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).