Changing Emotion with Emotion: A Practitioner's Guide, Paperback

Mental health providers confront emotional suffering every day, yet working with emotion is rarely explicitly taught in 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.

This book presents principles and methods for working with emotion in psychotherapy to target the internal mechanisms that underlie anxiety, depression, and other common clinical disorders. Chapters in this volume focus on methods that 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 of moment-to-moment clinical dialogue demonstrate techniques such as memory reconsolidation, providing corrective emotional experiences, chair work, and imaginal reentry to past situations.

About author(s):

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.

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