Leslie Greenberg and Emotion

Dr. Leslie S. Greenberg is known in psychology circles throughout the world as one of the originators and primary developers of EFT—emotion-focused therapy. He’s written a dozen or so books on the topic. Now retired from York University in Toronto, Ontario, where he was professor of psychology and director of the Psychotherapy Research Center, he spends his time in what he calls “training”—teaching counselors and psychotherapists how to implement EFT.

Which is why he’ll be at BYU for the Counseling Workshop on March 8–9, 2012.

One of the first things people notice about Dr. Greenberg is that he looks a whole lot like the guy who shimmies down your chimney every December 24.

Curious as to whether his personality was a match, we arranged to interview him by telephone—and are pleased to announce that he’s a really nice person, with a noticeable South African accent.

How did that happen? Greenberg was born and raised in Johannesburg, where he grew up during the early apartheid era.

“I left because of the political situation,” he said. “I was involved in student politics—opposition (to apartheid).”

Before he went to Canada, he earned a bachelor’s degree—not in psychology, but engineering.

“I went to a guidance counselor when I was 17 and said I wanted to be a nuclear physicist,” he explained. “But I wanted to work with people. I went into engineering instead, so I could work with people. I was always interested in working with people.”

Once in Canada, he decided to study psychology instead of earning an advanced degree in engineering. “My wife was a psychology major. I knew a lot from her,” he said.

He’s been married 44 years, and both he and his wife are now “officially” retired. Unofficially, though, he continues to work. “I retired from the university in order to do more training,” he said. “I do a lot of it internationally.”

So how did he end up departing from the widely prevalent cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and focusing on emotion instead?

“When I came in from engineering, I thought that emotion was important,” he explained. “I found that nobody was studying emotion. I wanted to know how it works.”

He started studying emotion, and he’s never stopped. Asked if he’s more a researcher or a psychotherapist, he said, “I’m both. I think I’m an investigator more than a helper. I believe in order to be an investigator of psychotherapy you really have to be a therapist—it requires that you be a therapist before you can be an investigator. All my students have this dual background, which is not common in psychology.”

Greenberg sees emotion as key to helping people. “The strange business of psychotherapy is that all the theories are related to cognition and behavior. But both behavior and cognition are essentially produced by emotion. You can’t change behavior without working through emotions. Each of them (CBT, EFT) has something important to offer. It’s a matter of trying to integrate them according to the needs of the patient.”

Greenberg’s Emotion-focused Therapy >>