Emotion

Emotion and cognition are interrelated in creating meaning (Elliot & Greenberg, 2007).  People continually analyze their emotional reactions to experiences to make sense of them and to understand their environments.  This "affective-cognitive" process happens at automatic, or unconscious, levels just as it does at concious levels. 

 

Greenberg (2010) explains that emotion is "fundamental to the construction of self" but is "detrimental" to "self-organization."  Emotion is different from thought; it operates independently in its own sphere that includes the lymbic system and connections to the body's functioning systems including the organs and the immune system.  The limbic system has a native process that quickly produces emotion in the amygdala, and a slower complex process that combines emotion with thought through connections to the prefrontal cortex in the neocortex--where the executive function, well, executes its process.

 

Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) leverages emotion by attempting to substitute maladaptive, or bad, emotions with adaptive, or good ones.  Resilient people, EFT theory holds, use positive emotions to displace negative ones, and hence have better lives.  Anger, in EFT, can be adaptive or maladaptive.  In depression (where EFT is most commonly used), anger may be elicited as a response to a depression-causing emotion such as shame (perhaps caused by negative appraisal as we previously discussed), and the anger pushes out the shame because, as emotion-focused therapists believe, these two types of emotions cannot coexist.  The client will likely leave therapy feeling empowered.  When anger is maladaptive, such as in feelings of revenge, compassion is used as a substitute emotion, and the client feels soothed and, presumably, happy.

 

Because EFT uses a switching strategy, it is much like cognitive and behavioral therapies, except that it substitutes emotions rather than thoughts and behaviors.  It also has a speedy success rate as does CBT (Ellison, 2009), but because it is rooted in client-centered therapy, the client can naturally implement the process as part of basic self-actualization, making the process permanent.

 

References

 

Elliott, R., & Greenberg, L. (2007). The Essence of Process-Experiential/Emotion-Focused Therapy. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 61(3), 241-254. Retrieved from Academic Search Premier database.

 

Ellison, J., Greenberg, L., Goldman, R., & Angus, L. (2009). Maintenance of gains following experiential therapies for depression. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 77(1), 103-112. doi:10.1037/a0014653.

 

Greenberg, L. (2010). Emotion-focused therapy: A clinical synthesis. Retreived October 3, 2010 from http://www.emotionfocusedclinic.org/documents/Emotion-FocusedTherapy_AClinicalSynthesis.L.S.Greenberg.Jan2010.doc