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).