What is Emotion Focused Skills Training for Youth and why it might help enhance your practice?

Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT), created by Dr. Leslie Greenberg, was expanded in critical ways when Dr. Joanne Dolhanty, PhD, CPsych. formulated Emotion Focused Skills Therapy (EFST). Both EFT and EFST are evidence-based treatments that focus on the development of insight, emotion self- efficacy, secure relationships, and healthy emotional agency in a way that can bypass traditional barriers to receiving professional and effective mental health care. Qualitative research on the use of EFST-P have indicated a link between increased understanding and acceptance of parents' own and their child’s emotions which lead to positive outcomes for the children’s mental health (Ansar et al. 2021). However, these models of intervention have seen limited direct application for youth.

Our approach is based on and adapted from the revolutionary work of Dr. Dolhanty by articulating the theory and application of an EFST model that can be used with youth who are struggling with numerous mental health concerns; including specific applications for depression, anxiety, trauma, suicidality, and peer victimization. We are proposing a new model of trauma-informed intervention that clinicians can use directly with complex and challenging youth: Emotion Focused Skills Training for Youth (EFST-Y).

We, Joanne Jouvin, Registered Psychotherapist, and Clint H. Robson, Registered Social Worker, have a combined 30 years experience working with children, adolescents and their families. We have experience working in an acute inpatient mental health setting for adolescents, and together have clinical experience in child protection, education, and community mental health systems who support underserved, at risk adolescents and their families.

The creation of EFST-Y is in part our response to working in the child and adolescent mental health system. This system is often pathologizing, misguided, prescriptive, and in the worst cases, inadvertently punitive. Long wait lists and lack of provisions and expertise to treat complex and “resistant” patients and their families means the system is also frequently unable to provide the help needed. EFST-Y can be used across multiple contexts to achieve unique outcomes that may not be achieved through the highly structured, skills-based, or cognition-focused modalities typically offered. Instead, EFST-Y focuses on the more productive and accessible area of adolescent emotion, includes a non-hierarchical stance between clinician and client, and reframes problematic behaviours and symptoms as indicative of an ineffective attempt to meet their healthy needs.

Are you finding yourself saying “I feel stuck . . . ?”

EFST-Y offers clinicians a tool to address the low self-efficacy and sense of ‘stuckness’ they likely encounter as they provide treatment to complex, high risk youth and their families: an enhanced ability to form genuine and meaningful relationships with youth and thereby achieve transformative outcomes. Training in this model will support clinicians through understanding the practical application of the EFST-Y model that will support the therapeutic alliance, complete assessment and formulation, and provide unique, effective intervention.

This is a unique trauma-informed transdiagnostic model that will guide clinicians through assessment and help them create an understanding of the client but will also serve the adolescent themselves as a tool for stabilization, recovery and maintenance at the end of treatment. The EFST-Y case conceptualization model consists of three pathways that are interconnected. It consists of what we see and hear, what we need to understand and integration and change.

EFST-Y focuses on two primary goals, the first is to increase emotion self-efficacy and the second is to enhance self awareness in the adolescent. Emotional self-efficacy is an essential part of what we need as humans in order to feel that we can accomplish things that we need and want in life. For clinicians, like ourselves have experience working in an acute inpatient mental health setting,  and with the rise in presentations to hospitals over the last two years clinicians will most certainly be working with adolescents who are questioning if their life is worth living. Emotion self-efficacy is a key factor in making life worth living.

If you’re interested in incorporating this intervention into your practice, be it private practice or through a community mental health agency, please contact us expressing your interest and we can discuss when and how we can offer you or your group of clinicians this training. You might also want to explore our “Events” page. Here you will be able to see if we have any upcoming trainings you’d like to join.