Greenberg’s Emotion-focused Therapy

It’s not the happy people who seek professional counseling. That’s one reason why Dr. Leslie Greenberg, who will present BYU’s Counseling Workshop, March 8–9, 2012, decided to be an investigator (researcher) of emotion therapies.

One of the chief developers of emotion-focused therapy (EFT), Greenberg believes that for the positive results of therapy to last, emotions must be dealt with.

“Emotions tell us what is important to us and whether things are going our way (whether our needs are being met), and so they are an important source of information, action tendency and motivation,” he said in a recent interview.

With behaviors such as eating disorders and drug abuse, emotion is usually at the root of the problem.

“For enduring change you have to deal with the emotional,” Greenberg said. “People are usually using/abusing substances to regulate their feelings. With eating disorders for women, it has been very promising, working with their emotions.”

With emotion-focused therapy, the approach is less on helping a patient understand why he behaves in dysfunctional ways (as in the cognitive approach) and more on helping him deal with his emotions. Merely going back to one’s childhood doesn’t always help, Greenberg noted. “We work with helping people change their emotional responses” to past experiences.

“The best way to change an emotion is to feel another emotion. You really can’t reason yourself out of an emotion,” he explained. “People know what they should do, but that doesn’t lead the person to be able to do it. We work with people to help them have new emotional experiences. We try to facilitate the emergence of alternative emotion.”

Using EFT, the therapist tries to be attuned to what people are feeling; offer a relationship that’s understanding and compassionate; and help them “come out of their heads and get in touch with their feelings,” Greenberg said. “We help them understand their own feelings, and help them have alternative feelings.”

EFT also helps people deal with “unfinished business,” emotional issues that need to be resolved.

Greenberg uses the Gestalt methods of talking with parts of the self and imagined others in an empty chair. “It helps you reactivate the old feelings—it’s an opportunity to ‘arrive’ at these feelings to change them,” he explained. For example, “if you were a physically abused child, you might feel a lot of fear (as an adult). We would take you back to invoke your memories of that experience. Anger and sadness also would be involved, also accessible to you. The adult goes back into the situation to acknowledge feelings, then have a corrective emotional experience, feeling a new emotion in place of the old feeling.”

A person could feel anger instead of fear, and sadness that would possibly lead to compassion and forgiveness.

“Forgiveness seems to be the pathway—but you have to acknowledge your anger and your sadness first. You also have to be in individual therapy to get some sense that your injurer feels compassion, some apology or regret; then you are more able to forgive,” Greenberg said. “We’re helping that person feel deserving of love—that they were in fact lovable. Then you can feel another emotion—often anger, compassion for the self or another. Sometimes you have to grieve, assert, self-soothe. Then you feel forgiveness.”

In EFT, “we talk about it as ‘meaning creation,’” he said, “as people create new meaning for their feelings. Feelings are not irrational.”

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