause a break in the alliance with the
client or the supervisee, and the supervisor has to remain aware of this.
For example, a supervisee or a client may be sensitive to any stereotyping
they may hear in the comments from the supervisor or the therapist. This
would need to be articulated and discussed because the supervisor and
the supervisee ultimately need to cooperate in order for supervision to
be successful.
Third, another difficulty occurs when the supervisor needs to deal with
supervisee’s interpersonal and personality issues, which may be getting
in the way of the supervisee’s effectiveness. This is done, first, by observ-
ing what is occurring between the client and the therapist and between
the supervisee and the supervisor. Then, when the supervisor is clear on
what seems to be happening, he/she begins giving the supervisee some
86
feedback. This feedback should be phrased predominantly as a disclosure

of the supervisor’s experience rather than as an observation or criticism
of the supervisee, as disclosure helps the supervisee to listen rather than
defend against a perceived criticism. Thus, the supervisor might say to the
supervisee who is very timid or cautious something like, “When I listen I
feel concerned that maybe your client doesn’t get your warmth because of
your caution”; to a supervisee who is very anxious something like, “When
I listen I feel concerned that maybe you are so anxious to help your client
that you end up speaking more than you need to”; or to a too dominant
or critical supervisee something like, “When I listen I get concerned that
maybe your client needs more space and finds your offerings too much
or overwhelming and can’t really use them.” Once, and if, the supervisee
hears the supervisor’s concern, then some guidance can be given as to what
the supervisee might do differently. For example, in the situation with the
overly dominant supervisee the supervisor might say, “it would be better to
step back and be less guiding.” Thus, the EFT supervisor must know him/
herself, be genuine, and be able to be unconditionally accepting, embrac-
ing, and tolerating the differences between him/her and the supervisee.
This is achieved by personal development, therapy, and consultation.
Dealing with supervisees who have problematic, long-standing per-
sonality difficulties that set up alliance ruptures always presents a major
challenge. In these instances, the supervisor attempts to understand the
deeper underlying issues but also gives feedback about the problematic
pattern and often suggests individual therapy. The supervisor also must
be aware of his/her feelings, personal values, and attitudes, and under-
stand how these may limit their ability to genuinely respect and remain
empathically attuned to the supervisee’s different experiences and world-
view. Sometimes there are disagreements or a fundamental lack of trust
between the supervisor and the supervisee. For example, they may dis-
agree about the theory behind the therapy or the way to handle a client’s
situation such as abortion. In these cases it may not be possible to col-
laborate; then it is time to make a decision that will benefit the supervisee
(e.g., remedial action, changing supervisors), but always holding the client’s
welfare as the focal point.
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SUPERVISEE’S INTERPERSONAL SKILL DIFFICULTIES

In this section, we present a more general way of identifying and dealing
with alliance difficulties or ruptures, then move to a more specific situ-
ation where an alliance rupture resulted from the supervisee’s difficulty
with being present and providing empathy to the client.
Identifying and Dealing With Alliance Difficulties

or Ruptures With the Client
The markers of alliance difficulty or rupture with a client are presented in
Exhibit 4.2, as well as the supervisor’s intervention (task environments),
the supervisee’s change processes, and resolution.
In the following segment, the supervisor works with the supervisee on
an alliance difficulty between client and the therapist as a result of poor
task collaboration.
Therapist (on video): Well, we [have] a way of working, with a dialogue.

If we put your father in this chair and you talk with him, and let’s see what
happens.
Client shakes her head, refusing with an unwilling smile, and reluctantly
murmurs.
Therapist (on video): Why is that? You have time, 20 minutes more.
Client (on video): It sounds like a waste of time to me.
Supervisor: So there is a type of disagreement here.
Therapist (on video): But this is important.
Client (on video): It feels like I’m saying the wrong things with my father,
just to get [the exercise done]. It was not a problem to do it with my hus-
band, but I probably cannot confront my father yet.
Therapist (on video): Your emotions are activated.
Client (on video): Uh-huh.
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Exhibit 4.2
Tasks for Alliance Difficulty With the Client
Markers of therapy alliance

difficulty/rupture Task environments Supervisee processes Resolution
Confrontation: Overt Empathic attunement: Supervisor coaches supervisee in Explores own interpersonal Supervisee becomes better
expression of alliance how to bring up the rupture in a tentative manner, reactions to client. able to metacommunicate
difficulty by client’s to acknowledge his/her own contribution to some- Generates or practices and is better able to apply
disagreement on goals thing occurring in the present when it happens, and responses based on pri- what was practiced in
or tasks or client’s to adopt a collaborative stance to discussing inter mary experience of what supervision.
89
self-esteem-enhancing personal difficulties using “we” language. is occurring in response

operations. Self-disclosure: Supervisor encourages supervisee to to client.
Withdrawal: Indirect com- explore his/her own reactions to get to primary experi-
munication of negative ence and to disclose his/her own feelings and thoughts
sentiments or hostility, in an open and honest, genuine manner, maintaining
avoidance, compliance, respect for client and a nonjudgmental stance.
and/or nonresponsive- Task exploration: Supervisor encourages supervisee to
ness to therapy. engage in an empathic exploration of the problem
with the client, inviting the client to share his/her
views, underlying the reciprocal involvement in the
problem, and empathically reflect on its meaning.
The client’s face is flushed and her eyes become teary.
Therapist (on video): Let’s look at it together. What kind of feelings are
there. I think it would be useful. I feel that you are intense right now.
Therapist (on video): I feel like you came here cheerfully. You said you
were relaxed, that you were alright. We’ve talked about this before. You
come here feeling hopeful every time. “I’m fine now, I got better.”
You came with joy; [you came] joyfully. Then we talk here again, and
again you went deep inside of you, and some things came out. I feel like
you [are] kind of trying to be cheerful, trying to be good, in a sense trying
to please me.
Client (on video): Uh-huh. Like repressing [my feelings].
Therapist (on video): Like repressing. Could the emergence of something
be bothering you now? You came with the plan to talk merrily.
Client (on video): Yes. It does not bother me now. It did not bother me
before. Because I told [you] this when I [first] came [to therapy]: I cannot
change my mother, my father, [or] my sister. This is how they are.
Supervisor: So there is a potential break here in the alliance in terms of
agreement on task when you say, “trying to please me” this is a type of
beginning transference interpretation. She does not seem to respond to
the interpretation or to your focus on what is bothering her. So there is
too much disagreement here. She doesn’t want to put [her] father in the
empty chair and [she] doesn’t want to feel bad. It is best here to try to
understand her fear.
Therapist (on video): [This happens] more often recently. Play it out here.
What happens [with] you, what’s going on inside of you? I think it would
be useful to have a look.
Client (on video): Let’s look, let’s look, but I’m not so very sincere. There
is such stopping.
Therapist (on video): Stopping?
90
Client (on video): Yes, there is stopping.

Therapist (on video): I think it might help you understand it better.
Client (on video): Maybe so. If you say so. You are the boss.
Therapist (on video): I wonder what it is like for you that I am the boss.
Client (on video): Do I go over there now?
Supervisor: Again, this is a relational interpretation to which she doesn’t
respond. She is compliant but not really agreeing. I think here it would
have been best to shift to empathic understanding of her distress rather
than guiding or inferring what is happening or focusing on her experi-
ence of you. I try to keep away from relational exploration unless there is a
strong marker of alliance difficulty. This does not appear to be a relational
rupture just a current break in collaboration.
Therapist’s Difficulties With Being Present

and/or Empathic With the Client
The main types of difficulties in interpersonal skills beyond alliance issues
are the supervisee’s with being therapeutically present and being empathic.
These are summarized in Exhibit 4.3. The exhibit presents markers of
supervisee interpersonal difficulty of low presence and low empathy,
describes the task environment, indicates the hypothesized supervisee
change process, which are not yet clearly understood, and describes the
nature of task resolution.
The concepts of congruence and genuineness are global descriptions
of the way EFT deals with relational processes, but these general concepts
do not specify clearly how the therapist deals with interpersonal difficulties
(cf. Greenberg & Geller, 2001). Thus, the supervisor needs to demonstrate
to the supervisee a disciplined genuineness. This involves deeply exploring
one’s own experience, rather than reacting in the moment with a feeling
that may be a secondary or nonfacilitative. So the supervisee needs to be
encouraged to explore what he/she is feeling when working with a client,
and then the supervisor needs to help the supervisee access his/her most
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Exhibit 4.3
Tasks for Interpersonal Difficulty Related to Presence and Core Conditions
Markers of low presence

and empathy Task environments Supervisee processes Resolutions
Low presence: Supervisee too Feedback: Point out the need to focus on client and Practices paying attention Supervisee lets go of
conceptual, distracted, goal own current experience; suggest coming into the to own breath and then thinking and planning
directed, too analytic. moment and breathing; focus supervisee’s atten- to breathing and non- and becomes more
Low empathy: lack of empathic tion on what he/she is feeling in the therapy session verbals of the client. present.
style (i.e., asking questions, at that moment and client’s nonverbal. Practices virtual identifi- Supervisee becomes more
giving interpretations, giving Teaching and feedback: Guide the supervisee to fol- cation with the client able to communicate
advice, being rational, lacking low more and be more empathetic rather than (“being the client”). empathy and more
attunement to affect, not using make confrontive statements or ask questions; Comments on therapy ready to apply what
92
empathic reflection, etc.). model empathic response. segment, expresses was practiced in
Task exploration: Supervisor invites supervisee to reactions or difficulties, supervision.
enter client’s world and resonate with it; supervi- and generates or prac- Renewed hope in own
sor asks the supervisee as he/she listens to therapy tices new or different abilities by supervisee.
session to “become” the client and identify what responses.
he/she feels as the client and to formulate that in
words; practices by listening to excerpts, encourag-
ing different responses and models; supervisor,
listening to recorded session, stops the recording
and makes recommendations as to possible
responses, asks the supervisee to express own reac-
tions or ideas or models an alternative way of com-
municating empathy; supervisee is asked to listen
to a client statement and grasp the client’s feeling
and central meaning.
primary reactions, which often involve feelings of incompetence, fear of

not being able to help, failure, rejection, and powerlessness. The super-
visor then needs help in formulating ways to communicate these feelings
in a facilitatively genuine manner. For example, this can be accomplished
by saying “all of it,” which involves not only saying what the therapist is
feeling in relation to the client but also what the therapist is feeling about
saying it. This latter feeling may be one of concern that, for example, what
is being said may be hurtful or offensive or may appear foolish.
Another important aspect addressed during supervision is the neces-
sity of the therapist’s giving feedback to, or confronting, the client about
nonfacilitative behaviors. At times, this need arises out of the therapist’s
observation and concern about the client’s evident interpersonal and per-
sonality issues, which may be getting in the way of forming functional
relationships. This is less of an emphasis in EFT than in interpersonal
therapies, as identifying relational patterns and focusing on personality
and motivation are not the foci in EFT. However, markers may arise of
evident client distortions or problematic patterns that the client does not
seem to understand. In this case, some form of feedback about maladap-
tive interpersonal patterns is necessary and given. The supervisor will
thus encourage the supervisee faced with this issue to first observe what
is occurring between the client and other people in their world, and also
between the client and the therapist. When the supervisor and the super-
visee are clear on what seems to be happening, they can begin working on
giving the client some feedback or confronting certain issues.
For example, a client tried to explain to his therapist that his behavior
of blowing up in anger and verbally attacking his partner in intimate rela-
tionships often led to his partner leaving, and the client added that he was
rejected “for loving them too much.” This is a clear distortion, which the
therapist needed to address and confront. The supervisor suggested to the
supervisee that after empathizing with this client’s anger and the underly-
ing hurt, the supervisee should then highlight the more primary underly-
ing emotions, such as a fear of abandonment, and gently suggest that what
the client experiences as love is probably what scares the women in his life
and ultimately drives them away. The feedback for the client should be
93
phrased predominantly as the supervisee’s understanding, rather than as

a confrontation or criticism. So it is not to be phrased as “You say you are
too loving, but really you are angry,” which is a negative confrontation of
a discrepancy, highlighting that the client is not saying what he is really
feeling. Rather, it is phrased in empathic, conjectural, or understanding
terms as “I guess you end up getting angry because you feel you are too
loving, and you fear they will leave you, as it was the case in the past, and
that leaves you feeling maybe so misunderstood or hurt.” This also is based
on the crucial EFT principle of the importance of acknowledging the sec-
ondary defensive emotion of anger and conjecturing about the underlying
primary vulnerable emotion of fear of abandonment. The supervisee also
needs to ask the client how he/she reacts to statements of this nature, and
process any relational feelings evoked in the client.
The supervisor thus helps the supervisee learn and engage in different
forms of empathic responding and in different forms of genuine rela-
tional disclosure (Greenberg & Geller, 2001). This is done through teach-
ing, modelling, and by setting tasks for the supervisee, in which he/she
comes up with different types of responses to what the client said on the
tape or discloses internal experience in a disciplined genuine and facilita-
tive manner.
Examples of Supervision of Supervisee Empathy Difficulties

