1. Understanding the Principles of Counseling and Psychotherapy
Chapter 11

2. Chapter 12 Overview Introduction to common negative emotions
Specific Considerations in dealing with client’s emotions.
The relationship between emotions and schema dynamics
Therapeutically working with emotions: Processes found in Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT), Acceptance & Commitment Therapy (ACT), and Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT)

3. Common negative emotions in therapy and counseling
Fear/anxiety and sadness/depression
Fear helps motivate a person to take flight from whatever the danger is, or to confront and change the fearful stimulus.
Anxiety is the dread of something to occur in the future, the belief that something bad may occur- “on edge” alert

4. Common negative emotions in therapy and counseling
Sadness is the result of experiencing a form of loss or disappointment in life, triggered by an event in the past or present.
Depression can be related to prolonged episodes of melancholy
Please turn to p. 234 and review “Clinical Case Example 11.2

5. Please turn to p. 235 and review “Clinical Exercise 11
Please turn to p. 235 and review “Clinical Exercise 11.1 De-constructing Emotions

6. Specific considerations in dealing with client’s emotions
Nonlinear listening for expressions of affect: draw attention to affect. Help client to express and understand affect
Linear and nonlinear listening for and responding to incongruence: identify the incongruity between a a person is saying and how they are saying it.
Linear and nonlinear listening for absence of feelings: observe when a client does not appear to express feelings when it would be normal to do so.

7. Specific considerations in dealing with client’s emotions
Linear and nonlinear listening for inference: helping a client realize that what they are feeling becomes a gateway to what they believe in their schemas.
Linear and nonlinear listening for presence: listening for the expression of client feelings.
When a therapist is relaxed, engaged, interested, hopeful, and empathetic, a client can experience it.

8. Relationship between emotions and schema dynamics
Schema Dynamics: view of self, view of others, and view of the world and life.
“Your strong emotional reaction to what happened is very interesting. Lets look into that some more”.-connects the emotional system’s reaction with the schema dynamics.
Emotions inform you that something, which is important or of perceived value is transpiring.
Rational vs Irrational behavior.

9. Therapeutically Working with Emotions
Coaching
Therapist are emotional coaches
Coaches: Collaborate to achieve goals, confer responsibility for success on the “player”, are supportive at moments that require calming, focusing, energizing, etc.
Focuses on Arriving or Leaving

10. Therapeutically Working with Emotions
Coaching
Arriving: helping client to come to a more informed awareness and acceptance of their feelings.
Identification, welcoming, labeling, exploring emotions
Leaving: process of deciding whether a particular “place” the feelings reveal is good or not good for the lient.
Assess if primary feeling is healthy or unhealthy, identifying maladaptive destructive schemas, alternate adaptive emotions and needs”, transforming maladaptive emotions and beliefs that are destructive with the client.

11. Using Other Domains in Dealing With Clients’ Emotions
Listening and Responding
Nonlinear listening for:
Expressions of affect
Incongruence
Absence of feelings
Inference
Presence
The Therapeutic Relationship & Emotions
-Conjointly experiencing the client’s experience – empathy

12. EFT Using the Relationship between Emotions & Schema Dynamics
Emotion Focused Therapy
based on client’s schema dynamics (Attachment style) and works with their emotional system when problems arise (i.e. reactions)

13. EFT –Coaching the Therapist’s Approach to Working Successfully with Emotions
Emotional Coaching:
Therapist collaborates with a client in strategizing to achieve specified goals
Confers responsibility for success upon the player (client)
Are supportive at moments that require calming, focusing, energizing, etc.
Two phases in the emotion coaching process:
Arriving: helping a client come to a more informed awareness and acceptance of his/her feelings
Leaving: deciding whether the particular place his or her feelings reveal is good or not good for him or her

14. EFT – Focusing to Foster Recognition and Reflection of Emotion
Focusing (Gendlin, 1978)
Designed to help clients cope with sense of being stuck
Attending to felt sense of sensations, feelings, and cognitions
See Information Box: Assisting Clients to Recognize and Reflect on Emotional Processes, p. 271

15. EFT Therapeutically Working With Emotions
Revelations, reflecting, and focusing
Aware of feelings and also reflecting upon them.
“Here and now” awareness- aware of feelings but lacks understanding of what they are feeling(Greenberg,2004).

