This book presents principles and methods for working with emotion in psychotherapy to address the core maladaptive processes that cause anxiety, depression, and other common mental health disorders.
Mental health providers confront emotional suffering every day, yet working with emotion is rarely explicitly taught in most clinical graduate programs.
There is evidence that emotional experience in therapy relates to therapy outcome, across multiple diagnoses. This research has given rise to strategies that address the core maladaptive processes that cause distress and dysfunction, rather than specific diagnoses.
Methods described in this book can help clients with all types of disorders to 'arrive at,' or fully experience, their painful maladaptive emotions, and then 'leave' these emotions by accessing new, adaptive emotions. These methods include helping clients sit with painful feelings, access bodily felt experience, identify unmet needs, and articulate the meaning of an emotion.
Excerpts from moment-to-moment clinical dialogues help demonstrate techniques such as memory reconsolidation, providing corrective emotional experiences, chair work, and imaginal re-entry to past situations.
About the Author
Leslie S. Greenberg, PhD, is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Psychology at York University in Toronto.He has authored key texts on emotion-focused psychotherapy, from its inception in the 1980s through today. He has received the Distinguished Research Career award of the International Society for Psychotherapy Research as well as the Carl Rogers and the Distinguished Professional Contribution to Applied Research of the APA. He conducts a private practice for individuals and couples and trains people in emotion-focused approaches.
Industry Reviews
Conceptually brilliant, clinically bold, and empirically persuasive, this book is pure Greenberg-perhaps today's most well-rounded and accomplished scholar, researcher, practitioner, and trainer in psychotherapy. -- Louis G. Castonguay, PhD, Liberal Arts Professor of Psychology, Penn State University, University Park, PA
In this book, Leslie Greenberg, one of the world's leading experts, presents a deep and insightful view of how to work with emotion in psychotherapy. This is a book for all practicing therapists, as well as for those who teach psychotherapy and those who do research on psychotherapy. The author presents a unique, research-based model of how working with emotion creates change. I particularly liked the chapters that dealt with therapist skills. It gives a sophisticated and insightful view of the roles of therapist empathy and self disclosure. It also includes important sections on dealing with culture and systemic racism. It will be useful to therapists of all persuasions. I plan to use it in my classes.
-- Arthur C. Bohart, PhD, Professor Emeritus, California State University Dominguez Hills
Leslie Greenberg has long been a source of some of the most important and generative ideas in our field. At a time when psychotherapy is sometimes reduced to an arid overemphasis on cognition, Greenberg points our attention to experience and emotion. This book is rigorously grounded in research and amply filled with rich nuggets for the clinician. -- Paul L. Wachtel, PhD, Distinguished Professor of Clinical Psychology, City College of CUNY, New York, NY