The following supervision examples, which include therapists from different
countries and cultures who have completed training in EFT, demonstrate
the work to increase empathy and indicate the multicultural applicability of
the approach. These examples show that multicultural supervision does not
fundamentally differ from monocultural supervision.
Working on a Marker of Low Empathy. The following example shows
the supervision of a therapist working with a 52-year-old client who is
an intellectualizing professional experiencing low-grade depression and
existential alienation. The client is divorced and has been single for
12 years; he feels isolated and as though he is not living a satisfying life.
In this segment, the client is in a two-chair self-interruptive dialogue in
which one part is deadening the self. The supervisee is an experienced
94
therapist trained in the psychodynamic approach and a variety of others,

including EFT. The therapist is attempting to help the client recognize
that the client is an active agent in suppressing or blocking his feelings.
Recognition of agency is one of the core issues of EFT treatment, but this
segment shows the supervisor giving feedback to the supervisee that he is
being too directive and not following empathically enough when trying
to get the client to recognize his agency.
The client in this segment is talking about feeling idle—not able to act
and not feeling anything. At this point the supervisee intervenes, focusing
on the client’s interruptive process:
Therapist (on video): It is happening in this moment. You bite your lips.
What is it that you suppress there? What is it that you are trying to sup-
press? How are you suppressing it? Are you aware of that? You sigh, bite
your lips, laugh—this is the part that you are suppressing with these.
Whatever it is that you suppress. You keep saying that you cannot get
angry, it is because you’re not, you’re trying to suppress anger. When you
say you stand idle, is it when you’re alone?
Client (on video): Sure, of course. I’m very comfortable when I am with
someone, talking to someone, doing an activity. But when I stop, do
nothing, my mind suddenly goes to complicated stuff.
Therapist (on video): Like what? Is it emptiness or loneliness that
frightens you?
Client (on video): Actually, I like being alone, I don’t mind it.
Therapist (on video): How interesting it is that a person likes being alone,
but you could only start doing things alone for the past two weeks. What
makes you like loneliness?
At this point the supervisor, seeing that the supervisee is far too directive
and that empathy is low, stops the tape.
Supervisor: I understand you are pushing to get at how he blocks himself,

but I think it is important to try to empathize with his experience of liking
95
to be alone—to follow where he is, because that will help him connect
more with himself rather than respond to your questions or suggestions.
Also, if we look more specifically, your question “what makes you like the
loneliness” is motivationally oriented and requires him to think. Empa-
thizing would be saying something like “so you sort of like the loneliness.
Something about it feels good or what is it like?” and the aim of this is
to guide his attention to his feeling. Let’s listen to a little more and see
what happens, and also let’s try and track more closely what he is actually
experiencing.
The supervisor is guiding the supervisee to follow more and be more

empathetic rather than making confrontive statements and asking ques-
tions. The session video continues with the client’s responding to the
question about what makes him like the loneliness.
Client (on video): I used to like being alone in the past, too, but I could
not stand being alone after I got sick. Well, I was like that before, too, but
after I got ill, I always wanted to have someone with me. The stress, sweat-
ing, it always comes when I am idle. The difficult things that I encountered
in life occur to me. It feels like I will come across the same things. But
when I look at the overall perspective, when I look from above, I see that
it is not like that.
Therapist (on video): When you are relieved as you see that it is not like
that, you don’t need someone so much. But how do you feel when your
other part is beginning to suppress?
Supervisor: Let’s both try to generate empathic responses that would
capture his core experience.
Supervisee: Okay. “So somehow when you are idle difficult things come
up. Something about that empty space and you begin to feel, I don’t know,
maybe isolated or kind of insecure or what?”
Supervisor: Yeah, that really sounds good and that is focusing him on his
core feeling. You might have begun by just acknowledging the part of him
feeling that it’s not like that when he gets some perspective so he feels under-
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stood, but then continue with empathically focusing on his main painful
feeling. So rather than leading at this point, I think reverting to following
him to get back attuned to his experience would probably help. I know it
is difficult and he is blocked, but it is better to try to go where he is, rather
than try to lead him to where he can’t yet go. Let’s just listen to a little more.
Again, the supervisor points out the possibility of being empathic here
rather than going on the more questioning path, and also engages the super-
visee in a task by asking the supervisee to generate an empathic response.
Client (on video): My feeling is that I feel distressed and my teeth feel
numb suddenly. The tips of my feet feel burning.
The client is complying with the therapist’s question, but he is not really
engaged. He is describing in an external voice and a bland expression like
he is doing a clinical examination.
Client (on video): But it passes. It is a different feeling. I don’t know what
causes this feeling. I feel burning especially around [my stomach]. When
this feeling is escalated, these burnings come all the way up here to my
arms, to my back, and I am sweating. But over the past 2 weeks, I can deal
with this easily. It is not troubling. I used to have burnings like that before.
But [I’ve been] very good for the past 2 weeks. Thank goodness.
Therapist (on video): But there is something you constantly try to deal
with, whether it is stronger or [weaker]. But there’s something you’re try-
ing to cope with.
Client (on video): Yeah, but not like it was before.
Therapist (on video): I wonder why loneliness does that to you?
Client (on video): Because I am lost in thought. It is no problem if I am
not [alone].
Therapist (on video): Why does loneliness cause you to be lost in bad
thoughts?
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At this point the supervisor again points out the difference between asking
motivationally or causally oriented questions (“why” questions) versus
empathizing, and models an empathic response saying that it would be
good to follow the client’s current experience with something like, “So
over the past weeks, all these body feelings, the burning, haven’t taken over,
it’s been really good, not troubling and leaves you feeling much improved.”
Supervision to Increase Empathy. In this section, we give examples of
how supervisors can help enhance and refine the supervisee’s expressions
of empathy.
This first example looks at improving moderately good empathy. The
client is a 42-year-old mother and housewife from a Middle Eastern cul-
ture, who is feeling depressed and trapped in a traditional marriage.
Therapist (on video): What does it do to you when you feel that there is
no solution to it?
Client (on video): I feel exhausted. Very exhausted. I only want to [do
nothing].
Therapist (on video): [You feel] tired?
Client (on video): Yes, tired. I feel tired.
Therapist (on video): [You feel] like you don’t have chance to do any-
thing, like [the] game [is] over?
Client (on video): And there are many things on the top, like work, exams
[and such].
Therapist (on video): Yes, I understand. But if we stick to the essence
[of your problem], you feel you are on your way to destroy your children
and you don’t know what to do [about it]. So it just leaves you so tired,
drained, like nothing [is] left inside.
Client (on video): Yes, but I always think that I have to get a grip of it and
sort it out.
Therapist (on video): Yes I understand that, but at the same time, when
you get those messages on the inside it sounds very heavy.
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Supervisor: You are keeping a gentle consistent pressure toward her inter-
nal experience and that’s good.
Client (on video): Yes, it’s a feeling of failure. That’s what it is. It [is] a big
failure. I feel I’m a big failure. Yesterday, I sent my son home [on] the bus
because he did not want to go [to a concert] with me. I walked a while toward
the church [to go to the concert], but I turned [around] because it wasn’t for
my own sake that I wanted to go to that concert, it was because I wanted to
show it to my son. I have seen it many times, so I didn’t have to go there. I
felt totally empty inside. I felt like I had no feelings for my children anymore.
Therapist (on video): [You felt] like a failure.
Supervisor: Closer, more differentiated empathy would be good [here],
something like, “just feeling empty, so hopeless and unappreciated.”
Supervisee: I [understand], rather than reflecting what happened.
Therapist (on video): [I felt like you] had lost all spirit. [You] didn’t want
to do anything anymore for them.
Supervisor: Yes, good, so you did give a more differentiated response.
Therapist (on video): [You felt] completely empty.
Client (on video): Cancel Christmas; [I] just [want to] live alone.
Therapist (on video): A feeling of failure. Like if you cannot manage, in
a way.
Client (on video): Meaningless. Emptiness.
Therapist (on video): Emptiness. Can you feel it now?
Client (on video): Luckily it quickly [got] better during the evening. I
wondered if I should have it like this a long time.
Therapist (on video): So it is more than feelings of helplessness, exhaus-
tion, no possibility . . .
Client (on video): [I feel] irresolute.
Therapist (on video): Irresolute. What is it that you need when you feel
like that?
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Supervisor: Good, you are going for the need.

Supervisee: Yes, I felt it was time.
Supervisor: Good that you see it.
Client (on video): I need someone to talk to. I need some good persons.
One person. Someone who can give some good advice.
Therapist (on video): [You] need some support it sounds like.
Therapist (on video): What do you feel when you say that?
Client (on video): That I long for that [support] all the time.
Therapist (on video): [It is a] deep lack of someone. You need someone
to lean on.
Supervisor: [Be] careful here with how the need is expressed. There is a
difference between “I need support” with an emphasis on what the self
needs [to do] versus “I need someone to support me” with an emphasis
on what the other needs to do. The latter puts the emphasis on the global
need from someone and essentially on what others need to do and leaves
the person in a more powerless position. The “I need someone to give me
something” can’t be achieved in individual therapy in which we can’t get
the other to give her support. The “I need support” puts the focus on what
the self needs, and then leads potentially to “what do I need to do to get
support” not what [do] others need to do for me.
Client (on video): That’s the essence of it all, I think. That I miss [my]
mother and father.
Therapist (on video): So you miss a mother who can share.
Supervisor: Good you’re making it more specific and on the missing actu-
ally the client does focus on her need rather than complain about the
absence of the other as I said she might.
Here the supervision is focused on increasing the supervisee’s empathic

attunement to the client’s nonverbal signals and affect.
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In this next example, the client is a 35-year-old woman who is

depressed and is talking in the session about her childhood experience
of sexual intrusion.
Client (on video): No. [It’s] like I need to protect myself, even from my
father, sexually; even he is unreliable.
Supervisor: This is a marker of unfinished business, but it is too early to
respond so just notice and empathize as you do.
Therapist (on video): You were actually all alone [when you were a child],
afraid [and] vulnerable.
Client (on video): Huh?
Therapist (on video): You were all alone.
Client (on video): Was it so? I was and I was not. I don’t know.
Client (on video): When my mother touched [me] or when someone
touched [me], I had inner battles that it might be sexual [touching]. I had
bad thoughts inside [my head].
Supervisor: Notice her nonverbals express the discomfort. You might say,
“What do you feel now as you say this?”
Client (on video): [The thoughts were] strange, absurd, [and] I could
not stop [them]. Nothing was natural. I could not even say what anything
was like.
Therapist (on video): You could not actually make sense [of your feelings],
whether you would be harmed or not.
Supervisor: Good. You could add “so you felt afraid” to focus more
directly on her feeling.
Therapist (on video): When you saw you were not harmed, you could not
understand it, whether it [was] good or bad for you.
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Client (on video): Yes. Is it like how everybody . . . Well, anyone would
think of oneself first . . .
Therapist (on video): Cannot know. Yes.
Increasing Empathy to Activate Emotion. In the next supervisory
example, the client’s presenting complaint is that she wants to separate
from her husband but she feels she cannot. She is a 35-year-old housewife
who’s been married for 15 years. She does not have children due to her
husband’s health problems. She is undecided about leaving her husband.
She used to be able to tolerate anything about him but can no longer do
this. She wants children and so she wants to separate from her husband.
She has maladaptive feelings of guilt and indecision and has little affect.
She is dull and inhibited while talking, using very nonspecific words,
mostly “I don’t know, I don’t feel anything.”
Client (on video): But my husband could not tell his family. He said it
once, there was something serious, according to me. There was a bicker-
ing kind of thing with one of his family [members] and [in] reaction I
[did not] want to go to visit them. My husband backed me up, but his
father did not allow this. So I had to be together with my husband’s fam-
ily all the time.
Therapist (on video): It is kind of like an obligation, this marriage.
Supervisor: She is tearful here. Reflect how painful it is and explore the
feeling rather than reflect the meaning.
Client (on video): I remember every day, every second, every minute. I
always have those days, those thoughts in my mind, constantly. When it
comes to my mind, I usually think of those years [when I was] constantly
crying [at night]. I live those days [over and over].
Therapist (on video): Would you also cry constantly in those days, or do
you cry when you look back and remember those days later?
Supervisor: You ask a question here, and that will pull for an answer,
and then she will wait for the next question. It is better to conjecture,
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“You must have felt so misused, not important or cared about or so

alone.”
Client (on video): I would also cry all the time in those days. Even when
I was with [my husband’s family], I was crying in the bathroom or hiding
somewhere.
Therapist (on video): If you concentrate your attention on this cry-
ing, what feelings are there in this crying? What is there? What does it
feel like?
Supervisor: [This is] rather conjecture. [You] answer the question your-
self. Sense, guess based on your sense what she is feeling and offer her that
as a possibility.
Client (on video): [I wonder] why can’t I do more about my marriage? I
could have objected to my parents more. I did object when I was engaged,
and I thought of breaking up [with my husband]. I told my parents, too.
It just didn’t happen.
Therapist (on video): Now I have been hearing two things from the
beginning: One is that if I had loved my husband, if I had shown him
more affection, something might have changed. If I had objected to my
parents. Something might have changed. Why did I do that? You say such
sentences. [What is] underneath this sentence? [Do you] perhaps kind of
put a lot of responsibility on yourself? What is there?
Client (on video): Well, sure, I blame myself because I say I could have
been like this or that, but on the other hand, why can’t I do something,
why can’t I take a step otherwise, why [am I] hesitant?
Therapist (on video): I am hesitant on this and I cannot do anything.
Client (on video): Yes. And I always regret it.
Therapist (on video): [You] regret [it] in the end for what happened.
Then is it like that when your parents decided on your marriage, one part
of you did not want it. But you said, it could be worse if you objected. So
you did not object. And they decided for you.
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Supervisor: You are reflecting what happened. [You] need to reflect her
feeling about it. [It would be] better to use exploratory reflection of the
regret and elaborate: “You feel you have let your life slip by, and you feel
this sense of loss for what you didn’t do and now there’s a sort of kicking
yourself or what?”
Client (on video): Exactly.
Therapist (on video): Even if you objected, it was not a strong objection.
Client (on video): That is exactly what happened.
Therapist (on video): Then you got married [and] your husband let his
family use you as a cleaning lady.
Supervisor: Add “and that was so humiliating and left you feeling sad
and alone and also angry.” I know culturally anger is usually difficult
especially toward a parent so you may need to do some permission
giving.
Client (on video): Well. Perhaps he did not approve of it, but he also felt
obliged to it, as it is common in our town. It has to be like this.
Increasing Attunement to Affect. In this supervision example, the
supervisor and therapist observe the session of a 46-year-old woman who
is currently working as an interior designer and has been married for
14 years. She says she is in the process of divorce but doesn’t know how
to get over this process. She feels like she failed and blames herself. She
cannot deal with life, cannot stand upright, feels incapable, and has lost
her energy of life.
Client (on video): Yes. I could not breathe.

Therapist (on video): Right at that moment, it seems to be repeated over
and over again. Right? It is always like you cannot express yourself and you
get misunderstood.
Client (on video): It is bad. I mean, you know how low-educated people
cannot bring the two words together and cannot express their feelings
properly, I am not that kind of a person. But I’m dishonest. Because I do
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not tell people exactly what I really think because I am tired. I cannot tell.
It does not change a thing.
Supervisor: Listen to her voice. It is like a questioning tone but it is
a complaint and we need to get to sadness and anger. Ask what is she
feeling now.
Therapist (on video): Well, what prevents you from telling, is it because
it does not change anything or [what]? Let’s say you expressed your
thoughts, your feelings as they are, [then what would happen]?
Client (on video): I’m afraid of the response I would get, for one thing. . . .
Even I, let me tell you the beginning of it, [I was waiting for the bus, but]
there was no bus and [so] I’m calling and calling [my husband], but his
phone is busy. I called 20 times in a minute. So that he would stop talking.
I do not know with whom he was chattering, but obviously there’s some-
thing important. I called him 20 times to make him hang up the other call.
You know, the iPhone shows how many times you [have] called. Finally, he
answered the phone. I was going crazy at that moment. So much was going
through my mind, how much I need him, let him cut off the chatter, there’s
something important here. I think about these. I was frustrated at first.
Therapist (on video): Then [you were] disappointed. Already [you are]
desperate, alone. The men are like a gang, talking through their hats. They
say it is illegal to prevent the service of a municipal bus and so on. [You
are] completely feeling helpless and alone.
Supervisor: Listen to her voice complaint. Pick up [the] anger and sadness.
Therapist (on video): And you asked for help.
Therapist (on video): When your husband said he was going into a sur-
gery, so he would send his friend, did you feel like you were rejected?
Supervisor: [Do] not ask a question that gets a yes or no answer but
[rather] give a reflection or conjecture.
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CONCLUSION
This chapter focused on the first major component of supervision: the
interpersonal aspects. Supervision needs to focus on the alliance between
the supervisor and the supervisee and the alliance between the super-
visee and the client. The following chapter explores the more technical
aspects (case formulation, marker identification, task facilitation) of the
EFT model of supervision.
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5
Handling Common Technical

Supervisory Issues
Failure is lesson, not loss; it is gain, not shame.

