Why Focus on Emotions? Clients do not change their emotions simply by talking about them, by understanding their origins, or by changing beliefs; rather, emotions are changed after they are accepted and experienced, opposed with different emotions to transform them, and reflected upon to create new narrative meaning. (Greenberg, 2011)

Why Focus on Emotions?
 
Clients do not change their emotions simply by talking about them, by understanding their origins, or by changing beliefs; rather, emotions are changed after they are accepted and experienced, opposed with different emotions to transform them, and reflected upon to create new narrative meaning.
(Greenberg, 2011)

One of the elements in EFT is the distinction made between four very different forms of emotion responses.
 
Primary Adaptive Emotions: the normal function of emotion is to rapidly process complex situational information to prepare the person to take effective action. For example, if someone is threatening to harm ones' children, anger is an adaptive emotional response, because it helps one take assertive action to end the threat.
Maladaptive Emotions are direct reactions to situations that involve over-learned responses based on previous, often traumatic, experiences. These emotion responses no longer help the person cope constructively with the situations that elicit them and instead interfere with effective functioning. For example, a client with borderline processes may have learned when she was growing up that offered caring was generally followed by physical or sexual abuse. Therefore, this client will automatically respond to any kind of caring with anger and rejection as a potential violation.
Secondary Reactive Emotions are the person's reaction against primary emotions which obscures or transforms the original emotion and leads to actions that are not appropriate to the current situation. For example, a man who encounters danger and begins to feel fear may then become either angry at the danger or angry at himself for being afraid, even when the angry behavior actually increases the danger!
Instrumental Emotions: the person reacts to the situation by enacting an emotion that is intended to influence or control others. For example, a bully may put on a display of anger in the absence of perceived danger in order to intimidate or dominate another person. (Elliott, Watson, Goldman, Greenberg, 2004)

Click to learn more about EFT

An introduction to Emotion Focused Therapy- Individuals
by Dr. Robert Elliott at the LA CAMFT networking meeting.

Click to Register for the LA-CAMFT Meeting

Advanced EFT Empathy Training Feb. 23-24, 2019
Los Angeles, CA
By Dr. Robert Elliott
(available on wait list)
 
This 2 day experiential training will
1. Help you develop your “empathic attitude”: 
curiosity & openness toward the other.
2. Help you up the level and quality of your empathic responding.
3. Help you broaden your repertoire of empathic responses.
4. Help you “lean in” empathically, even (especially!) when the other person is experiencing strong emotion.
 
There will be video and/or live demonstrations as well as
supervised practices. 

Click to Register at the Advanced EFT Empathy Training

You have to arrive at your emotions
before you can leave them.
Les. Greenberg, PhD.