Emotion-focused mindfulness therapy

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.

Study at a glance

Abstract

ABSTRACT With emotion-focused mindfulness therapy (EFMT), we are exploring integrating mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) into the process-experiential (PE)/emotion-focused therapy approach, oriented to its neo-humanist principles, emotion theory, and dialectical constructivist epistemology. Both MBIs and EFMT value the role of implicit experience in meditation. While MBI meditation may include allowing the felt sense to arise, it does not specify symbolizing it in order to fully resonate with, receive and carry forward its implications. Instead, MBIs emphasize attending to present-oriented experience and decentering from and letting go of distractions from this, such as thoughts and feelings about the past or the future. In doing so, MBIs create optimal conditions for, but do not specify, experiential and emotional processing. In contrast, EFMT uses its emotion-focused perspective to integrate process-diagnostic, marker-oriented tasks such as focusing into meditation, journaling, and empathically exploring clients’ experience in order to deepen experiencing, address unfinished business and inner conflicts, better navigate life, and cultivate growth and flourishing. Research is needed.