—Kevin Ashton
Skills make dreams happen.

—Emi Iyalla
I n emotion-focused therapy (EFT), difficulties often lie in the domain

of helping the supervisee technically, because if they get stuck in their
efforts to facilitate good client process, they become rapidly discouraged;
begin to question the helpfulness of following the process, of empathic
attunement to affect, or of evocative interventions; and feel a pull toward
problem solving and advice giving. More specifically, difficulties often
arise in the area of implementing interventions. There are a lot of complex
interventions and microskills to learn. Much of the focus in supervision
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/15966-005
107
is on dealing with the supervisee’s difficulties in implementing interven-

tions in a model-congruent fashion, which is necessary because the spe-
cific intervention processes have been shown to predict better outcomes
(Greenberg, 2010). It is important to help the supervisee overcome a fear of
emotions and overcome blocks to using empathy and evocative interventions,
which for some may seem insufficiently solution focused. It is also important
to help the supervisee maintain an exploratory and discovery-oriented stance
rather than an authoritative one. In turn, being able to maintain an overall
process-oriented stance often helps the supervisee be more technically skilled.
Demonstrating what it means to be process oriented, to be present in the
moment, and to keep a finger on the emotional pulse of the client is the best
way to help the supervisee develop a process-following attitude. This is
done by listening to therapy recordings and teaching the supervisee in a
moment-by-moment fashion.
In this chapter, we discuss difficulties in the supervision process that
arise in the areas of case formulations, in conceptualizing and implement-
ing interventions, and in the individualization of technical aspects to fit
the supervisee. The first area discussed is difficulties in case formulation.
CASE FORMULATION DIFFICULTIES: MARKERS, TASK

ENVIRONMENT, PROCESS, AND RESOLUTION
During the supervision, a marker of case formulation difficulty may become
evident when the supervisee feels unclear, “stuck,” or is missing something
in understanding clients’ core emotion scheme, or when client collaboration
is not solid. The supervision task environment involves a series of back-and-
forth interactions between the supervisor and the supervisee which involve:
clarifying the formulation, understanding the client’s core emotion and its
role in their relational themes at a conceptual level, and formulating. In this
process, the supervisor might ask questions to help the supervisee articu-
late the formulation in more specific, situational terms, or identify some
in-session examples that illuminate the formulation. The supervisor might
also ask the supervisee to write down a way of expressing a formulation
to the client prior to the next supervision session, which can be reviewed
with the supervisor before the next therapy session. The resolution of this
108
Handling Common Technical Supervisory Issues
task consists in the supervisee’s sense of clarity about the formulation, an

enhanced theoretical understanding of client’s core emotion scheme and
themes, as well as a good way of delivering a response to the client to convey
this and provide a focus. The steps (markers, task environment, process, and
resolution) involved in the task of working on a case formulation difficulty
are presented in more detail in Exhibit 5.1.
Example of Supervision of Case Formulation Difficulties

The following example involves a therapist with a master’s degree who
has had some training in EFT. The client was a kindergarten teacher with
a bachelor’s degree in education. She had been severely depressed twice
before the current episode, both after having been left by men with whom
she had not yet entered into a relationship but for whom she had developed
feelings. She had been in therapy once before and in her view improved,
because the therapist managed to motivate her to pick herself up and try
again. The precipitating event of the current episode was that a man she
recently met through Internet dating ended the relationship. Although she
wasn’t very attracted to him, and saw it primarily as something to occupy
her and learn about Internet dating, she became severely depressed after
the ending. The client felt that because this was now her third failed rela-
tionship, something must be terribly wrong with her and there was little
hope for her. She had been on sick leave for a number of months. She
was intellectually well-functioning and seemed prone to intellectualizing
when facing difficult feelings. The therapist spent the first two sessions
getting to know the client’s background, and he basically followed her
empathically, which led to the client opening up a bit and lightening up.
During this first supervision session, the supervisee, after giving the
background on the client, says he is unclear on how to handle the client,
and he plays a videotape of their session. The supervisee’s difficulty lies
in his struggling with finding a focus. He continues to tell the supervisor
that in the first session with the client, she described her family home as
very good, with loving parents. However, in the second session, she said
she felt her mother has always worried too much, and this left the client
feeling that she should only do things her mother was comfortable with,
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Exhibit 5.1
Tasks for Case Formulation Difficulty

Markers of case
formulation difficulty Task environments Supervisee’s processes Resolution
Supervisee feels unclear, “stuck,” Clarifying the difficulty: Super- Provide a situational context or Supervisee enhances his/her theo-
or missing something in under- visor attempts to clarify where more examples of poignancy retical understanding of client’s
standing client’s core scheme supervisee feels “stuck” and and pain in client’s account of core emotion scheme and its
and its effects. understand what does not experience. role in client’s core conflictual
make sense. Identify primary and second- relation scheme.
Conceptual understanding: Super- ary emotions and differentiate Supervisee feels clearer about
visee is asked to provide his/her adaptive from maladaptive the case formulation and is
110
own understanding of the cli- while listening to a fragment. able to condense moment-by-
ent’s difficulty; supervisor assists Identify the core emotion(s), the moment processes into a
supervisee understanding the narrative, and relational themes. schematic understanding.
client’s working model at a con-
Develop a formulation in writing.
ceptual level.
Task exploration: Supervisor and
supervisee engage in a dialogue
about client’s core scheme;
supervisor explores supervisee’s
sense of what is the client’s core
pain; supervisor guides the pro-
cess of understanding client’s
emotion scheme and the mal-
adaptiveness of client’s experi-
ence at a more concrete level.
so as to not cause her mother to worry. The client said she felt trapped by
this, but at the same time felt very guilty. The way in which she said she
felt trapped—like a bird with its wings clipped—touched the therapist as
being quite poignant. The client said it in a focused voice, with pauses and
hesitations, and then she sighed before she went on to say she felt guilty.
As the supervisee and the supervisor watch a video of the therapy ses-
sion, the client’s sense of feeling trapped is salient for the supervisor, who
asks the supervisee what he thinks is most important for the client. The
supervisee says that he thinks it is her guilt. The supervisor responds that
although the guilt is important, clearly there is unfinished business with
the mother. He asks the supervisee what the supervisee felt most touched
by, and the supervisee replies that it was the way the client said she felt
trapped. The supervisor describes how the client’s voice and expression
around feeling trapped sounded poignant to him. It is this feeling, if fol-
lowed, that will point to the core emotion scheme and ultimately to the
case formulation. Later in the therapy session, the client expressed sad-
ness that she was 35 years old without any real experience of a romantic
relationship, and began to feel hopeless, saying she cared little for what she
does in life and stays in bed most of the day. The supervisor discusses with
the supervisee that the client’s hopelessness is a secondary symptomatic
emotion and that they will need to help the client get to her core underly-
ing painful feelings, which the therapist needs to help her identify.
The first coconstructed formulation that seemed to fit was that the
client was feeling hopeless because she couldn’t see how anybody could
come to love her and that at the core she felt unlovable. It was unclear at
this point in the formulation process if her feeling unlovable was more of
an anxious or insecure feeling when she was disconnected or more of a
shame-based feeling of worthlessness. After the another therapy session
with the client, the supervisor and supervisee reformulated more globally
that the client felt so hopeless because she found herself withdrawing for
reasons she could not understand, and that she felt confused and insecure
when it came to following her vital feelings of interest and enjoyment.
The client seemed, therefore, to be unable to use her emotions as infor-
mation. It became clear that the mother–daughter relationship was highly
significant in this dynamic, although it was still in the background. The
111
supervisor and the supervisee decided that the latter should wait until a
clear marker of unfinished business came up in his session with the client
and that at the moment, it was most important for the client to focus on
intellectualizing about her feelings.
By the end of the fourth therapy session, in which the client and the
therapist followed the client’s pain, they got to the client’s core maladaptive
feelings of basic insecurity, which originated from a lack of support from
an anxious mother who needed more protection from the client than she
was able to give. The supervisee and the supervisor were quite clear from
this that the client suffered from anxious insecurity related to her experi-
ence as a child needing to avoid anything that would make her mother
anxious and this had led her to be cautious and shy and to withdraw rather
than take risks. Had the client’s guilt been more intense and persistent,
the process might have unfolded into working on her self-interruption of
unresolved anger at her mother, rather than working on anxious insecurity.
INTERVENTION DIFFICULTIES: MARKERS, TASK

ENVIRONMENT, PROCESS, AND RESOLUTION
There are several categories of intervention difficulties that an EFT super-
visor will often encounter in supervision, such as conceptual difficulties, dif-
ficulties of perceiving, listening and following, and/or difficulties with action
or intervention (i.e., what, how, and when to intervene). These categories are
presented next, with examples of different supervisory technical difficulties.
Supervision of Conceptual Difficulties Related to Intervention

The supervisee needs to understand the interventions at a conceptual level.
For example, in a two-chair dialogue the aim is to activate a critical voice
to help evoke experience and work on unfinished business to process emo-
tions. It is not a role-play to practice how to speak to the other person in the
real world. In addition, the supervisee needs to understand the general steps
of different intervention processes. This is achieved through teaching and
reading. A description of dealing with a conceptual difficulty task in super-
vision is provided in Exhibit 5.2, which includes markers of conceptual dif-
ficulty, the task environment, the supervisee’s process, and a resolution.
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Exhibit 5.2
Tasks for Conceptual Difficulty
Markers of conceptual

difficulty Task environments Supervisee’s processes Resolution
Supervisee expresses uncer- Clarifying the difficulty: Supervisor listens Clarify the main area of conceptual Supervisee feels clearer
tainty or lack of clarity or for conceptual difficulties in the follow- difficulty. about a concept or
understanding about an ing areas: understanding the structure Retrieve background theoretical informa- theoretical model.
emotion-focused therapy of the intervention, the sequence of tion and take notes about further Supervisee expands his/her
task concept or proce- steps, how to activate appropriate pro- references, readings, ideas, etc. knowledge by relating
dure (e.g., “Why am I cesses, how to deepen emotion, and readings and clinical
While reviewing own or others’ thera-
activating the critic, don’t how to regulate emotion. situations to the concept.
peutic interventions, identify difficulty
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we want to get rid of the Working on the conceptual difficulty: and ask clarifying questions about
emotion”). Supervisor reiterates theoretical and other, more appropriate interventions.
research-based background informa-
Observe and comment on therapists’ per-
tion and provides any missing theo-
formances and interventions.
retical pieces; supervisor provides and
answers questions about conceptual Watch recordings of therapeutic interven-
issues; supervisor provides anecdotal tions done by other, more experienced
examples or reviews recordings of good therapists on own time.
or bad interventions with supervisee;
supervisor listens to parts of a session,
and provides feedback and examples of
different interventions that could have
been used; supervisee is asked to work
outside the session to fill in the knowl-
edge gap.
Supervision of Perceiving Listening

and Following Difficulties Related to Intervention
Markers of difficulties in listening and following, plus the task environ-
ment, the supervisee process, and a resolution are described in Exhibit 5.3.
After the identification of a marker of the supervisee’s problematic per-
ceiving, where the supervisee is missing too many cues or is not perceiv-
ing the emergence of a client marker, the supervisor will engage in task
exploration with the supervisee. They begin by listening to segments of
a recorded session and pausing in a moment-by-moment fashion; the
supervisor encourages the supervisee to focus his/her attention and try to
identify the client’s micromarkers, while setting aside other possible con-
cerns. A micromarker is the observation of a momentary client expres-
sion or behavior that is an opportunity for an intervention. For example,
a sigh, a grimace, or a poignant phrase is an opportunity for guiding
attention to the client’s current experience. A moment-by-moment
imagining of what the client may be experiencing follows, and different
client micromarkers are identified, together with client’s experiencing
and processing style.
Markers of listening and following difficulty may consist of the
supervisee expressing concerns about his/her ability to stay attuned to
client’s experience rather than the content of the discourse; understand-
ing what is going on with the client in the moment; or having difficulty
“hearing” the emotion underneath (i.e., grasping the centrality of client’s
experience). The supervisor may also notice this. After a marker is identi-
fied, the supervisor listens to the supervisee and clarifies what the latter
has trouble with.
Supervision of Action Difficulties Related to Intervention

The development of more advanced intervention (e.g., chair work,
imagery) beyond different forms of empathy and empathic attunement
to affect gives the supervisee tools for how to handle different therapeu-
tic tasks specific to EFT. A marker of action difficulty may take the form
of the supervisee’s expressed/implied concerns related to what to do
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Exhibit 5.3
Supervisee Asks for Perceiving Listening and Following Difficulty

Markers of listening and
following difficulty Task environments Supervisee’s processes Resolution
Supervisee expresses con- Clarifying the difficulty: Supervisor listens Practice “being the client”—emotional self- Supervisee develops a
cerns, such as staying for difficulties in the following areas: awareness of what client is experiencing clearer focus and is able
attuned, understanding recognizing client’s micromarkers, while listening to a client statement. to identify and differen-
what is going on with recognizing markers of characteristic Practice listening and identifying different tiate client’s markers.
the client, “hearing” the style, recognizing mode of engagement, therapeutic markers. Supervisee is more able to
emotion, or grasping identifying major tasks markers, and generalize his listening
Develop a focus.
the centrality of client’s identifying treatment foci indicators. skills to more complex
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experience. Familiarize with and analyze/rate other

