Emotion-Focused Therapy Quotes

“Emotions are seen as crucial in motivating behavior. People generally do what they feel like doing rather than what reason or logic dictates. It follows that to achieve behavioral change, people need to change the emotions motivating their behavior. Emotion also influences thought. When people feel angry, they think angry thoughts; when they are sad, they recall sad memories. To help people change what they think, therapists must help them change what they feel.”
― Leslie S. Greenberg, Emotion-Focused Therapy

“Emotional expression governs, and changes, interaction. Anger, for example, produces distance, whereas vulnerability disarms. Thus, interpersonal conflict can be resolved by changing what people express”
― Leslie S. Greenberg, Emotion-Focused Therapy

“The following steps have been identified to guide clinicians in the development of case formulations (Greenberg & Goldman, 2007): 1. Identify the presenting problem. 2. Listen to and explore the client’s narrative about the problem. 3. Observe and attend to the client’s style of processing emotions. 4. Gather information about the client’s attachment and identity histories and current relationships and concerns. 5. Identify and respond to the painful aspects of the client’s experiences. 6. Identify markers and when they arise; suggest tasks appropriate to the problem state. 7. Focus on emerging thematic intrapersonal and interpersonal processes and narratives. 8. Attend to clients’ moment-by-moment processing to guide interventions within tasks. CASE”
― Leslie S. Greenberg, Emotion-Focused Therapy

“Emotional approach and awareness should be used when the emotions are below some manageable level of arousal, say 70%, but distraction and regulation should be applied when they exceed this level and the emotions become unmanageable. In”
― Leslie S. Greenberg, Emotion-Focused Therapy

“People often experience emotional flooding as dangerous and traumatic, which leads them to try to avoid feelings altogether. At times emotional avoidance or numbing may be the delayed result of trauma, and this is one of the key forms of posttrauma difficulty. Emotional overarousal also often leads to the opposite problem, maladaptive attempts to contain emotion. Trying to suppress or avoid emotions entirely or to reduce one’s level of emotional arousal to very low levels may lead to emotional dysregulation in the form of emotional rebound effects, including emotional flooding. In addition, excessive control of emotion may lead a person to engage in impulsive actions, in which they break out of overly strict self-control and eat, drink, spend, or have sex more than they generally want to. Narrative”
― Leslie S. Greenberg, Emotion-Focused Therapy

“Adopting a stance toward any external experience as partial rather than total allows the feeling to more easily be accepted. Thus, recognizing my shame as part of me allows me to tolerate it far better than if I am all shame. Allowing the hating of a parent comes easier when there also is a loving part. Getting to know each part, like a critical part, or a blocked or blocking part, is facilitated by seeing it as an aspect of myself that I can get to know and can have a relationship with rather than being totally identified with it. Seeing aspects of experience as part of oneself becomes a crucial aspect of change in EFT: It implies possibilities of alternatives because my fear or my sense of worthlessness or unlovableness is only a part of me. VIEW”
― Leslie S. Greenberg, Emotion-Focused Therapy