EFT Theory

Question 1

What is the purpose of EFT?

Answer 1

Help clients form new emotion schematic memories that lead to new responses and to the narrative consolidation of these changes

Question 2

What is self-organization?

Answer 2

the experiential state of the self at any one moment

Question 3

What is Schematically based self-organization?

Answer 3

the feeling of who one is

Question 4

What is Narrative identity? How does it emerge?

Answer 4

A level of organization of self that is higher than the schematically based self-organization (i.e., the feeling of who one is)

Emerges out of the dialectic of experiencing and explaining

Through the integration of experience and various self representations into a coherent story or narrative

Question 5

How is the narrative self created?

Answer 5

Through a dialectical process

• basic elements of biological and physiological phenomena - - these are filtered through emotion schemes, which are synthesized
• this leads an experience of self-organization (one of many possibilities. E.g., vulnerable, open, withdrawn, good humored)
• self-organization is influenced by cognitive processing (e.g., attention, executive processes)
• This self organization results in a bodily self sense of who one is (bodily felt referent)
• consicous experience results when this implicit feeling is attended to and symbolized explicity
• When self-organization is both symbolized and reflected on, meaning is created
• this symbolization involved learning from culture
• meaning, narrative, and identity are constructed by reflecting on experience, making sense of it, and explaining it to ones self

Question 6

Within the EFT theory, what are the mechanisms through which dysfunction can arise? (4)

Answer 6

1. Meaning creation: through the particular meanings and narrative created
2. Disclaimed or unsymbolized experience: through incongruence between what is reflectively symbolzied and the range of experienced possibilities
3. Learning: through the type of experience that is generated by the schematic synthesis formed on the basis of prior experience
4. Conflict and splits: from problematic shifts between plurality of self-organizations or lack of fit or integration between them