ABSTRACT
The main therapeutic work in emotion-focused therapy (EFT) for generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) difficulties lies in transforming underlying chronic painful emotions (emotion schemes), which are feared by the client who seeks to avoid them by engaging in worry, mainly concerning potential, threatening triggers and the emotions they may bring. Several EFT authors describe a tentative use of two-chair dialogue for working with worry. Typical in-session presentations of the worry marker contain the clients' worrying and feeling exhausted, or may contain descriptions of recent worries that prevented the client from participating in everyday activities, and caused trouble with sleep, leading to experiences of profound exhaustion and debilitating anxiety. Once the worry marker is established, the therapist presents the two-chair worry dialogue task to the client. After the client enacts and expresses the worry process in its full experiential quality, the therapist asks the client to change seats and return to the Experiencer chair.
