Principles of Emotional Change
The principles of emotional change in EFT are applicable in treating a wide variety of clinical populations.
There are 3 key categories of emotion change principles when working with emotion: 1)Emotion Utilization, 2)Emotion Transformation, and 3)Emotion Regulation. The first category of Emotion Utilizationis comprised of principles of awareness, expression, and reflection , which refer to increasing awareness of and deepening experienced emotions so they can be used productively. The principle ofawareness involves increasing awareness of emotion by directing clients to pay attention to, allow, and accept their emotions. Awareness involves feeling the emotion in awareness and putting emotion into words to provide access to the healthy information and action tendency (for example, in shame wanting to hide) that are embedded in them. Labelling emotions also connects people to their motivation and moves them to action to meet their relevant needs and goals. In EFT, the therapist offers empathic understanding and empathic exploration responses so that clients feel understood. In addition, therapist empathic exploration responses such as empathic conjecture are used to facilitate emotional awareness and help clients identify unacknowledged and unnamed emotions. The next principle of expression involves helping a client express what they feel in words. In EFT, expression involves expressing primary emotions, and often overcoming avoidances to express previously constricted primary emotions (Greenberg, 2015, 2021). Reflectionis the third emotion utilization principle which involves reflecting on activated and expressed emotions to help people make sense of their experiences and incorporate them into their ongoing self-narratives. Reflection has been demonstrated to be an important ingredient to the emotional change process as it creates new meaning and develops new narratives of self, others, and the world (Angus & Greenberg, 2011; Greenberg & Angus, 2004; Greenberg & Pascual-Leone, 1997; Pennebaker, 1995). The Emotion Transformation Principles , includechanging emotion with emotion (Greenberg, 2021) andcorrective emotional experience . In EFT changing emotion with emotion is the most important principle of emotional change and the main change process. This involves primary unhealthy emotions such as fear, shame, and the sadness of lonely abandonment (Greenberg, 2002, 2015, 2021). These withdrawal emotions are transformed by accessing healthy, approach emotions of empowering anger that sets boundaries, the sadness of grief that promotes self-compassion, as well as soothing by the self and others (Greenberg, 2002, 2015, 2021). This principle asserts that an unhealthy emotional state can be undone by activating another, more healthy emotional state. This first involves the client experiencing an unhealthy emotion to make it amenable to change. Once alternate emotions have been accessed, these new emotional responses start to undo the prior manner of processing. Furthermore, new emotional states allow a person to challenge their perceptions of self and others that are connected to their unhealthy emotions (Greenberg, 2002, 2015). Corrective emotional interpersonal experience is a transformation principle which transpires with another person, and in the therapy context, it refers to new lived experiences with the therapist such as feeling safe, understood, and prized. Having one’s painful emotions accepted by another person can lead to new ways of being and the safety of the therapeutic relationship is corrective and leads to change (Greenberg, 2011).
Emotion Regulation is the principle comprised of deliberate regulation and automatic regulation and refers to the necessity to regulate emotion to be able use it productively (Greenberg, 2011, 2015, 2021). Deliberate regulation is used when emotions are too distressing to be useful and they interfere with a client’s coping. It involves engaging the client in specific, concrete coping strategies such as: distress tolerance skills; establishing a working distance; avoiding triggers; establishing a safe place; or distraction. The result is to help the client regulate their emotions and feel calm. In contrast, automatic regulation is an intervention facilitated during the activation of unresolved emotional suffering or anguish of past painful interpersonal needs that were never soothed by others. The therapist helps the client to re-enter these past painful memories using a two-chair, self-soothing intervention where the adult-self faces and soothes the wounded child and grieves the unmet interpersonal needs, which leads to feeling calm, soothed, secure, and resilient (Elliott et. al., 2004; Greenberg, 2015). This helps clients to develop automatic regulation over time, whereby they spontaneously engage in self-empathy, self-compassion, and self-soothing. Another way automatic regulation develops over time is through the empathic relationship and internalizing soothing of the therapist (Bohart & Greenberg, 1997).