ROBERT J.R. GRAHAM: Emotional Therapy – Understanding Yourself

About Emotional Therapy (ET)

Emotional Therapy brings Counselling into the 21st Century

integrating mind, body, emotional and spiritual needs.

We all have times in our lives when we feel we can’t cope, when we are so anxious we can’t concentrate. Our mind works overtime, and yet we forget things, can’t retain information and we may even suffer panic attacks. We get scared to leave the house, and sometimes we lose all sense of reality, it’s like our world is crumbling. There are times when our feelings are so near the surface that tears come out at every opportunity.

Emotional Therapists believe that we suppress emotions as we go through life because they are too painful to deal with. We need to work in order to pay the bills, so we just get on with things. We can’t risk letting people see that we’re not coping. We need to ‘keep it all together’, but our feelings don’t go away. They wait for a window of opportunity and then they rise to the surface.

Sometimes, we can’t identify the emotions we have, or we know that we are constantly feeling angry, guilty, anxious or fearful although we don’t know why.

Using a combination of listening, techniques specific to ET, exercises and journal work, an Emotional Therapist will firstly help you to make the connections with why you are feeling like you are. But the process, which is very supportive and gentle, rather than using the mind to analyse things, seeks to promote healing of the original emotional wounds by working through the feelings.

When somebody hurts us, we instinctively put up defences to make sure that we don’t get hurt again, it’s a normal thing to do. But these barriers not only serve to protect us from feeling pain in the future, they also prevent us from feeling any joy in life and we can become depressed or anxious.

The ultimate aim of Emotional Therapy is to help us remove the barriers, and learn how to offer ourselves the emotional support, which we may never have been given at any time in our lives, so that when a problem arises or old buttons are pressed, we can feel and respond differently.

As a counselling model, ET is an integrative and holistic therapy using the inner child model. It has been practised for around 20 years, and incorporates aspects of other models of counselling as well as having developed its own ethos.

Emotional Therapists train with The Foundation for Emotional Therapy for a period of not less than 4 years. They subscribe to a professional code of ethics and practise and have a commitment to continuing professional development and supervision.

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