Task exploration: Supervisor and super- situations.
therapy examples using the Experienc-
visee listen to segments of the recorded Supervisee responds to
ing Scale, the Emotional Arousal Scale.
session and pause in a moment-by- client’s markers in a
moment manner; supervisor suggests Review therapeutic examples and evalu-
more efficient manner.
focused attention and search for client’s ates client’s emotional productivity
markers, while setting aside other con- (attending, symbolization, congruence,
cerns during listening; different client acceptance, regulation, agency, and
markers are identified, together with differentiation).
client experiencing and processing style. Practice various therapeutic responses to
Practicing therapeutic responses: Super- facilitate client’s emotional awareness,
visor uses different methods to help and symbolization.
the supervisee to follow the client with Practice interventions to address emo-
helpful responses. tional regulation difficulties.
next or how to do it. The supervisee may describe feeling stuck and
unable to help the client further, lack technical skills, or be indecisive
about which way to go. For example, a supervisee whose ability to listen
and empathically respond to clients is well established, who complains
to her supervisor about feeling as if she is not advancing with a particu-
lar client, and does not know what to “do” next, will be taught to build
on her existing skills by modeling and practicing the steps involved in
different therapeutic tasks. In this case, the supervision marker is the
supervisee’s sense of being stuck in the process, and thus a specific super-
vision need becomes evident: learning how to help the client learn a new
intervention. The dialogical interaction that results between the super
visor and the supervisee represents the task environment that will even-
tually facilitate learning. One of the goals of all the interventions is to
access core emotion schemes, so the supervisor often intervenes to help
the supervisee develop skills to activate emotion. The markers of action
difficulty, the task environment, the supervisee’s process, and a resolution
are described in Exhibit 5.4.
EXAMPLES OF SUPERVISION
OF INTERVENTION DIFFICULTIES
This section presents examples of some of the main difficulties that arise
in EFT supervision. It starts with a discussion of the supervisee’s own self-
criticism and fear of deepening emotion. The section then moves on to the
supervisee dealing with disclosures of shame by the client, as this often is
difficult to know how to respond to.
Supervisee Self-Criticism
One of the main difficulties that arises in intervention supervision is anxi-
ety or lack of confidence from the supervisee, which results in self-doubt
about competence and self-criticism, which all impede learning and espe-
cially learning by doing. During a session with a 31-year-old male client
with social anxiety, the supervisee felt he was struggling to turn the client
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Exhibit 5.4
Tasks for Action Difficulties in Supervision
Markers of action

difficulties Task environments Supervisee’s processes Resolution
Supervisee expresses Clarifying the difficulty: Supervisor is attuned to super- Summarize case formulation to create Supervisee is pro-
concerns related to visee’s stated difficulty with empathy-based, relational, context. gressively more
what to do next or reprocessing or re-enactement tasks. Restate the client’s core emotion and skillful and fluent
how to do it; super- Task exploration: Supervisee is asked to provide spe- main therapeutic focus. in using different
visee describes feeling cific examples of his/her difficulty with a specific interventions.
Listen to therapy segments and stop
“stuck,” unable to therapeutic task; supervisee and supervisor listen whenever own difficulty is apparent.
help the client, lack- to session segments and pause when either needs
Summarize and plan various possible
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ing technical skills, or to point to the difficulty; supervisor works with a

being indecisive about interventions for next session.
notion of “could do’s” rather than right or wrong;
which way to go. supervisor points to alternatives that could be done Return with results of new inter-
at this point; attention is focused on a specific dif- ventions tried and review them with
ficulty in a task; supervisee and supervisor engage in supervisor until proficiency and
a moment-by-moment exploration of supervisee’s fluency are achieved.
performances (what is done) and difficulties with a Learn about specific therapeutic task
specific task, a step in a task, blending them fluently, and solidify theoretical understand-
etc.; supervisor deepens the supervisee’s experience ing of steps involved.
when there are possible therapeutic blocks. Watch videotaped examples of specific
Practicing therapeutic responses: Supervisee is asked therapeutic tasks as suggested by
to think about different intervention alternatives; supervisor.
supervisor uses different methods to help the super-
visee practice different responses and interventions.
inward. As the supervisee and the supervisor listened to the therapy ses-
sion, they saw lots of opportunities for deepening the process that the
therapist had missed. There was one point where the supervisee noted,
I should have tried to focus more on the shame here and what that
feels like. I think what happened at that particular point was that
in my head I was debating doing chair work and that’s what got me
deflected. So I know I need to be much better at getting him inside, I
think what happens sometimes is that his tone is so incongruent with
his words that I get confused about how to respond.
Here, we see the issue of supervisee’s self-criticism emerging, and this

often occurs with competent and sensitive therapists. In EFT supervision,
the supervisor comments on this in a way that normalizes the anxiety
(“It’s hard to be perfect, anyhow there isn’t a perfect way,” said with a
bit of humor) and validates the therapist’s competence (“You’re doing a
good job!”). If the self-criticism continues, the supervisor might do a little
unpacking of the supervisee’s own critic and go through the early steps of
a self-critical dialogue at a cognitive level to highlight what the supervisee
is doing, but would not readily engage in therapy or a tow-chair dialogue
with a focus on the supervisee’s inner world of experience of shame or its
origins as the supervision contract does not, at this point, have personal
work as a goal. If it seemed advisable, the supervisor could discuss whether
the supervisee felt he/she would benefit from some personal work, and
discuss how to do this and give referrals, if needed.
The supervisor may work experientially on the supervisee’s experi-
ence when there are possible therapeutic blocks. Sometimes two-chair
work can be done with the supervisee when there is a more chronic block,
but more often the supervisee’s block is explored empathically to get at
anxieties about performance or conceptual confusion. In learning the
two-chair dialogue, for example, a supervisee may express anxiety about
initiating a dialogue between the client’s two opposing sides and deepen-
ing the split. Here, the supervision interactional sequences may include
exploring the difficulty in more specific terms (exploration of what hap-
pened in session), addressing the difficulty (e.g., by clarifying what the
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therapist wants to learn, such as how to introduce two-chair work to the

client; by creating separation and contact in the client’s experience; or
by helping the client access the underlying feelings), deepening super-
visee’s sense of difficulty (e.g., working through and understanding
supervisee’s sense of confusion and his/her “therapeutic block”), or
suggesting how to set up the two sides.
Fear of Deepening
A significant difficulty that has to be dealt with repeatedly is the super-
visee’s anxiety about deepening the process by going into the client’s most
painful feelings. This is addressed in the following example.
Listening to the tape, it became clear to the therapist that the client
has a real conflict with allowing himself to go to the painful places, fearing
he would get stuck, be unable to pull himself together or contain things
after the session, and feel isolated because there is no one around to help
him pick up the pieces, no “safety net,” as he put it. So it was apparent
that the client’s self-interruptive process was preventing him from letting
go of his protections and allowing himself to get deeply engaged in the
therapy process. The therapist felt hesitant to “push” the client, so he was
seeking help. The supervisor empathically explored with the supervisee
his hesitance to push, which in this context meant doing self-interruptive
work by asking the client to move to the other chair and stop himself from
getting into his pain.
The supervisee essentially articulated a fear of rupturing the alliance,
a fear of losing the client, and also an anxiety about whether the client
could tolerate the pain. Here is an important problem that often arises in
supervision: the supervisee’s fear of painful emotions. After checking that
there are no counter indications to deepening the client’s experience, the
supervisor needs first to validate the supervisees fear. Then, the supervisor
needs to help the supervisee overcome his/her own avoidance by guiding
the supervisee to stay with, rather than avoid the emotion. EFT super
vision may focus on helping the supervisee become aware of his/her fears
of emotion, teach him/her to interrupt the fear, and encourage him/her
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to learn to tolerate his/her own emotions so that they can help the client
tolerate his/her own emotions. The EFT supervisor does not, however, go
into activating the supervisees painful dreaded emotions and sees this as
either being done in the context of their experiential training or as work
to be done with the supervisee’s therapist.
In turn, by overcoming his/her own fears, the supervisee is better
able to help the client face his/her pain and help him/her experience that
the client does not fall apart as he/she feared. It is a circular process—the
supervisee’s ability to overcome the fear of staying with and deepening an
emotion in-session in turn helps the client overcome his/her own fear. Of
course, a judgment has to be made as to how quickly and directly or slowly
and less directly the painful emotions can be approached, tolerated, and
accepted. Psychoeducation at two levels is helpful here: from the supervisor
to the supervisee and from the supervisee to the client. However, even more
important is that the best way the supervisee will be able to help clients face
painful emotions is if supervisees have faced their own painful emotions
and discovered that they survived them and experienced how they did this.
Experiential learning is crucial in helping trainees learn how to deal with
emotion and to give them the courage to help clients do the same. As we
said earlier, this usually needs to take place outside of supervision in the
supervisee’s training or therapy.
Dealing With Shame

One significant difficulty for the supervisee is how to proceed after the
client has disclosed a shameful experience for the first time. In the exam-
ple here, the supervisor discussed the importance of the supervisee’s
bringing up the content in the next session rather than shying away from
it, as shying away would confirm that it was too shameful to discuss. The
supervisor suggested that the supervisee, in the next session, say how
pleased he was that the client trusted him enough to break the family
code and tell him about the parents’ sexual behavior, nudity, and por-
nographic activities. In the next session, the therapist brought up the
shameful experience so that he and the client could continue processing
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it. In response to the therapist’s efforts to get the client to talk about how
all this had affected him emotionally, the client brought up his sense of
being very blocked. His whole life, the client had received the message
that “this doesn’t exist,” so he didn’t know how he felt about the open
sexuality and drugs. The only way to keep going was to “keep his mouth
shut” and to deny it affected him.
Intervention Flexibility
Another issue is that often, therapists who have been taught the marker-
guided intervention method: focus too much on getting the right inter-
vention and lose the client’s experience in trying to implement the
intervention. The intervention is a means to getting to the core emotion,
not an end in itself. During supervision, the supervisee said he had become
lost in the session, was thinking too much in trying to figure out in which
direction to go next. In the therapy session, there had been multiple mark-
ers (of unfinished business, of self-loathing, of self-interruption) and it
was hard to know where to go when. The case formulation that proved
useful helped the supervisee see that it didn’t matter which intervention
to use or which marker to follow, as long as the therapist and the client
got to the core feeling and could get to the client’s need for acceptance
and validation. This helped the supervisee understand the centrality of
the painful emotion, and he was able to get back to following the client’s
experience and getting to the core painful emotion.
Coach Critic
One of the real difficulties encountered by most therapists learning
EFT is how to get the core critical voice in two-chair work. The process
requires that the therapist help the client get to his/her core negative
self-evaluations (e.g., “You are stupid/fat/ugly/selfish/a failure”) that are
essentially criticisms of the client’s personality, not second-level criticisms
of themselves for having symptoms or problems. A second-level criticism
occurs when the client criticizes him-/herself for having a problem (e.g.,
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“I’m so angry at myself for being depressed/being anxious/procrastinating”)

that itself is caused by a first-level criticism, which is a core characterologi-
cally focused criticism (e.g., “I am worthless,” which leads to depression;
“I’m stupid,” which leads to anxiety; “I don’t have the talent needed,”
which leads to procrastination). The therapist wants to access the first-
level criticism instead of letting the client criticize him-/herself for feeling
bad. Even though the supervisee is taught this conceptually, in general,
he/she often needs to learn this by making the mistake of doing it and, in
supervision, having it pointed out. An example of this follows.
In this session, the therapist began two-chair work for a self-critical
split with a client who criticizes and pushes herself constantly because
she feels imperfect, unsuccessful, helpless, and like a loser. At this point
the client is relaying an incident of not being able to assert herself in a
family context.
Client (on video): We made a plan. My husband and I made this plan. We
told my mother. She said okay. My mother-in-law said okay, at first. Then
she said there was a lot to eat at home, don’t go outside, let’s sit at home
and have your parents come to us. I said okay to her, [I said] “whatever you
say.” But I wanted to go out. I criticize myself here, for example. I didn’t do
something that I wanted.
Therapist (on video): So whatever the incident is, there is a self-critical
part of you.
Client (on video): A self-critical part. I will bring it out.
Therapist (on video): Find that critical part and criticize [yourself]. [You
are] criticizing [yourself in the other chair during this two-chair dialogue].
Client (on video): I am myself right now. Why don’t you express your
thoughts now? Such stuff. Why don’t you control your thoughts?
Therapist (on video): You are always doing this. You don’t express your
thoughts.
Supervisor: This is a second-level coach critic. She is criticizing herself
for not expressing herself. The real problem is that she inhibits herself, not
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that she is critical of herself for inhibiting herself. You need to get to the
core criticisms that stops her from expressing herself.
Client (on video): You have difficulty expressing your thoughts. Can you
please express your thoughts now?
Later in the therapy session, the client explains why she has difficulty
expressing her thoughts.
Client (on video): If she expresses her thoughts, if I express my thoughts

and if anything goes wrong in the end, I’m going to be the one to blame.
I don’t want to be blamed.
Therapist (on video): [You] don’t want others to blame [you].
Client (on video): Yes. Because I am not confident about what I argue
for, because I cannot predict how it would end, I hesitate, unable to
decide.
Supervisor: So you need to say come over here and make her not confident.
Therapist (on video): You hesitate; [you are] unable to decide.
Client (on video): I hesitate; [I am] unable to decide.
Therapist (on video): This is very upsetting for you. You hesitate, unable
to decide, and it upsets you.
Client (on video): I don’t want to jump to conclusions without knowing
if my expressions are right or wrong. Therefore, I say okay to the thoughts
of others. I say yes to the wishes of others. I act in this way so that I will
not be guilty if there is a problem.
The client continues the therapy session by enacting in a two-chair dia-

logue with her critical self.
Client (on video): You criticize others too much within yourself. You act
in this way because you criticize and interpret others too much. You are so
critical they will reject you. Keep quiet.
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Supervisor: This is now a first-level criticism. When she says, “You criti-
cize others too much; they will reject you,” there is both a negative evalu-
ation and a frightening of herself. You need to develop these.
Therapist (on video): It is interesting. What do you think, well, what do

you say about how she criticizes others like that?
Client (on video): Let everyone live their lives.
When the client expresses disappointment in her need to please others, the
therapist again encourages her to use a two-chair dialogue.
Client (on video): She wants to do things willingly, but mostly she does
something to please someone else. She is always trying to please some-
one else.
Therapist (on video): Go over there. Tell her, you are always doing some-
thing to please others.
Supervisor: Not such a good idea. You are taking her back to the coach
critic where she is criticizing herself for being inhibited.
Client (on video): You always do things to please others. You always do
this. You always do this.
Therapist (on video): You keep yourself under pressure.
Client (on video): You press yourself, push yourself.
Therapist (on video): Criticize, criticize yourself today. Look into her eyes
and what does she do wrong. Criticize her.
Supervisor: This is potentially better and will get to more first-level criti-
cisms, like you are stupid, selfish, ugly, et cetera.
Client (on video): There is a fear that I might upset [other people by dis-
pleasing them].
Therapist (on video): There is a fear that you might upset them. So as not to
upset them, you are always alert, cautious, self-interrupting, blocking your
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own feelings. You constantly stop yourself not to upset them. Constantly
blocking yourself means giving up your rights. It means giving up what you
deserve.
Leading and Teaching

