(Clinical Supervision Essentials) Greenberg, Leslie S. - Tomescu, Liliana Ramona - Supervision Essentials For Emotion-Focused Therapy (2017)

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
Supervision Essentials for

Emotion
Focused
Therapy
Leslie S. Greenberg and
Liliana Ramona Tomescu
American Psychological Association • Washington, DC

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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
7 is evaluative and hierarchical,

7 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
7 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
7 requires formal education and training;

7 prioritizes the care of the client/patient and the protection of the
public; 7 focuses on the acquisition of competence by and the
professional devel opment of the supervisee;
7 requires supervisor competence in the foundational and
functional competency domains being supervised;
7 is anchored in the current evidence base related to supervision
and the competencies being supervised;
7 occurs within a respectful and collaborative supervisory
relationship that includes facilitative and evaluative
components and is established, maintained, and repaired as
necessary;
7 entails responsibilities on the part of the supervisor and
supervisee; 7 intentionally infuses and integrates the dimensions
of diversity in all aspects of professional practice;
7 is influenced by both professional and personal factors,
including values, attitudes, beliefs, and interpersonal biases;
7 is conducted in adherence to ethical and legal
standards; 7 uses a developmental and strength-
based approach;
7 requires reflective practice and self-assessment by the
supervisor and supervisee;
7 incorporates bidirectional feedback between the supervisor and
supervisee;
7 includes evaluation of the acquisition of expected competencies
by the supervisee;
7 serves a gatekeeping function for the profession; and 7 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
11
American Psychological Association. (2014). Guidelines for clinical supervision in health
service psychology. Retrieved from http://www.apa.org/about/policy/guidelines-supervision.pdf
ix
programs must complete. Furthermore, research has confirmed 12

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.
12
Rønnestad, M. H., Orlinsky, D. E., Parks, B. K., & Davis, J. D. (1997). Supervisors of
psychotherapy: Mapping experience level and supervisory confidence. European
Psychologist, 2, 191–201.
13
Schön, 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
Supervision Essentials for 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
1
All case material has been altered to protect the confidentiality of all clients and supervisees.
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
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.
7Relationship 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.
7 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).
7 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).
7 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.
7 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).
7 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.”
7 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. 7 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.
7 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
MARKERS TASK
presented difficulty B. Supervision alliance difficulty
CONTACT CHANGE RESOLUTION

ENVIRONMENT PROCESS
a) Supervisee’s difficulty intervention style) Active and productive

Weak alliance • Technical: engagement in the supervision
• Interpersonal: o Low empathy o Supervisee processes relationship
Supervisor operations (supervisor’s Supervisee engagement b) Improved skills
role and a) Improved supervision alliance
o o Intervention Case formulation
• Interpersonal skills: Empathy and ability
to
b) Supervision
alliance difficulty • Confrontation: o
Withdrawal
o Personalization
Empathic
exploration
Experiential
learning dialogue Modeling
Role-play
Figure 2.1
communicate Rogerian core conditions
•Technical skills:
Improved knowledge
Using new interventions, understanding
client’s core emotions scheme, and
developing a personal intervention style
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
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.
needs embed ded in the emotion.
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:
7 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.
7 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?
7 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.
62
The following main markers and their accompanying

interventions have been identified (Greenberg et al., 1993):
7 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.
7 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.
7 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.
7 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
63
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.
7 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.
7 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.
7 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
64
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
66
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

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Supervision Essentials for Emotion

Clinical Supervision Essentials HANNA

Supervision Essentials for

American Psychological Association • Washington, DC

Foreword to the Clinical Supervision Essentials Series vii

Foreword to the Clinical

W e are both clinical supervisors. We teach courses on

an intervention provided by a more senior member of a

7 is evaluative and hierarchical,

7 has the simultaneous purposes of enhancing the professional

It is now widely acknowledged in the literature that

The Guidelines for Clinical Supervision in Health Service

7 requires formal education and training;

The importance of supervision can be attested to by the increase

programs must complete. Furthermore, research has confirmed 12

We asked each expert to write a concise book elucidating her

About This Book

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

Hanna Levenson and Arpana G. Inman

Supervision Essentials for Emotion

Supervision is an opportunity to bring someone back to their

How much has to be explored and discarded before

S upervision holds an important place in the education and training

of a psychologist (Russell & Petrie, 1994). It provides the

also supervision skills. Moreover, supervisees should receive

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK OF EMOTION-FOCUSED

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

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

difficulties, while genuinely assuming responsibility as

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

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

a formulation of painful emotions, which are arrived at by

In addition to teaching intervention skills, learning and

overlearned responses based on previous, often traumatic,

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

Tasks as Applied to Therapy and Supervision

tasks is associated with various interventions that are learned

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

making. Making experience vivid in awareness, attending to a

evaluates, monitors, and serves as a gatekeeper. Supervisors

rather than facilitating and guiding the formulation process (e.g.,

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

ideas about working with clients. The supervisor, building on the

Supervisor’s Modes of Participation

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

PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT AS SUPERVISORS In this

Dr. Leslie S. Greenberg

who took a social learning perspective and one from a supervisor

understanding but also as assisting information processing and

explicit model of case formulation, my supervision began to

Dr. Liliana Ramona Tomescu

moving to North America helped me to understand and

an interpersonal space designed for growth: for supervisees, for

ROAD MAP FOR THIS BOOK’S CONTENTS

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

The Essential Dimensions

To get to your place of victory, intended destination,

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

focused therapy (EFT) model of supervision. These include a