16. Therapeutically Working with Emotions
Revelations, reflecting, and focusing
Thoughtful awareness of feelings and is also able to determine if they want to feel that way. Once information is reflected the client can decide what to do about a particular feeling state feeling (Greenberg,2004).
Accepting the feelings, the feeling is attempting to tell the client something and that something important is present.

17. Therapeutically Working with Emotions
Focusing to Foster Recognition and Reflection of Emotions
Focusing-helps client’s cope with feeling stuck or uncomfortable, and not being able to move on (being disconnected from internal feelings) (Genlin,1978).
Attending a “felt sense” of sensation, feelings, and cognitions located in the client’s body (educate client).
Use Early Recollections to connect to schema dynamics
Negative emotions have a 2:1 ratio to pleasant emotions.

18. Please turn to p. 271 and review Information Box : Assisting clients to recognize and reflect on emotional processes.

19. Therapeutically Working with Emotions
Regulation
Understanding and dealing more appropriately and effectively with emotions and emotional reactions.
Using one’s cognitive powers of attention, recognition, and thoughtful reflection- start using them for one’s benefit (informative, motivating)

20. Therapeutically Working with Emotions
Regulation
…client’s need emotions to tell them, without thought, that something important to their well-being is occurring, and they need their thinking capacities to work on the problems that emotions point out and that reason must resolve” (Greenberg,2004,pp.29-30).
This is the key connection between cognitions and emotions

21. Therapeutically Working with Emotions
Soothing
Learned in childhood
The objective is for a client to provide feelings of emotional comfort to themselves as an antidote to a wide spectrum of negative thoughts, urges, and feeling.
Through the means of: self talk, treating self well and engaging in a healthy feeling experience.
Allows for disengagement of emotions that for the moment are sensed as overwhelming.
Important tool to teach clients regarding the regulation of emotion.

22. Acceptance & Commitment Therapy: Working with Emotions
Alternative to experiential avoidance
Cognitive Diffusion
Alter the undesirable functions of thoughts & private events, rather than trying to alter their form
Contact with the Present Moment
Demonstrate ability to exert control over behavior
Observing the Self as Context
Shifting sense of self based on context of the moment
Values
Clarifying and acting in accordance with personal values
Committed Action
Important tool to teach clients regarding the regulation of emotion.

23. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy: Working with Emotions
Mindfulness
Core concept of DBT
What skills:
observe nonjudgmentally what is going on in a circumstance
describe what has been observed
participate: become fully focused and involved in the events
How skills
Employing nonjudgment…
a) One-mindfully: maintaining nonjudgment focus
b) Effectively: doing what works and avoiding what does not
You cannot simultaneously feel anger and laugh at the same time. Often it breaks the tension enough to allow for the client to reappraise their circumstances. This will be covered more in the Level 3 chapters.

24. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy: Working with Emotions
Distress Tolerance
The ability to accept, in a non-evaluative and nonjudgmental fashion, both oneself and the current situation, acknowledging the realities of the situation via:
Distraction – designed to delay impulse to react to unpleasant stimuli
Self-Soothing – behaving in a nurturing, comforting, kind, gentle way toward oneself
See Clinical Exercise: Therapeutic Methods for Self-Soothing on p. 283.
You cannot simultaneously feel anger and laugh at the same time. Often it breaks the tension enough to allow for the client to reappraise their circumstances. This will be covered more in the Level 3 chapters.

25. Dialectical Behavioral Therapy: Working with Emotions
Emotion Regulation
Designed to help a client recognize, identify, and reflect upon one’s emotions to establish the beginnings of a rational process of circumstances
Facilitates an increased sense of competence in dealing with emotions in the present
Placing them in perspective as tools rather than autonomous entities
You cannot simultaneously feel anger and laugh at the same time. Often it breaks the tension enough to allow for the client to reappraise their circumstances. This will be covered more in the Level 3 chapters.

26. Please turn to p. 275 and review Clinical Attitude and Disposition: Self Soothing and Therapeutic Detachment.

27. THANK YOU.
Any Questions?