OUR FOUNDER

Creator of Emotion Focused Skills Training

Dr. Joanne Dolhanty is best known for her pioneering work in two areas using Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT). She developed the application of EFT to individuals suffering from eating disorders, in collaboration with EFT founder, Dr. Leslie Greenberg. In consultation with Dr. Greenberg, she also pioneered the inclusion of parents of adult clients in their loved one’s individual Emotion Focused Therapy treatment, developing a central role for parents in their adult child’s recovery.

The latter led to Dr. Dolhanty’s creation of Emotion Focused Skills Training for Parents (EFST-P). From its inception as “Emotion Focused Mother-Daughter Dyad Therapy,” the model has evolved to the current EFST-P – a lifespan model for parents, caregivers, and families of a loved one of any age (little, adolescent, or adult child) suffering from a mental health or physical health disorder, or other difficulty such as a social or educational challenge.

Dr. Dolhanty’s approach to training and to supporting learning is also well-known, in helping clinicians acquire the skills, and especially overcome the impasses, to become competent in the use of emotion focused experiential tasks, including chair work.

She has also developed tasks and techniques for consultation and learning-support in utilizing the emotion-focused appraoch specifically in relation to the foundational goals of Motivational Interviewing, which she refers to as “Enhancing Motivational Enhancement with Emotion Focused Therapy.”

Background:

After completing her first Masters degree in Comparative Literature, Dr. Dolhanty came to the study of psychology with a driving interest in the factors that lead individuals to survive and thrive in the aftermath of adversity. This led to an interest in the mechanisms of change and of motivation to change. She earned her PhD in Clinical Psychology at York University in Toronto, Canada, where she also worked for 15 years at the Toronto General Hospital Eating Disorder Program.

The severe nature of eating disorders, the high levels of morbidity and chronicity, the extremely low motivation to change and apparent intransigence of the disorder in the face of attempts to increase motivation, increased Dr. Dolhanty’s interest and commitment to developing a treatment that would encompass and utilize intransigence rather than see it as an obstacle. Surely such determination could be channeled. This was when she sought out Dr. Greenberg and began her training with him, convinced that the eating disorders were based in emotional dysregulation and low emotion self-efficacy, and that EFT could provide hope where there was little. Having learned Motivational Interviewing basics as part of her eating disorders training, and with her discovery that what eating disorder clients reported most frequently as the factor thwarting their motivation to recover was their fear of emotion, she began to work with emotion and motivation together.

In Emotion Focused Therapy, Dr. Dolhanty found in particular that its client-centered foundation and philosophy, combined with the very specific mechanism of change, offers the possibility that the therapist can equip themselves competently to be able to offer guidance to another person in a change process that they can operationalize and articulate clearly. That has inspired a dedication not only to providing training and consultation in the emotion focused approach, but to operationalizing the training and learning process, and developing tools to support mastery in the methods, tasks and techniques of EFT and EFST.

Dr. Dolhanty has been a clinical trainer for three decades. She has trained and provided consultation to professionals at the highest levels in Emotion Focused Therapy for Eating Disorders and in Emotion Focused Skills Training, in mental health organizations across Canada, in the U.S., and internationally.

Dr. Dolhanty is known for her lively, warm, and engaging approach to training. Participants consistently report that she has the ability to render complex theory and concepts simple and accessible and that she has an extraordinary talent for facilitating the process of converting theory into practice to support excellence in the acquisition of EFT and EFST techniques. She makes trainees feel that they can begin to use the techniques quickly, while inspiring them to continue to strive towards the highest levels of competence, mastery, and excellence.  At the Emotion Training Institute, all of our trainers seek to adhere to the philosophy, approach, and constructs that she has developed and to apply them in all of our programs.