Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) has inherited the rich tradition of Rogers’ Person-Centered Therapy (PCT) and Gendlin’s Focusing-oriented therapy, along with influences from gestalt and existential approaches. Overviews of EFT generally emphasize what distinguishes EFT from PCT. However, in this workshop I am going to take the opposite approach of focusing on common elements, which are often obscured by differences in terminology.  After outlining the shared history and neohumanistic values of EFT I will provide translations and bridges between EFT and PCT theory and practice, including emotions as expressions of and vehicles for the growth tendency, emotion response types as forms of incongruence; shared forms of empathic response, the central role of therapist empathic attunement with the client, the attention given to supporting client personal agency and authentic relating between client and therapist. After this, we will move on to a description of PCT versions of key EFT tasks, with skill practice on two of these: (a) EFT-style deep empathic immersion via evocative reflections and empathic affirmation responses; and (b) speaking your truth in imagination to important others.  I conclude with a discussion of issues in learning EFT, including strategies for dealing with its complexity of language and practices. 

Robert Elliott (preferred pronouns: they/them) is professor emeritus of counselling at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, Scotland) and professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Toledo (Ohio). Their main interests are practice, supervision, training, and research on EFT and related therapies. Their books include Learning emotion-focused psychotherapy (2004/2025) and Emotion-Focused Counselling in Action (2021), as well as 200 journal articles and book chapters. Robert is past president of the Society for Psychotherapy Research, and previously co-edited the journals Psychotherapy Research, and Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies.  They have received the Distinguished Research Career Award of the Society for Psychotherapy Research, and the Carl Rogers Award from the Division of Humanistic Psychology of the American Psychological Association. They now live in Northern California, where they continue to enjoy developing, writing about and running EFT training, as well as walking, running, science fiction, poetry, and all kinds of music.

As person-centered and experiential (PCE) psychotherapists, we know something (theoretically, experientially, empirically) about how humans respond to change. In this keynote, I will reflect on what we know and then explore three questions: 

(1) how can we bring what we know to understand how we humans are responding to current global challenges and crises?

(2) what can we learn from our specific experiences of (and struggles with) change in our own PCE community? and 

(3) how can we make a difference in our world as agents of change while being human ourselves?

Dr Susan Stephen is a senior lecturer in counselling at the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow, Scotland) and director of the Strathclyde Counselling and Psychotherapy Research Clinic where she leads research in the process and outcome of person-centered-experiential therapy. Her main research interest is the concept of congruent functioning as a contemporary redefining of the developmental process at the heart of Rogers‘ person-centered theory and its intercultural implications.  She is a co-editor of the journal, Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies and of the third edition of The Handbook of Person-Centred Psychotherapy and Counselling. She is also a former Chair of the board of the World Association for Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies and Counseling (PCE World).