Deliberate Practice in Dynamic Emotion Focused Therapy

A free training from Sentio University, co-authored by Susan Warshow, Bridget Quebodeaux, and Tony Rousmaniere.

Dynamic Emotion Focused Therapy (DEFT) is built around moves that are hard to read about and easy to fumble in the room. Recognizing shame the moment it surfaces, dissolving defense without making the client feel pushed, holding compassionate pressure on an avoided feeling, working with corrective emotional experience inside an intersubjective stance. Reading the model is one thing. Doing it in real time with a guarded or shame-sensitive client is another. Deliberate practice closes that gap by isolating each move and rehearsing it under feedback until it becomes reliable. This webinar, led by DEFT developer Susan Warshow alongside DEFT Institute training coordinator Bridget Quebodeaux and Sentio president Tony Rousmaniere, walks through the structured exercises that make these foundational moves trainable.

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What you will learn

The webinar demonstrates core DEFT skills broken down into rehearsable units:

  • Recognizing markers of shame as they surface in session
  • Using the "compassionate edge" to dissolve defense without confrontation
  • Holding gentle therapeutic pressure on an avoided primary feeling
  • Working with corrective emotional experience inside the therapeutic relationship
  • Tracking and naming the intersubjective field between therapist and client

Watch the webinar

Deliberate Practice for Dynamic Emotion Focused Therapy, with Susan Warshow, Bridget Quebodeaux, and Tony Rousmaniere. Free to share.

DEFT was developed by Susan Warshow and is taught through the DEFT Institute. The exercises demonstrated in this webinar are designed to make the foundational moves of the model trainable through structured rehearsal.

How to use this with peers or supervisors

The webinar is most useful when paired with structured practice afterward. We recommend a two-session model. In the first session, watch the recording with a peer or supervision group and pause at each demonstrated exercise to discuss how it would fit your current caseload. In the second session, run one of the exercises live. One person plays the therapist, one plays the client, and a third observes and offers structured feedback against a specific behavioral target, such as "name a shame marker within two minutes of a client's defensive shift" or "deliver one compassionate-edge intervention without breaking the intersubjective stance." Five to ten minutes of focused rehearsal followed by feedback tends to produce more growth than longer unstructured roleplay. Licensed clinicians who want to take this further can join Sentio's ongoing deliberate practice consultation group, which meets regularly and is open to clinicians worldwide.

Going deeper: Deliberate Practice Supervision

The webinar above demonstrates what deliberate practice looks like inside DEFT. Doing deliberate practice supervision well is a separate skill, and one that is hard to acquire from didactic content alone. The method has to be practiced under feedback, the same way the clinical skill itself does. A single weekend workshop tends not to give supervisors enough repetitions to develop the experiential muscle they need. Sentio runs an intensive year-long clinical supervisor training built around this principle. For the longer rationale for that format, see Why One Weekend Supervisor Trainings Fall Short.

About the authors

Susan Warshow, LCSW, LMFT is the developer of Dynamic Emotion Focused Therapy and founder of the DEFT Institute. She has been training clinicians in shame-sensitive, emotion-focused work for over three decades.

Bridget Quebodeaux, LMFT is the DEFT Institute Training Program Coordinator and a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist in Los Angeles. She co-leads DEFT trainings with Susan Warshow and maintains a private practice focused on emotion-focused work with shame-sensitive clients.

Tony Rousmaniere, PsyD is the President of Sentio University and Executive Director of the Sentio Counseling Center. He is past-president of the psychotherapy division of the American Psychological Association and the author of over 20 books on deliberate practice and psychotherapy training, including The Essentials of Deliberate Practice book series (APA Books).

Related Sentio resources

Frequently asked questions

What is deliberate practice in DEFT? Deliberate practice in Dynamic Emotion Focused Therapy is the structured, repetitive rehearsal of specific DEFT moves under feedback, rather than general experience accumulated on the job. It isolates skills like recognizing shame markers, dissolving defense through the compassionate edge, and holding pressure on avoided primary affect, and rehearses them in short cycles until they become reliable in live sessions.

Who is this training for? The webinar is designed for licensed clinicians, postdocs, predoctoral interns, and advanced trainees who already have some exposure to DEFT or to closely related models like ISTDP, AEDP, or emotion-focused therapy. Supervisors and training program faculty who want a concrete method for teaching shame-sensitive, emotion-focused work will also find the exercises directly applicable.

Do I need to be DEFT-certified to use these exercises? No. The exercises were designed to be useful at every stage of training, from first exposure to certification and beyond. Clinicians early in their DEFT learning tend to get the most value from rehearsing shame recognition and the compassionate edge. More experienced practitioners can use harder difficulty levels to keep advanced skills sharp.

Is the webinar really free? Yes. The webinar is free to watch, free to share with peers and trainees, and free to use inside a supervision group. Sentio University is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit and releases its training resources openly.

How is this different from a standard DEFT training? A standard DEFT training, like the multi-week intensives offered through the DEFT Institute, teaches the theory of shame, defense, and intersubjective work, along with the major interventions. Deliberate practice is a complement, not a replacement. It targets specific in-session skill bottlenecks with focused, behaviorally-defined rehearsal so the interventions you learned in the intensive actually show up in your live work faster.