The continuing process within this event reveals another difficulty—that
of leading versus following. Here, the therapist is trying to lead the cli-
ent to change rather than following the client’s process. This often hap-
pens, especially with therapists who are anxious to promote change and
see fostering understanding as helpful. EFT works on the principles that a
person has to arrive at a place before he/she can leave it and that although
supervisors do guide, the supervisor can only be one step ahead, still in
the client’s proximal zone of development. This means that the therapist
cannot lead the client by being too far ahead. The therapist cannot access
feelings by instructing them; the therapist has to follow and facilitate their
emergence. The client has to self-organize to experience his/her self in a
new way rather than understand something.
The following example shows a therapist trying to evoke assertive
anger as an antidote to the client’s fear, trying to get the client to stand
up to her critical voice, but the timing is wrong and the therapist is
too far ahead of the client, who is still feeling afraid. In addition,
the supervisee teaches or interprets to foster understanding, but this
doesn’t promote new experience. These are perennial problems in
teaching EFT—to help facilitators become process-sensitive facilita-
tors of new experience rather than modifiers, teachers, or providers of
understanding.
Therapist (on video): Take a deep breath. Do you have some anger? It is
also something that makes [you] angry.
Supervisor: This is trying to access anger too soon. There are no signs of
anger in the client’s voice, posture, or words. Rather, get her to go to the
anxiety-making chair and ask her to make herself afraid.
Client (on video): I cannot feel angry at them. So I do not.
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Therapist (on video): Rather than [an anger] at them, could it be an anger
because of not getting what you deserve? Overall, it may be [an anger]
at yourself, at life. [It may be an anger in] general. It does not have to be
[anger] at someone. [It may be] an anger that arises in the body. Not get-
ting what you want [or] what you expect [and] not being able to express
yourself creates anger no matter at whom it is directed. But anger seems
to be something dangerous to you.
Supervisor: [You] need to get her to do more interrupting and then assert
against the suppressor when she begins to self-organize as assertive. Also, it’s
not just insight you want to promote, which is what you are giving in the
summary, it is not an understanding. Although this is good, you want her to
get a sense of herself as an agent in the creation of her distress, to engage her
body and arouse the feeling of being the victim of her own actions, and to
promote a motivation to assert herself against her critical/interrupting voice.
Difficulties Introducing Chair Work for Self-Interruptive Splits

In this example, the supervisor is pointing out a marker of an interruptive
process and suggesting a two-chair dialogue to help the client work on
the self-interruptive process. Working on self-interruption is one of the
biggest difficulties that arises in supervision. Supervisees have difficulty
seeing the interruptive process and knowing how to intervene.
Therapist (on video): You experience certain emotions, but when the other
person, especially when they are valuable to you, you stop there. Like I feel
something, and then like freezing. You kind of stop and try to adjust yourself
according to the responses from that other person, as I understand it.
Supervisor: You could introduce a self-interruption split at this point. She
is stopping herself.
Client (on video): It could be, yes. Like [I am] directing [myself]?
Therapist (on video): There’s something inside of you, right or wrong,
possible or not, whatever, in your heart, to tell, to share, to express, to
reveal this.
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Client (on video): I need someone.

Therapist (on video): You need someone. Here’s the problem: You some-
how stop yourself from expressing these needs according to the reactions
[you get] from other people. [You] shape them accordingly and then you
let them out. Do you understand that?
Supervisor: You are providing understanding and giving her a formulation,
which is good. In addition, you need to create an experience, to go beyond
understanding. You can do this by moving to an interruptive dialogue.
Client (on video): I understand, yes.
Therapist (on video): Or, you do not let [yourself express your needs].
Client (on video): I do not let [myself express my needs], yes.
Therapist (on video): [The] problem [is not expressing your needs], but
when you do not let [let yourself express them], when you stop yourself
[from expressing them].
Client (on video): When [they] stays inside. I think in my mind con-
stantly. I should have done it this way, it should have been like that, why
did it happen, et cetera. I’ve had it for a long time.
Supervisor: This is the interruptive/critical process calling for an
intervention.
The therapist continues to encourage the client to get to her core emotion
by asking her what goes on when she stops herself from expressing her
own needs and desires.
Therapist (on video): What is happening here, about deciding what

[needs] to tell? You stop and think.
Client (on video): Yes. I’m pausing right now.
Therapist (on video): You are pausing.
Client (on video): It is like I forgot what I would say. What we were talk-
ing, I cannot even remember now. It is like amnesia.
127
Supervisor: A present-time interruption. Turn it into a “doing” rather

than a “being done to.”
Therapist (on video): Is what you just mentioned something like this?
Client (on video): No. It stays in my mind.
Therapist (on video): Indecision.
Difficulties With Marker Identification and Microskills

in Unfinished Business
The the next example shows a client talking about not being heard by her
parents. Some supervisees have difficulty identifying markers as they emerge.
In this dialogue, the supervisor points out some instances of the marker
emerging.
Therapist (on video): Now, what happened? What is it like not to be

understood? You took a deep breath.
Client (on video): Yes. It happened when [we] came to parents and not
being understood.
Therapist (on video): Yes. What happened? What is that feeling like?
Client (on video): Regret? Disappointment?
Therapist (on video): Is there disappointment?
Client (on video): Disappointment. [There is] some resentment. There is
something missing. That is [what I feel] right now.
The client appears to be sad and down, her voice got lower and quieter. She
seemed to turn inside to seek something, but she couldn’t find it. Then she
came out of it with a hardened voice and curling of her lips.
Supervisor: This is a marker of unfinished business. It has come up

before. Use this opportunity now to intervene with a dialogue with her
parents.
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Client (on video): [It is] the reason for [the] many things my parents did,
as you say. [It is] just like they put me in a shape they wanted or without
[me] knowing it. My husband puts me in a shape, too. Others also have an
impact [on me], but I can eliminate their effect somehow.
Therapist (on video): The voice telling that you do not deserve to cel-
ebrate that success, is that [the voice] of your husband [or the voice] your
parents?
Client (on video): Probably [my parents’] voice.
Therapist (on video): Did it feel [like your parents’ voice]? It seems like it
evoked that for you. Because you went there.
Client (on video): Not their voice, but I think I got [my] personality as a
result of what they did.
Therapist (on video): So this voice inside of you is one that they dictated
to you.
Supervisor: So now is a good time to introduce the chair dialogue by say-
ing, “Come over here and do it.” Remember, you want to help her have an
experience not just insight. You want her to enact the parent and to experi-
ence agency in being able to stand up to her internal construction of them.
As you know, it is not a role-play of how to behave with her parents in the
world. This is about reorganizing her internal self–other scheme.
Client (on video): Well, they did not tell this to me exactly, but [it came]
from what they did.
Therapist (on video): This emerged for you.
Client (on video): Yes. I mean, inadequacy, certainly depression also leads
to [what they did].
Therapist (on video): It feels like that voice is a combination of your
mother, your father, [and] your husband.
Client (on video): Yes, and other people, too, partially.
Therapist (on video): Other people, too?
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Client (on video): So . . .

Therapist (on video): So it seems like you say no to that. Right? Did you
say so now?
The next example of supervision includes a female client and an

advanced supervisee. The supervisor watched video of the therapy ses-
sion before the supervision session. The supervisee requests to begin
supervision with the unfinished business dialogue from the client. This
example shows some close microskill supervision of empty-chair dialogue
for unfinished business. One of the major difficulties for supervisees using
the empty-chair dialogue is asking the client to enact the negativity of the
significant other. In the following example, the therapist asks the client
to enact the neglectful other. Another difficulty is being able to move the
empty-chair dialogue from a narrative account (a story of what happened
and was felt) into a current experience (what is felt toward the other in the
here and now of the session).
Supervisor: You begin the session by telling the client to “put your mother
here and tell her ‘I’m a bit worried about [your son].’”
Supervisee: [Is that] not the best thing?
Supervisor: [No, it’s not.] The best thing would be to say, “Put your mother
here. First can you see her?” Then ask, “What do you feel?” The way you
did it you’re not dealing with actually getting real experiential contact with
the mother to get the client’s feeling. You’re starting much more with the
narrative. [You might] say, “Can you see your mother? What do you feel
when you see her?” And then I guess if nothing comes up you could move
in to tell her about Jamie or something like that. But it’s really good to
make experiential contact with her mother first.
Supervisee: Right, yes, okay. Normally I would do that, but here I didn’t
do that.
Supervisor: Yeah, I know you are good at this. But remember these are
minor, but they all build up.
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Supervisee: Yes, they’re important.

Supervisor: Then, somewhere the client says, “I’m angry,” so my main
comment about the first part is that she’s angry and you maybe kind of
missed the anger there.
Supervisee: [I] only got to it much later, toward the end [of the session].
Supervisor: Exactly, but it was there.
Supervisee: You saw it and I didn’t.
Supervisor: She actually said “I’m angry” and so you could say “Can you
see her? Tell her ‘I’m angry.’” Because she said this right at the beginning.
So it’s about picking up the anger early. And then at some point, you com-
mented, and this comment of mine is more stylistic, you say to her, “This
sounds superficial what you’re saying, can you really talk from a deeper
place?” Or something like that. So I would feel a bit worried that she might
feel a bit judged by you when you say that. So I wouldn’t say things like
“this sounds superficial.”
Supervisee: Yeah, that’s not a very nice thing to say.
Supervisor: I mean, you do it in a gentle kind of a way, but in an evalu-
ative context, right? So then going along, I don’t know if we listen to this
now on tape but there’s too much narrative content. You need to deepen
the amount of emotion. There, you see, [the client is] complaining. It’s all
complaining basically and you need to deepen the emotion. As you know,
it’s best to differentiate the complaining into the underlying fused anger
and sadness. You do at one point say to her, “What do you feel?” She says
she feels neglected, but I think you should say, “What do you feel now as
you are saying this?” You know, I have pointed this out before to other
supervisees, as well as to you. It’s very helpful to ask, “What you are feeling
as you are saying this?” to bring her into the experiential present, here and
now, versus talking about what she did or felt in the past, which pulls more
for cognitive processing. So she says, “You neglected me and you always
gave my sister more attention.” First, she is in blame rather than in expres-
sion of her primary feeling, which would probably sound more like “I felt
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lonely and unimportant,” although she is not there now. Second, her tone is
currently one of resentment, so by asking “How do you feel as you say this?”
you will help her connect to her anger. Sometimes it’s the other way round,
the content is angry but the current emotion is sad. Because you want to
bring it alive now. And then, [there are] two options when she’s saying this
now, “Well, what do you feel now, either you feel angry or sad?” You know,
it could also be “I’m afraid,” but generally when [the client is] in the com-
plaint, it’s good to bring her to “What do you feel now?” and then say, “Tell
her [in the other chair] what you feel” and usually it’s going to be “I resent”
or “I feel angry.” You see, she says, “I feel neglected,” but really she feels angry.
Supervisee: [Angry] about being neglected.
Supervisor: [It is] the process and the content, right? In the present, “I’m
feeling angry that I felt neglected in the past.” But you stay at that narra-
tive second-level of “What did you feel?–I feel neglected,” but really it’s
“I resent that you’ve neglected me.”
Supervisee: That’s a good thing, [to be in the] present, [to focus on the
feeling] now. You see there is something [the client] does that I have dif-
ficulty with and in the end it works out [but then] I think later [I should
have said], “So what are you feeling now about that?”
Supervisor: That’s right, okay. You know when it gets more alive, she’s
now [acting as] the mother. So you change her back to herself at this point
[when] the mother says “forget about it,” right? Now my comment about
this whole thing, I mean it was good, but what you’re engaged in is more
of a debate between the mother and the daughter. You’re not getting at the
essence of being the bad mother, although it kind of evolves later. But you
see, you did that earlier and [you said], “Come over here and what does
your mother say?” This is not what you want to do, as it promotes a type
of debate. The two best options here are (a) if it is still early in the dialogue
as it is here is “Come over here and be the neglectful mother,” to enact
the bad other or (b) if it is later in a dialogue after you have accessed the
painful feeling when you have the feeling and the heartfelt need, then you
can say, “Come over here and how does your mother respond to what you
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feel and need?” But what you did when the client is basically complaining
and she says, “I feel neglected by you” but [you are] not in the present and
then you say to the [client as the] mother “Come over here what does your
mother say?” Then the [the client as the] mother says “You’re a difficult
child, you’ve always been a difficult child.” So, I wouldn’t have moved [the
client] into [enacting the] mother until [the client] comes into the present
and she’s crying or she’s angry. Actually not when she’s angry. Her primary
feeling is probably [sadness], about not feeling important or loved. Then
once she is expressing her feelings and states the need, then [you can] have
her come to [enact] the mother and then [you can] ask the [client as the]
mother, “What do you say to that?” Does what I’m saying make sense?
Supervisee: Yes, I understand, but there are two different points. You
would say, “What do you say when [your] child is showing sadness?”
Supervisor: Yes, when the primary emotion is there and [the client] is
showing the real feeling.
Supervisee: Okay, but in this case, I should have emphasized the neglect-
ful mother or the bad mother. But what is difficult for me is to actually
find this bad mother. But she did say it.
Supervisor: In a way, when the [client] is debating, she is enacting the
neglectful mother. That is where it was saved. But really, there’s an image
in [the client’s] head of [a] mother who turns away from her, pushes her
away, or closes her ears. And that’s what you want to play until such time
it is activated in the client’s mind—that’s the core emotion.
Supervisee: Actually, what I saw was the guilt-making, blaming mother.
But that is not what it is about. What I saw, and I was kind of happy with
that part, was the client as a blaming mother.
Supervisor: Yes, I understand. So the image in [the client’s] head is of a
blaming mother, right?
Supervisee: Yes, and she actually reacts to that and becomes angry. But it’s
true, I didn’t instruct her to be a blaming mother. I was sort of lucky that
[the client did that on her own].
133
Supervisor: Exactly, exactly. The ideal thing would be [to say to the
client], “Come over here and be your blaming mother, blame her.” You
see a little bit at this stage, it was sort of more like a role-play of how the
mother would react to [the client] now. But we want to get more to her
core emotional internal structure, which is the feeling that comes from the
experience of how the mother blamed her all her life. What’s happening
here is more like a role-play of what would happen if [the client] called
her mother. So, then you could say, “Tell her what you resent” and when
the client says, “It’s pathetic,” this is rejecting anger. Get at the empowered
anger and the sadness, so then if [the client] says it’s pathetic, that’s like a
judgment and it’s disgust, but what you want is to say, “Tell her what you’re
angry about,” right? It’s getting [the client] to be very direct.
Supervisee: Yeah, so this is an important part, because when [the client]
says it’s pathetic, I see her really activated and angry. I was satisfied. I hear
you would want me to go further, to deepen that anger, right?
Supervisor: Yes, exactly. I want it to be direct so I want you to say, “Can
you tell her I’m angry at you?”
Supervisee: A simple statement [that is] more direct. I need to get [the
client] to say “I’m angry.”
Supervisor: Yes, you see you have got to move it to an “I” form of expres-
sion and [away from] the blaming form using “you”. [Throughout the ses-
sion, the client downplays “I” statements.] You’re pursuing the hurt, which
is good. It would be good to focus on her [feelings] now, not [focus] on the
narrative content. What you are doing is good, but it could be deeper. So
it would be good to say, “So what do you feel right now that you say this?”
and she’ll say “I feel sad” or “[I feel] mad.”
Supervisee: Again, so when she’s like looking down you would say, “What
do you feel?” and she would say [whether she feels sad or mad]?
Supervisor: Yes. And now it changes, [now the client] feels angry. [She
says], “I felt the lack of you, I’m mad at you for letting me down.” Do you
see the content and the process are two different things? She’s saying [she]
feels sad but really she feels mad.
134
Supervisee: That’s helpful for me, so I have to bring [the emotion] to

