Emotion Assessment in EFT
EFT interventions are based on a process-diagnostic, moment-by-moment
assessment of four emotion types that clients are currently expressing
in-session: primary healthy (adaptive), primary unhealthy (maladaptive),
secondary, and instrumental (Elliott et al., 2004; Greenberg & Paivio,
1997; Greenberg & Watson, 2006; Greenberg et al., 1993). The key
distinction in emotion assessment is between primary and secondary
emotions (Elliott et al., 2004; Greenberg, 2002, 2015; Greenberg et
al.,1993). Primary emotions are defined as a person’s first immediate
gut response to a situation such as fear when threatened, or anger at
violation. In contrast, secondary emotions are reactions to a person’s
primary responses, often masking or interrupting a person’s primary
reaction and lead to responses which are not appropriate to the current
situation. Secondary emotions require validation and exploration by the
therapist to understand their protective functions, and to allow access
to the more important primary emotions underlying these secondary
reactions.
Primary healthy emotions provide useful information about the current
situation to serve a person’s needs, goals, and concerns in the world,
and organizes them for taking healthy action. Primary unhealthy
emotions are responses that were originally healthy and may have served
a helpful purpose in the past, but now they have developed into
unhealthy emotion schemes, such as feeling ashamed to express oneself to
a loved one now, because of being humiliated by a parent growing up.
Central to unhealthy emotions are deep fears of abandonment or
annihilation, sadness of loss, or the shame of being unworthy
(Greenberg, 2021). It is important to highlight that it is both the
activation and expression of primary emotions that is therapeutic.
Primary healthy emotions need to be accessed to obtain their healthy
information to problem solve and navigate through one’s world with
emotional competence. In contrast, primary unhealthy emotions need to be
activated and deepened to be receptive to new information, and amenable
to transformation (Greenberg, 2015, 2021). An EFT treatment focus is to
transform these primary unhealthy emotion schemes by accessing
alternative primary healthy emotions (Greenberg, 2021; Greenberg &
Paivio, 1997).