Bill Gayner

Emotion-focused mindfulness therapy

Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies January 2, 2019 Bill Gayner

Emotion-focused mindfulness therapy (EFMT) integrates mindfulness-based interventions with emotion-focused therapy, drawing on neo-humanist principles, emotion theory, and dialectical constructivist epistemology. While both approaches value implicit experience in meditation, mindfulness-based interventions emphasize attending to present-moment experience and letting go of distractions, creating conditions for experiential processing without specifying it. EFMT adds process-diagnostic, marker-oriented tasks such as focusing, journaling, and empathic exploration to deepen experiencing, address unfinished business and inner conflicts, and cultivate growth. Research is needed to evaluate this integrated approach.