the present, because that seems to be the difference, she is always telling
stories.
Supervisor: The stories are good at first because they get at the feeling, but
they don’t bring her to the present.
Supervisee: You want a present experience and action.
Supervisor: Right, it’s very clear that she’s angry. You’ve got the anger and
[then] I see you go for the sadness. This is a key way of getting sadness,
but she’s actually in an angry state. Listen to her voice, her posture, her
words. I just say get at the anger before the sadness. You see when [clients]
complain there is a fusion of anger and sadness, but when people are in
the complaint, you generally get the anger before you can get the sadness.
Supervisee: You think I don’t get to the sadness? I already heard the sad-
ness and that’s where I went.
Supervisor: What I’m saying is that you haven’t cleared the anger out of
the way [first] and you go for the sadness before you go for the anger in the
present. So, you see, when she says it’s pathetic, maybe you think you’re get-
ting the anger but I’m saying you’re not and it interferes later with getting at
[the] sadness. The anger is not in the present, it’s in this narrative form. So
you need to get [the client] to say [to her enacted mother], “I resent that you
don’t call me. Since I’ve been a child, I’ve always been angry at you.” Then
you ask the client, “What do you feel now?” and she’ll say, “I’m really sad.”
But what we have is “it’s pathetic, even [for] my husband” and then you go
to, “but you miss [your mother]” [to which] she says “I miss [my mother].”
But the anger is still there, it hasn’t been symbolized, processed, [or] dealt
with. So then the sadness isn’t as deep and it [has to] be in the present.
Supervisee: I see so now when she says, “I wanted you to come.” You’re
saying it’s more narrative. Not felt.
Supervisor: Right. [Here] you see you go to can you say “I miss” but it’s
when she is [still] angry.
Supervisee: I kind of step over the anger, it is not fully declared, you mean?
135
Supervisor: Exactly.
Supervisee: But then [should I step over the anger]? [That is] a bit of
a theoretical question. [The client] starts to express that she misses her
[mother] and that she wants her [mother]. The anger seems to disappear
[later in the session]. Is that my illusion?
Supervisor: Well, it is more like the depth of the sadness is not at the level
it could be if she really [focused on the sadness, without the anger]. This
is a hypothesis, right? To my [knowledge], the sadness isn’t deep enough.
You [do] finally get [her] to [say], “It makes me furious,” [which] you
prompt that and that’s great. That’s what I wanted to see happening earlier.
Supervisee: Okay, but it does happen [at this point in the session].
Supervisor: Yes, it’s true, you did get to it [eventually]. I’m trying to
encourage you to use these skills to get at [the client’s] primary emotions
earlier [in the session]. So, now we’ve got the [client’s] anger, right?
Supervisee: Yes.
Supervisor: It’s good, you got there [eventually], but she was expressing
this [much earlier in the session]. I know you [know how to] do it, I’m
trying to show you how to be more efficient [with the process].
Supervisee: Alright, I see.
Supervisor: It’s good that you got [to the anger] and that was very good,
that was very direct. You suggested the sentence to her and it worked.
Supervisee: Now my question is: Do you think it is enough anger now?
Supervisor: What you did was still helpful. But yes, [at this point in the
session] I think it’s good and this is direct anger. I understand, now you
even got to the [client’s] need, which is great. It’s what we want? The next
step is to get to the sadness.
Supervisee: Sadness comes after the need?
Supervisor: Yes, this angry part here is the superficial need, or it’s a need
associated with the anger. But now you need to get to [the client] feeling
136
the primary [emotion of] sadness; the need and the missing in the sad-
ness. This is the heartfelt need [in the sadness], not the more superficial
need in the anger.
Supervisee: Actually, I think it comes out in another way later on [in
the session]. It is kind of in a projected way when the [client, enacting]
mother, says she misses the daughter.
Supervisor: Exactly.
Supervisee: Is that good enough?
Supervisor: Yes. Very much so. Let’s just look at [this dialogue] technically
in the moment. At this point [in the session] you make a change and you
[ask the client to] come over here [to act as her] mother [in an empty-chair
dialogue]. The issue is [with] her last statement, [which] is anger at [her]
mother. It is as though it were a marital interaction. The mother will defend
[her actions]. If [the client is experiencing] sadness, because the need is
closeness [with the mother or because] the need is a nonviolation. If [the]
mother [was abusive], then the anger would be the right point to change,
[as it] would be an adaptive, boundary-serving response. But [with this
client], [the emotions are] longing and attachment, so the core emotion is “I
needed you to be close and I’m sad and that will bring [my] mother close.”
Supervisee: I needed to go a little bit more into the [client’s] sadness and
[have her say to the mother], “I needed you” and “I wanted you” and then
[ask the client] what does the mother respond to this?
Supervisor: Yes, so when [the client] says “I need you,” say “Tell her again,”
and then say “What do you feel as you say this?”
Supervisee: Okay, to get at this sadness.
Supervisor: Yes, and then [have the client] tell [the mother] what [she]
misses. [In that case,] it will be deeper because [because the client will be]
much more in the present.
Supervisee: She did change her view [at the end of the session] and did
change. And [there are still] moments when she flips out again, but that’s
[just] the way she functions, I think. So I was like, okay it’s not entirely
137
intense, it’s a bit chaotic and still the elements are there as she says things
have changed, and I see that she is different in a way, you know?
Supervisor: [This] was definitely good, and it’s good to keep working at
going deeper.
Supervisee: And so first anger and then sadness.
Supervisor: And in the present.
Supervisee: And in the present.
SUPERVISION OF DIFFICULTIES IN MAKING

INTERVENTIONS MORE INDIVIDUALIZED
The steps (markers, task environment, process, and resolution) involved
in tasks to resolve individualization difficulty are presented in Exhibit 5.5.
The marker of an individualization difficulty may consist in the super-
visee’s speaking about his/her preference in using one intervention over
another or wanting to make adjustments to the therapeutic steps in a
manner that will fit more with his/her personal values, which will ulti-
mately aid in communicating genuineness and becoming authentic and
congruent. In this process the supervisee expresses a need to blend his/her
personality with a different intervention mode and the supervisor pro-
motes the supervisee’s exploration of personal ways of implementing
interventions. The supervisee thus develops a personal style.
As part of the task environment, the supervisee is encouraged to
express his/her need for a personal style by providing more concrete
examples. For example, the supervisee may state that starting the two-
chair dialogue in a more tentative manner and providing some prepa-
ration for the client would “feel better” than being more directive and
asking the client to just enact his/her critical self without warning. In
such a situation, the supervisor explores alternative ways of adjusting
the steps in the two-chair dialogue; the supervisor’s role is to encourage
the supervisee’s freedom of choice for what he/she needs to work on dur-
ing supervision, as well as for the what, how, and when to work on these
during supervision.
138
Exhibit 5.5
Tasks for Individualization Difficulties
Markers of individu-

alization difficulties Task environments Supervisee’s processes Resolution
Supervisee speaks Clarification: Supervisee is encouraged to express need Reflect on personal preferences in address- Supervisee feels
about prefer- for personal style by providing concrete examples of ing clients’ issues and relate them encouraged
ence in using one preferences. back to the emotion-focused therapy and inspired to
intervention over Exploration of alternatives: Supervisor invites supervisee principles. develop a personal
another or want- to openly speak about preferred interventions and Weigh the benefits and disadvantages of intervention style
ing to adapt cer- facilitates a dialogue about why supervisee prefers an using one intervention over another. with the client in
tain interventions intervention and the possible gains for supervisee and mind.
Try different ways of relating and inter-
to fit own personal
139
clients; supervisor provides the supervisee with alter- vening with clients.
style; supervisor natives to the when, what, and how of the therapeutic
notices something Practice self-awareness and monitor emo-
tasks; supervisor encourages supervisee’s freedom of
about supervisee’s tional reactions to various interventions
choosing what and how to intervene in sessions with
reluctance to voice until a sense of “feels good” starts to form.
client while also providing sufficient guidance and
preferences about support on how to achieve the desired effect. Continue to emphasize personal strengths
manner of task and skills in providing therapy.
Empathic reflection and validation: Supervisor continu-
implementation. Learn to become readily aware in the
ously supports supervisee’s need for finding a personal
style by blending his/her personality into interven- moment and minimize the effects of
tions; supervisor notes in a nonjudgmental manner negative emotional reactions to client
possible vulnerabilities or areas of personal difficulty issues.
for the supervisee, and provides feedback on how to Reach a point where integration of per-
manage these in the future; supervisor acknowledges sonal style and metacommunication
and validates the supervisee as the expert on the con- with clients is used to achieve best
tent of his/her own experience as therapist. therapeutic effects.
CONCLUSION
In EFT supervision, the supervisor gives very specific technical feedback
on a moment-by-moment process. In spite of this high technical focus,
it is important to stress that the relationship is still seen as fundamental
and foundational to the helping process. So supervision is always paying
attention to the relationship between the supervisor and the supervisee
and between the therapist and the client. Because the supervisor provides
so much feedback on what could be done differently, the supervisee could
feel criticized if there is not a highly supportive relationship with the
supervisor, which is experienced as genuine and accepting in spite of the
corrective feedback. In the previous example, the therapist was advanced
in EFT and needed more focus on refining skills rather than hand-holding
(as would be needed by a less advanced therapist) and the supervisor pre-
vented a potential rupture by communicating, and eventually owning,
his own misunderstanding. All this was done using genuine attunement.
140
6
Research
O ur model of supervision is supported by two lines of research, com-

ing predominantly from empirical work on emotion-focused ther-
apy (EFT). One line concerns the importance of relationship; the other line
addresses specific change processes. There is only a small amount of addi-
tional research on EFT supervision itself, some research on training, and
much more research on psychotherapy in general, relevant to supervision.
RESEARCH ON EMOTION-FOCUSED
THERAPY SUPERVISION
Palmer-Olsen (2007), using a systematic structured approach to research
grounded in phenomenological philosophy, studied EFT couples thera-
pists’ experiences of EFT training and supervision by collecting in-depth
information through interviews, discussions, and participant observations.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/15966-006
141
Emotion-focused couples therapy, originally developed by Greenberg and

Johnson (1988), includes a systemic component, which further evolved
into an attachment-based couples therapy (Johnson, 2004). But emotion-
focused couples therapy is essentially based on the same emotion prin-
ciples as the individual EFT that we focus on in this book. Palmer-Olsen
(2007), in a qualitative research study with 17 subjects, found that good
EFT supervision and training (a) requires a strong supervision alliance,
(b) works best when the EFT supervisor incorporates the “self of the
therapist” issues, (c) requires that participants have access to EFT writ-
ten materials, (d) requires modeling and practicing of EFT concepts and
interventions, (e) requires observation of clinical work via live sessions
and videotaped and/or audiotaped review, and (f) includes goal setting
and an informal/evaluative element for the supervisor and the supervisee.
SUPERVISION RESEARCH RELEVANT

FOR EMOTION-FOCUSED THERAPY
In a research effort relevant to EFT’s events-based, task-based, analytically
derived model (Greenberg, 1984) of supervision, Ladany, Friedlander, and
Nelson (2005, 2016), drawing on their extensive supervision experience,
used a task analytic approach to analyzing supervision transcripts. They
proposed an events-based model of supervision. Using this model, they
showed how often-overlooked dilemmas (e.g., ambiguity about roles, mis-
understandings related to cultural background and gender, problematic
attitudes and behavior, skill deficits, countertransference, sexual attrac-
tion to clients) are all supervisory events that can be identified, mutually
explored, and overcome. Their model shows how supervisee problems
can be turned into opportunities for growth and how resolving supervisor–
supervisee difficulties effectively models positive ways of handling inter-
actions with clients (cf. Bertsch et al., 2014).
Recently, Watkins, Budge, and Callahan (2015) proposed a model of
supervision on the basis of Wampold and Budge’s (2012) psychotherapy
relationship model. They propose a convergence of common and specific
factors. This entails the initial development and ongoing maintenance
142
Research
of an alliance bond, as well as a number of changes that follow. These

changes result from the real relationship with the supervisee, the supervi-
sor’s setting a framework and expectations about the supervision process,
the supervisor’s engaging in establishing agreement on tasks and goals,
and the supervisee’s participating in some form of educational actions
by experimenting and refining actions. They suggest that these result in a
reduction of supervisee anxiety, shame, and self-doubt and the develop-
ment of the therapist’s identity and therapeutic skills. The EFT model of
supervision fits into this transtheoretical framework where specific tasks
and therapeutic actions, as well as a consistent focus on emotion, are what
stamp the supervision as specifically emotion-focused supervision.
Although not much research related specifically to the EFT model of
supervision is presented here, there is research that supports components
of the model. Research on supervision in general suggests that supervisors
who demonstrate the core Rogerian conditions of empathy, genuineness,
and positive regard during supervision are likely to enhance the supervis-
ee’s behaviors with clients (Neufeldt, Beutler, & Banchero, 1997). Research
on the working alliance in supervision has shown that a good alliance
predicts good supervision on a number of indices. The supervisor’s capac-
ity to create a good supervisory alliance has repeatedly been shown to
predict good things in supervision. A strong supervision working alliance
has been shown to play a significant role in the process and outcome of
supervision (Ladany, 2002). Studies point to supervisees’ preference for
supervisors who provide a “good” relationship. For example, a summary
of research on the supervision relationship by Falender and Shafranske
(2004) concluded that, among other things, trust and respect in the super-
visory relationship, supervisor sensitivity to the supervisee’s developmen-
tal needs, and supervisor’s encouragement of supervisee autonomy were
important in the provision of good supervision. Research conducted by
Ladany and Walker (2003) also suggested that appropriate supervisor
disclosure enhances the emotional-bond component of the supervisory
alliance by communicating trust in the supervisee. All these aspects are
part of the empathic relational environment that are the foundation of a
supervisory relationship in EFT supervision.
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RELEVANT RESEARCH ON TRAINING

