Being Emotionally Focused

1. Being Emotionally Focused Adapted from Les Greenberg, 2003 Mark Young, Ph.D. Director, Marriage and Family CounselingGonzaga University

2. “Emotions are never right or wrong. They’re always right. From the perspective of the person feeling the emotion – it’s the truth. It’s what I feel.” • Dr. Xavier Amador (PBS (2010) This Emotional Life)

3. Why Focus on Emotion? • Affect is information • Affect is primary motivator of behavior • Emotions are often feared and avoided • Emotional reactions learned through experience • Emotional experience and reactions can be changed

4. Emotional Processing • Not catharsis or “getting rid of” • Allow, tolerate, accept • Make sense of • Transform

5. What is Emotion? • A relational action tendency • A process of meaning construction • Emotions are relational action tendencies that act to establish, maintain, or disrupt our relationship with the environment in the form of a readiness to act. • Emotions are the basis of social connectedness and constantly give us signals about our social bonds. • Emotion results from automatic appraisals of situations in relation to needs/goals/concerns • Emotion is adaptive, not rational or irrational

6. Emotion and Reason • Nothing is urgent or important in life unless and until it is brought to our attention by emotion. • Each of the emotions may be thought of as a spotlight that turns on to show us what needs cognition. • Each spotlight motivates us to use our cognition differently. • Stimulus gets a response only if it triggers emotion.

7. Emotion Schemes • Represent internally our emotional reactions plus the evoking stimulus situation. • Later we represent our conceptual learning and beliefs associated with our emotional experience. • Results in a “high level” synthesis which when evoked provides our sense of things such as feeling unsure, confident, vulnerable, or “on top of the world.”

8. Emotional Reactions • Emotions tell me if things are going well for me or not • Emotional reactions are learned – emotional systems are highly adaptive – can become maladaptive • Emotional reactions can be changed

9. Emotional Processing • I always have a feeling of what is happening rather I like it or not – I can choose how I attend to it. • How we make sense of what is going on inside of us determines who we are and how we will experience the moment • How we make sense of emotions can be influenced by culture

10. Meaning Making • How we explain/describe to ourselves and others how we are feeling will influence what is going to happen and what we need • Out of our explaining process comes our articulated self beliefs & self representations – our self narratives

11. Meaning Making Example: “I’m depressed” • I’m tired, need a break. • My life is horrible, I don’t like my life or self. • Depending on how you explain this internal feeling influences how you see yourself, what will happen next.

12. Assessment • Primary • Adaptive or Maladaptive • Secondary • Instrumental

13. Characteristics • Primary Adaptive • Feel good even if not happy • Nothing that feels bad is ever the last step • First experienced in the body translated into action • Brings relief/change • Enhances self and relationships • Cues complete, full, sureness, calm, integrated, alive, clarity

14. Characteristics • Primary Maladaptive • Feels bad • Stuck • Destructive to self and others • Cues: Self pity, whining, tantrums, hysterical sobbing, ranting, false calm or overexcited.

15. Characteristics • Secondary • Obscures • Reactive • Protective • Diffuse • Cues: Upset, hopeless, confused, low engery, inhibited.

16. Characteristics • Instrumental • An emotional expression used to influence others. • Learn to express emotions to get gain.

17. Emotional Functioning Emotion Adaptive Maladaptive Sadness Grieving, Hopeless, despair, Reaching out Desperate clinging Anger Empowering Destructive Love Caring, freeing Addictive, clinging Anxiety Signals danger Traumatic Shame Belong to group, Self hate, contempt Remorse Disgust/ Healthy outrage Self/other abuse Contempt

18. Adaptive Maladaptive Guide Transform Emotionally Focused Intervention 1 – Bond 2 – Evoke 3 – Access Deeper Emotion Scheme 4 – Narrative Reconstruction

19. SIX MAJOR EMOTIONAL CHANGEPROCESSES A)Accessing Emotion 1. Increase Emotional Awareness & Symbolization in the Context of Salient Personal Stories. Symbolizing emotional experience in awareness in order to make sense of one’s experience. What am I feeling? 2. Express Emotion. Expressing changes the self and changes interactions both by revealing and mobilizing self

20. B) Modulating & Understanding 3. Enhance Emotion Regulation Explicit regulation. Use deliberate cerebral capacities to contain and regulate maladaptive amygdala reactions (especially fear, rage and shame). Implicit self soothing. Allowing, tolerating, accepting and soothing. 4. Reflect on Emotion. Making sense of experience. Dis-embeding. Creation of new meaning. Insight. Seeing patterns, understanding in a new way. New narrative construction

21. C) Transforming Emotion 5) Change Emotion with Emotion. An alternate self organization, set of emotion schematic memories, or “voices” in the personality based on primary emotions are accessed by (a) intentional re-allocation or (b) focus on a new need/goal. (c) changing interactions The maladaptive emotional response is synthesized with, or transformed by, more adaptive emotional response.

22. 6. Change Emotion with New Experience. New lived experience with another provides a corrective emotional experience. Disconfirms pathogenic beliefs. Provides interpersonal soothing. New success experience changes emotion.

23. Accessing Alternate Emotions 0. The empathic relationship 1. Shift attention to present subdominant emotion 2. Access adaptive need/goal and associated emotion 3. Expressive enactment of alternate emotion 4. Imagery to evoke emotion 5. Evoke emotion memory of alternate emotion 6. Mood induction via music 7. Humor 8. Cognitive creation of new meaning 9. Therapist expresses emotion for client 10. Relationship evokes new emotion

24. Interventions • When we get to a maladaptive primary emotion we want to restructure it • When we get to a secondary emotion we want to validate & explore • All emotions are not the same – getting in touch with just any feeling isn’t going to produce change • In touch with core fear or core shame is not productive

25. Examples • Client was depressed, crying & expressing sadness but also expressing anger • Secondary sadness (could be instrumental) • Primary pain/anger • Once we identify primary emotion we must access it to get information • If it is adaptive then we guide • If it is maladaptive we restructure

26. Highlights • Dialogue with self is not about “is it true” • It is to access feelings/access the experience • Need to help clients access emotion & learn how to bracket or come out of the emotion • Practice going in and coming out to show they can do it/to help show emotions are part of life.

27. Highlights • We cannot take someone to an emotional place unless we have been there ourselves • If not we will take them there and then take them out too fast or send a message that emotions is bad or unsafe • “I feel like a failure, does not mean I am a failure.”