IN EMOTION-FOCUSED THERAPY
Supervision in EFT involves a lot of training. Greenberg and Goldman
(1988) proposed that training in experiential therapy is most effective when
it involves a combination of methods, such as conceptual learning, behavioral
skills training (involving modeling and practice), experiential learning, and
personal therapy. The experiential aspect of the training is very important.
Montagno, Svatovic, and Levenson (2011) found that following training in
EFT for couples externship, participants increased in their EFT knowledge
and competence, became more open to their feelings, were more self-
compassionate, and were less likely to use avoidant attachment behaviors. In
addition, the participants (most of whom were licensed clinicians) reported
shifts in their own relationships, especially with their partners. Montagno
and colleagues suggested that these results underscore the significance of the
experiential aspect of the training emphasized by EFT.
Skills such as attending and summarization of feeling can be learned
didactically through approaches like brief microcounseling training
(cf. Ivey, 1971). However, the ability to create and maintain an empathic
relationship is a different type of skill and is learned more in an experi-
ential fashion (Pagell, Carkhuff, & Berenson, 1967); it involves hearing
subtler feelings and complex meanings expressed by the client; thus, it
takes more time and personal development to acquire.
Greenberg and Kahn (1976) suggested that some of the skills of Gestalt
therapy involved in EFT could be taught in a systematic fashion, and they
designed a combined didactic–experiential and skill training program
that uses the four basic training processes stated previously. The program’s
rationale is that increased awareness of personal issues will facilitate a
supervisee’s therapeutic sensitivity and firsthand knowledge of the pro-
cess of change; in addition, learning specific skills as a result of increased
self-awareness is considered as a promoter for better learning. The work
of Greenberg and Sarkissian (1984) suggested the effectiveness of this pro-
gram in training students on how to use the two-chair technique. Results
indicated that after training, therapists responded to a client statement
of conflict more often with an appropriate two-chair dialogue interven-
144
Research
tion, provided more direct guidance, and provided more direct attention
to nonverbal referents, thus proving the effectiveness of the program in
training active intervention skills.
OUTCOME AND PROCESS RESEARCH

ON EMOTION-FOCUSED THERAPY
EFT has been shown to be effective with individuals and couples in a number
of randomized clinical trials for depression, complex trauma, and marital
distress (Elliott, Greenberg, & Lietaer, 2004; Johnson, Hunsley, Greenberg,
& Schindler, 1999). In addition to clinical trials on EFT, empirical research
on the role of using marker-guided tasks and on the independent role
of emotion in therapeutic change has consistently demonstrated a rela-
tionship between session emotional activation and outcome (Greenberg,
2010). Many articles, chapters, and books, have been published on EFT
clinical processes that have been linked to outcome, providing a blueprint
for the supervisor to follow in supervision. These findings lend support to
the supervisor facilitating the supervisee’s use of marker-guided tasks and
emotional arousal. The significance of this research on EFT for supervision
is that it gives an outline to the supervisor as to what the competent EFT
practitioner needs to know. Further research, however, is needed on how
best to supervise to promote acquisition of these skills.
CONCLUSION
A number of research findings from the psychotherapy literature sup-
port the activities suggested in our model of supervision. This research
support helps the supervisor have greater confidence in the proposed
supervisory processes. Developing a good relationship with supervisees
and supervising them on creating good relationships with clients seems to
be supported by general research on supervision, whereas facilitating cli-
ents’ emotional deepening and engaging in specific marker-guided inter-
ventions are evidence-based processes that supervisors can feel confident
should be taught in EFT supervision.
145
7
Future Directions
E motion-focused therapy (EFT) supervision relies on a combination

of common and specific factors. The relationship forms the trustable
core of supervision, but it is greatly enhanced by supervision of specific
technical aspects. We have proposed an analytical, task-based model of
supervision that focuses on the relationship between the supervisor and
the supervisee and between the therapist and the client, as well as on tech-
nical factors. The two main points of focus of EFT are (a) an empathic
form of relating and (b) emotion. Supervision parallels therapy with a
focus on these two major components: to provide growth and develop-
ment in the supervisee as a person, and to help the supervisee develop an
identity and skills as a therapist.
How will supervision develop in the decades to come in the 21st cen-
tury and, more specifically, how will EFT supervision develop? There
will, of course, be all kinds of developments that will occur because of
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/15966-007
147
technology, with such things as advanced audiovisual aids, virtual reality

simulators, instant communication, and mobile applications. Carl Rogers
first recorded therapy sessions in the 1940s, and this changed the course
of psychotherapy research, beginning the process of opening therapy to
inspection. Video and digital recording of treatment sessions now are
like the microscope of psychotherapy and are of enormous value in
psychotherapy supervision. We could hardly imagine supervising in EFT
without using video recordings of actual sessions. Observing videos and
getting supervisory feedback promotes skill learning more successfully
than instruction, reflection, or modeling. All training programs, espe-
cially EFT training, will incorporate video recording as the sine qua non
of supervision and training. It seems a foregone conclusion that these and
other related developments will have an important impact on supervision
in the new century, but in this chapter we focus more on the nontechno-
logical changes.
In our view, the supervision relationship, specification, individu-
alization to fit the supervisee, taking individual differences into account,
and ability to work with emotion appear to be important areas for devel-
opment. Relational concepts will most probably continue to develop
and be the cornerstone of supervision in the future. The value of a safe
and trusting relationship bond between the supervisor and the supervisee
has been affirmed repeatedly and this, as well as the importance of hav-
ing agreed-on goals and tasks, will guide supervision. Empathy and the
supervision alliance will become firmly established as common factors in
psychotherapy supervision. A key question for future investigation is what
cognitive, emotional, and behavioral processes supervisees need to engage
in with supervisors in order to learn to become better therapists.
Given that this book describes the first model of EFT supervision
developed on the basis of a task analytic approach, we hope to see this
model further developed and investigated empirically. Of particular
importance will be to study and specify the supervisee’s learning process,
which, at the moment, remains the most uninvestigated and unclear aspect
of our marker, task environment, process, and resolution sequence. EFT
supervision will become competency based, evidence based, and more
148
Future Directions
accountable. I think that the next important step for EFT supervision will
be to further specify supervision competencies that clearly reflect EFT’s
unique style of therapy and supervision. Especially key will be how to
facilitate supervisees’ work with emotion and how to help them overcome
their fears of working with emotion. Also greatly needed are more devel-
oped methods for teaching empathic attunement to affect. If supervision
practice and supervision training are to develop and succeed, then these
and other competencies will need further articulation.
In addition, clarifying how the supervision process needs to be adjusted
to deal with individual differences and needs in different contexts will
become a higher priority. For example, adjusting supervision for those
supervisees who are not as intuitively talented empathically or who are
less emotionally competent will need further work. We will need to better
understand how to meet supervisees where they are in the present, rather
than expect them to be able to jump right into being where we would
like them to be. This suggests a stage-like model of supervision in which
we understand something about where we should begin (probably with
simple empathy training) and when and how to proceed until we build
up the supervisee’s skills to engage in the complex emotion-focused inter-
ventions of EFT. In addition, differences between supervising graduate
and postgraduate students and supervising professionals in the workplace
need to be specified.
The quantitative and qualitative research needed will have an
increasingly important place in the future of EFT supervision. EFT was
developed by studying the moment-by-moment process of therapy; simi-
larly, we need to study the moment-by-moment process of supervision,
and the task analytic framework we have presented here is a method for
aiding this type of investigation.
We hope that this book has been a first step in the development of a
more scientifically informed evidence base for supervisory practice.
149
Recommended Readings
Elliot, R., Watson, J. C., Goldman, R. N., & Greenberg, L. S. (2004). Learning emotion-
focused therapy: The process-experiential approach to change. Washington, DC:
American Psychological Association.
This book provides an overview of emotion-focused therapy (EFT) and lays
out the skills of doing different EFT interventions. It is good for people who
want to learn the microskills of intervention.
Goldman, R. N., & Greenberg, L. S. (2015). Case formulation in emotion-focused
therapy: Co-creating clinical maps for change. Washington, DC: American Psy-
chological Association. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/14523-000
This book is probably the most comprehensive book conceptualizing how an
EFT therapist approaches therapy.
Greenberg, L. (2010). Emotion-focused therapy: A clinical synthesis. Focus:
The Journal of Lifelong Learning in Psychiatry, 8(1), 32–42. http://dx.doi.org/
10.1176/foc.8.1.foc32
A summary overview of EFT.
Greenberg, L. S. (2011). Emotion-focused therapy. Washington, DC: American
This is the most succinct statement of EFT theory and practice. Good as an
introduction to the approach.
Greenberg, L. S. (2015). Emotion-focused therapy: Coaching clients to work through
their feelings (2nd ed.). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
151
Recommended Readings
This book provides an overall approach to working with emotion both in

therapy and in life. It includes exercises for developing emotional competence
and is best for readers who want an understanding of working with emotion
in preventive as well as therapeutic ways.
Greenberg, L. S., & Watson, J. (2006). Emotion-focused therapy for depression.
Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.
This book provides the most comprehensive text of how to conduct EFT
form start to finish, discussing the phases and intervention in the context of
depression.
152
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158
Index
Acceptance, 47, 62, 85 Bias, 86

Actions, related to intervention, 114, Bodily felt sensations, 5
116, 117 Bordin, E. S., 46
Adaptive emotions, 11, 59 Buber, Martin, 81
Advice, 107 Budge, S., 142
Affect
attunement to, 55, 82, 107, 149 Callahan, J., 142
and supervision process, 46 Campbell, L. F., 35
Affirmation, 47 Case formulation, 54–58
Agency, 62 and event-based model of
Alienation, 16 emotion-focused therapy
Alliance. See Supervisory alliance; supervision, 42
Therapeutic alliance stages of, 56–58
Arousal. See Emotional arousal supervisory challenges with,
Ashton, Kevin, 107 108–112
Asian clients, 13 Centrality of experience, 5
Assessment, emotional, 12 Chair work. See Two-chair dialogues
Attachment-based couples therapy, 142 Challenges, supervisory. See
Attending, 62, 144 Supervisory challenges
Attitude competencies, 30–31 Change, psychotherapeutic, 14, 30,
Attitude training, 22 32, 145
Audiovisual aids, 148 Character dynamics, 55
Authenticity, 16. See also Genuineness Client-centered therapies, 14
Autonomy, 47 Client change. See Psychotherapeutic
Avoidance maneuvers, 82, 144 change
Client markers. See Markers
Behavioral skills training, 144 Clinical competence, 31–32
Bernard, J. M., 16, 17 Cognition, 5
159
Index
Collaboration, task, 88–91 Cultural considerations

Collaborative coconstruction, 18 overview, 8, 13
Collectivistic cultures, 13 with supervisory alliance, 86
Common factors, 147, 148
Communication, 148 Debussy, Claude, 3
Compassionate self-soothing, Decisional conflict, 66–69
64–65 Deep emotional experience, 8, 10
Competencies, 30–31 Deepening, 83, 119
Compliance, 82 Defenses, 55
Conceptual difficulties, 112–113 Dialectical constructivism
Conceptual learning, 144 in emotion-focused therapy, 4–5
Conflict, decisional, 66–69 overview, 5–6
Conflict splits, 63 Differentiation, 62
Confrontation markers Digital recordings, 148
and alliance difficulty with Disciplined genuineness, 91
client, 89 Disclosure, 143
and supervisory alliance ruptures, Discovery-oriented therapist stance, 108
82, 84 Dysfunction, 16
Congruence Dysfunctional processing, 6
in EFT relationship, 85
in evaluation of emotional EFT. See Emotion-focused therapy
productivity, 62 EFT supervision. See Emotion-
and modes of participation, 20 focused therapy supervision
supervisee difficulties with, 91 Emotional arousal
and supervisor’s role, 17–18 client degree of, 59, 61
Consultant role, of supervisor, 17, research on, 145
19–20 Emotional Arousal Scale, 61
“Contact before contract,” 46 Emotional assessment, 12
Content directive responses, 35 Emotional bond, 46
Core beliefs, 55 Emotional competencies, 31
Core critical voice (two-chair work), Emotional processing
121–125 observation of, 56
Core emotionally based self- overview, 8, 10
organization, 55 Emotional productivity, 59, 61–62
Counselor role, of supervisor, 17, 19 Emotional voice, 60
Couples therapy, 142 Emotion-focused couples therapy, 142
Criticism Emotion-focused therapy (EFT)
core critical voice in two-chair historical background of, 14–16
work, 121–125 principles of, 4, 7–14
first-level, 122 research on training in, 144–145
second-level, 121–122 theoretical framework of, 4–7
self-, 116, 118–119 Emotion-Focused Therapy Supervision
Crocker, P., 82 (DVD), 50, 55–56, 65
160
Index
Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) marker identification in, 37, 39–40

supervision, 29–43. See also relational contact in, 37–39
specific headings resolution in, 37, 42–43
application of EFT to, 4–14 supervisee’s process in, 37, 41–42
competencies in, 30–31 task environment for, 37, 41
event-based model of, 36–43 Evocative unfolding, 63
future directions for, 147–149 Existential therapy, 14, 16
goals of, 31–33 Experiencing
research on, 141–142 client level of, 59–61
supervisor’s modes of participation defined, 14
in, 20–21, 33–36 importance of, 14–15
supervisor’s role in, 17–20 Experiencing Scale, 60
Emotions Experiencing tasks, 13–14
implicit, 5 Experiential learning, 20
instrumental, 11, 12, 59 Experiential presence responses, 34–35
primary adaptive, 11, 59 Experiential therapy, 144
primary maladaptive, 11–12, 59 Experiments (Gestalt therapy
secondary reactive, 11, 12, 59 technique), 15
Emotion schematic processing, 7 Exploratory therapist stance, 108
Emotion theory, 5 External voice, 60
Empathic exploration, 20
Empathic exploration response style, Falender, C. A., 47, 143
8, 9, 33–34 Feedback
Empathic understanding, 20, 49 and client nonfacilitative
Empathic validation, 64 behaviors, 93–94
Empathy phrasing of, 87
as common factor in psychotherapy and skill learning, 148
supervision, 148 supervisee receptivity to, 47
development of, 4 supportive, 19
importance of, 85 technical, 140
and listening skills, 13 with video recordings of
in research on supervision, 143 treatment, 148
in supervision process, 47–54, 59 First-level criticism, 122
therapist difficulties with, 91–105 Flexibility, 121
Empathy-based tasks, 13–14 Focused voice, 60
Empty-chair intervention, 64. See also Focusing, 63
Two-chair dialogues Following and leading stance
Enactment tasks, 13–14 in emotion-focused therapy
Environment, task. See Task supervision, 19
environment overview, 8–9
Ethical practice, 32 supervisory challenges with,
Event-based model of emotion-focused 125–126
therapy supervision, 30, 36–43 Friedlander, M. L., 30, 142
161
Index
Gender bias, 86 therapeutic presence, 47–49,

Gendlin, E. T., 14–15 91–105
Genuineness unconditional positive regard,
disciplined, 91 48–54
and individualized interventions, Interventions. See also specific
138 interventions
in research on supervision, 143 actions related to, 114, 116, 117
and supervisory alliance ruptures, individualized, 138–139
83, 85 nonresponsiveness to, 82
and therapeutic presence, 47–54 tasks related to, 13–14
Gestalt therapy, 14–16, 144 Intervention skills, 42, 58–62
Glickauf-Hughes, C., 35 “I–Thou” dialogue, 32
Goals
agreement on, 46 Johnson, S. M., 142
of emotion-focused therapy
supervision, 31–33 Kahn, S. E., 144
supervisory alliance ruptures over, 82 Kline, Nancy, 3
Goldman, R. N., 59, 144 Knowledge competencies, 31
Goodyear, R. K., 16 Koyenikan, Idowu, 29
Greenberg, L., 13, 59, 142, 144
Group supervision, 35 Ladany, N., 30, 142, 143
Growth Leading, 125–126. See also Following
as goal of supervision, 31, 147 and leading stance
reframing of, 5 Learning
as component of emotion-focused
Hawkins, Peter, 45 therapy, 8
Hostility, 82 conceptual, 144
Humanistic principles, 4–5, 14 environments facilitating, 116
in event-based model of
Identity, 7, 147 emotion-focused therapy
Implicit emotion, 5 supervision, 37
Individualized interventions, 138–139 experiential, 20
Instant communication, 148 of perceptual skills, 11
Instrumental emotions, 11, 12, 59 procedural, 58
Intellectualization, 73–75 promotion of, 41
Interpersonal skills skill, 148
alliance difficulties/ruptures due in supervision process, 58
to, 88–91 Levenson, H., 144
empathy, 47–54, 91–105 Limited voice, 60
genuineness, 47–54 Listening skills
in supervision process, 45, 48–54 development of, 4
supervisory challenges with, 81, 86, and empathy, 13
88–105 markers of, 114, 115
162
Index
in supervision process, 59 as mode of participation, 36

supervisory challenges with, research on, 142
114, 115 Montagno, M., 144
Murray, P., 82
Maladaptive emotions, 11–12, 59
Markers Narrative identity, 7
of action difficulties, 114, 116, 117 Narratives, 56–57
of characteristic style, 59 Negative sentiments, 82
confrontation, 82, 84, 89 Nelson, M. L., 30, 142
of difficulties with case Nonjudgmental stance, 47
formulation, 108–112 Nonresponsiveness to intervention, 82
difficulties with identification of, Nonverbal expression, 4, 12, 40
128–138
in event-based model of Obama, Barack, 45
emotion-focused therapy Outcome research, 145
supervision, 37, 39–40
and feedback to client, 93 Palmer-Olsen, L., 141, 142
of individualization difficulties, Perceptual skills
138, 139 and event-based model of
of listening difficulties, 114, 115 emotion-focused therapy
low empathy, 92 supervision, 42
low presence, 92 overview, 8, 11
major task, 59 in supervision process, 58–59
micro-, 59, 114 Personality
and process diagnosis, 9–10 in case formulation, 55
research on, 145 first-level criticisms of, 121
supervision task, 4 and resolution of
and therapeutic tasks, 13, 62–65 individualization
unfinished business. See difficulties, 138
Unfinished business supervisory challenges related to,
markers 86, 87
for when to engage, 57 Personalization, 42
withdrawal, 82, 84, 89 Personal therapy, 144
Mark-Mordi, Bidemi, 29 Phenomenological philosophy, 141
McMain, S., 82 Positive regard, 20, 48–54, 143
Meaning-making, 61 Power differentials, 82
Micromarkers, 59, 114 Presence, therapeutic, 47–49, 91–105
Microskills, 128–138 Primary adaptive emotions
Mobile applications, 148 defined, 11
Modeling identification of, 59
and consultant role of Primary maladaptive emotions
supervisor, 20 defined, 11–12
of empathic responding, 94 identification of, 59
163
Index
Problematic reactions, 63 Resolution

Problem solving, 107 of case formulation difficulties,
Procedural learning, 58 108–112
Process in event-based model of
in difficulties with case emotion-focused therapy
formulation, 108–112 supervision, 37, 42–43
research on, 145 in supervisory alliance ruptures, 83
Process diagnosis, 8–10 Respect, 143
Process directive style, 15 Rogers, Carl, 14, 22, 143, 148
Process guiding, 8, 20, 34 Role-play, 20
Productive processing of
emotion. See Emotional Safe relationship, 4, 148
productivity Safran, J. D., 82
Psychoeducation, 120 Sarkissian, M. G., 144
Psychotherapeutic change, 14, 30, Secondary reactive emotions,
32, 145 11, 12, 59
Psychotherapy relationship model, Second-level criticism, 121–122
142–143 Seeing skills, 4, 59
Self-actualization, 15
Racial bias, 86 Self-criticism, 116, 118–119
Readiness, client, 13 Self-determination, 5
Recordings, 148 Self-esteem-enhancing operations, 82
Regulation, 62 Self-interruptive splits, 63–64,
Relational contact, 37–39 126–128
Relational patterns, 55, 93 Self-soothing, 64–65
Relational tasks, 13–14 Sensations, bodily felt, 5
Relationship competencies, 30 Sensorimotor components, 5
Reprocessing tasks, 13–14 Shafranske, E. P., 47, 143
Research, 141–145 Shame, 120–121
on emotional arousal, 61, 145 Shohet, Robin Hawkins, 45
on emotion-focused therapy Skill competencies, 31
supervision, 141–142 Skill training, 22, 144
on emotions, 5 Summarization of feeling, 144
future directions for, 4, 148–149 Supervisee processes, 37, 41–42
on outcomes and process in Supervision
emotion-focused therapy, defined, 16–17
145 function of, 3
problematic emotional processing importance of, 3–4
states, 62 research on, 142–143
psychotherapy change process, 14 Supervision process, 45–79
on supervision, 142–143 case formulation in, 54–58
on training in emotion-focused interpersonal skills in, 45, 48–54
therapy, 144–145 intervention skills in, 58–62
164
Index
ongoing case material in, 75–79 Task analysis

supervisory alliance in, 45–47 and emotion-focused therapy
therapeutic tasks in, 62–75 model of supervision,
Supervision task markers, 4 29–30
Supervisors in research on emotion-focused
modes of participation for, 20–21, therapy, 142
33–36 for therapeutic alliance, 82, 83
roles of, 17–20 Task collaboration, 88–91
Supervisory alliance Task environment
as common factor in for case formulation, 108–112
psychotherapy supervision, in event-based model of
148 supervision, 37, 41
development of, 4 for individualization, 138
in research, 142, 143 Teacher role, of supervisor, 17–19
ruptures in, 6–7, 40, 81–87 Teaching, 11, 94, 125–126
in supervision process, 45–47 Technical factors, 147. See also
Supervisory challenges, 81–140 Supervisory challenges
with actions related to Therapeutic alliance
intervention, 114, 116, 117 and culture, 13
with case formulation, 108–112 and event-based model of
conceptual, 112–113 emotion-focused therapy
core critical voice, 121–125 supervision, 42
dealing with shame, 120–121 factors in development of, 47
examples of, 116, 118–138 interpersonal skills and difficulties/
fear of deepening, 119–120 ruptures in, 88–91
following and leading stance, task analysis for, 82, 83
125–126 Therapeutic presence, 47–49, 91–105
with individualized interventions, Therapeutic tasks, 13, 62–75
138–139 for clients with decisional conflict,
interpersonal skills of supervisees, 66–69
81, 86, 88–105 for clients with unfinished
with intervention flexibility, 121 business markers, 69–72
with listening skills, 114, 115 example supervision statements
with marker identification, 128–138 related to, 65–75
research on, 142 for intellectualizing clients,
ruptures in supervisory alliance, 73–75
6–7, 40, 81–87 markers related to, 63–65
self-criticism by supervisees, 116, Third force (American
118–119 psychotherapy), 14
self-interruptive splits, 126–128 Training
Svatovic, M., 144 attitude, 22
Symbolization, 62 research on EFT, 144–145
Systematic evocative unfolding, 63 skill, 22, 144
165
Index
Trust intervention supervision

as goal of EFT supervision, 31 statements about,
and supervisory alliance, 87, 69–72
143, 148 ongoing case material for client
Two-chair dialogues with, 75–79
aim of, 112 therapeutic tasks associated with,
in case example, 65 10, 64, 69–72
core critical voice in, 121–125
for self-interruptive splits, 126–128 Validation, 64
and supervisee self-criticism, Video recordings, 148
118–119 Virtual reality simulators, 148
training in, 144–145 Vocal quality, 59, 60
Vulnerability, 64
Unclear felt sense, 63
Unconditional positive regard, 20, Walker, J. A., 143
48–54, 143 Wampold, B. E., 142
Understanding, 20, 49 Warmth, 47
Unfinished business markers Watkins, C., 142
difficulties identifying, 128–138 Withdrawal markers, 82, 84, 89
166
About the Authors
Leslie S. Greenberg, PhD, is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus

of Psychology at York University in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He has
authored the major texts on emotion-focused approaches to treatment
of individuals and couples. These include the original texts Emotion in
Psychotherapy (1986), Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples (1988), and
Facilitating Emotional Change (1993), and more recently Emotion-Focused
Couples Therapy: The Dynamics of Emotion, Love, and Power (2008);
Emotion-Focused Therapy: Theory and Practice (2010); Working With Nar-
rative in Emotion-Focused Therapy: Changing Stories, Healing Lives (2011);
and Therapeutic Presence (2012). He has published extensively on the pro-
cess of change. Dr. Greenberg has received the Distinguished Research
Career Award of the International Society for Psychotherapy Research,
as well as the Carl Rogers Award and the Award for Distinguished Profes-
sional Contributions to Applied Research of the American Psychological
Association. He also has received the Canadian Psychological Association
Professional Award for Distinguished Contribution to Psychology as a
Profession. He conducts a private practice for individuals and couples and
trains people internationally in emotion-focused approaches.
167
About the Authors
Liliana Ramona Tomescu, PhD, is a registered clinical psychologist (super-

vised practice) with the College of Psychologists of Ontario. Originally
from Romania, Dr. Tomescu earned her PhD in clinical psychology at York
University under the supervision of Dr. Greenberg. She has been trained in
psychodynamic, humanistic, and emotion-focused therapies. Dr. Tomescu
has a special interest in psychotherapy process research and is the recipi-
ent of numerous scholarly awards, including the Scholars Award from
Division 39 (Psychoanalysis) of the American Psychological Association.
She studied intensively the role of adaptively and appropriately expressing
emotions, particularly anger, in resolving depression due to interpersonal
injuries. Currently, Dr. Tomescu works in private practice, where she pro-
vides psychotherapy and comprehensive psychological assessments to adult
clients with mood, anxiety, adjustment and stress difficulties, emotional
dysregulation, and personality disorders.
168

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Supervision Essentials for

Supervision Essentials for

Leslie S. Greenberg and

American Psychological Association • Washington, DC

Foreword to the Clinical Supervision Essentials Series vii

W e are both clinical supervisors. We teach courses on supervision of stu-

an intervention provided by a more senior member of a profession to

77 is evaluative and hierarchical,

77 has the simultaneous purposes of enhancing the professional func-

It is now widely acknowledged in the literature that supervision is a

The Guidelines for Clinical Supervision in Health Service Psychology11

77 requires formal education and training;

The importance of supervision can be attested to by the increase in state

Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/about/policy/guidelines-supervision.pdf

programs must complete. Furthermore, research has confirmed12 the high

Mapping experience level and supervisory confidence. European Psychologist, 2, 191–201.

We asked each expert to write a concise book elucidating her or

About This Book

steps (i.e., markers, task environment, process, resolution) to work on major

Hanna Levenson and Arpana G. Inman

Supervision is an opportunity to bring someone back to their own mind,

How much has to be explored and discarded before reaching

S upervision holds an important place in the education and training

also supervision skills. Moreover, supervisees should receive training not

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF EMOTION-FOCUSED

cal constructivism (Greenberg & Pascual-Leone, 1995, 2001; Greenberg

shifting emotional states rapidly, having a number of stories, and speak-

difficulties, while genuinely assuming responsibility as coconstructor of

EMOTION-FOCUSED THERAPY PRINCIPLES

consist of (a) a following and leading stance; (b) an empathic exploration

client move on from a past traumatic experience; Elliott, Watson, et al.,

a formulation of painful emotions, which are arrived at by following the

In addition to teaching intervention skills, learning and teaching of per-

overlearned responses based on previous, often traumatic, experiences.

The final EFT principle is in regard to cross-cultural issues and takes

Tasks as Applied to Therapy and Supervision

(1997) argued that optimal self-process involves an ever-increasing use

making. Making experience vivid in awareness, attending to a body felt

evaluates, monitors, and serves as a gatekeeper. Supervisors have an ethical

In short, when it comes to the EFT supervisor’s role as a teacher,

Supervisor’s Modes of Participation

As they listen to excerpts of a session, the supervisor provides feedback

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT AS SUPERVISORS

Dr. Leslie S. Greenberg

understanding but also as assisting information processing and emotional

explicit model of case formulation, my supervision began to include more

Dr. Liliana Ramona Tomescu

moving to North America helped me to understand and appreciate the true

an interpersonal space designed for growth: for supervisees, for supervi-

ROAD MAP FOR THIS BOOK’S CONTENTS

supervisee’s interpersonal skills, and technical skills. Chapter 3 focuses on

The Essential Dimensions of

To get to your place of victory, intended destination,

I n this chapter, we present the essential dimensions of the emotion-

analytic approach to understand psychotherapeutic change (Greenberg,

EMOTION-FOCUSED THERAPY COMPETENCIES

Emotion-Focused Therapy Competencies

77 Relationship competencies include the ability to establish and maintain

1. To provide a growth-oriented, genuine, and trusting relationship that

client), (b) develop and use process-diagnostic skills (e.g., identify-

When speaking about goals in EFT supervision, two important aspects

SUPERVISOR’S INTERVENTION STYLES:

77 Empathic exploration is used to communicate understanding, while