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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.

This handbook offers a comprehensive tour of EFT research and applications for all common mental health issues including depression, anxiety, interpersonal trauma, personality disorders, and eating disorders. Through Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT), clients learn to rule their emotions, instead of letting their emotions rule them. With guidance from a skilled EFT therapist to help them identify, experience, accept, and tolerate difficult emotions, people can learn to regulate, explore, make sense of, transform, and flexibly manage their emotions. As a result, they become more skilled in responding adaptively to situations as they arise. EFT therapists help individuals and couples engage in productive emotional processing. They also offer methods to help clients become aware of their emotional needs. In this book readers will learn to: conceptualize clients'core emotions in order to form a focus of therapy guide clients through the process of emotional change, and structure therapy in an ongoing fashion, recognize key emotional markers, and facilitate the tasks needed to move to the next phase.

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD)--characterized by near-constant worry that often coincides with intense feelings of shame and despair--is a highly treatment-resistant disorder, with clients often relapsing after making some progress. Master therapists Jeanne C. Watson and Leslie S. Greenberg argue, however, that emotion-focused therapy (EFT) is uniquely capable of targeting the maladaptive emotional schemes that underlie GAD and helping clients maintain lasting, positive change. In this practical guide, Watson and Greenberg teach mental health practitioners how to employ EFT methods in their work with GAD clients. The authors first review EFT's conceptualization of GAD, emphasizing the key role that emotion plays in pervasive anxiety. They then translate those foundational principles into detailed techniques and strategies as they walk readers through the EFT process, beginning with the establishment of a healing therapeutic relationship. Chapters review different stages of EFT, describing specific therapeutic exercises, such as empty-chair and two-chair tasks, that allow clients to vocalize and directly address their deep-rooted emotional pain, anxieties, and relational injuries with significant others. Through this work, clients eventually learn to self-soothe and transform their maladaptive coping mechanisms into healthier ones. Sample client-therapist dialogues demonstrate how these EFT techniques can be applied in actual practice.

Emotion-Focused Therapy provides an introduction to the theory, history, research, and practice of this emotion-centered, humanistic approach to psychotherapy. Emotion-focused therapy is a complete theory of human functioning based on the adaptive role of emotion and founded on the idea that emotional change is central to enduring change. This therapy emphasizes the awareness, acceptance, understanding, and transformation of emotion, and proposes that emotions themselves have an adaptive potential that, if activated, can help clients to change. Emotion-focused therapists help clients to experience their emotions in the safe setting of therapy so that, rather than avoiding or controlling their feelings, clients learn to use them as a guide to what is important or necessary in their lives. In this book, Leslie S. Greenberg presents and explores this versatile and useful approach, its theory, history, therapy process, primary change mechanisms, the empirical basis for its effectiveness, and recent developments that have refined the theory and expanded how it may be practiced. This revised edition includes a wealth of recent research findings on important constructs such as emotional needs, as well as new developments in the use of emotion-focused therapy in treating anxiety disorders.

Although older adults face significant health challenges, they tend to have better emotion regulation skills than younger or middle-age adults. Why is this so? This book explores the reciprocal relations between aging and emotion, as well as applications for promoting mental and physical health across the lifespan. The authors discuss the neural and cognitive mechanisms behind age-related shifts in affective experience and processing. In addition to presenting emotion regulation strategies for offsetting age-related declines in mental and physical functioning, the book examines the role of culture and motivation in shaping emotional experience across the lifespan, as well as the factors defining boundary conditions between human illness and human flourishing in old age.

Why do some children's emerging affective tendencies and abilities make them more aggressive over time, while similar processes make most children less aggressive and more morally mature? Furthermore, what kinds of interventions are effective for altering these pathways? To answer these critical questions, this book takes a unique, integrative approach in two important ways. First, it integrates the psychopathology perspective with the developmental perspective, arguing that aggression and morality are two sides of the same basic developmental story. Second, it integrates research on cognitive processes with research on emotional processes. Drawing largely from social information processing and moral domain theories, the chapters demonstrate how early affective experiences and relationships provide a foundation for children's subsequent social cognitive understanding of victimization, harm, and moral intentionality. The book consists of three parts. Part I provides theoretical foundations, including the role of emotion in early conscience, empathic tendencies, and how principles of fairness and concern emerge from early parent-child and peer-peer interactions. Part II discusses factors influencing aggression and morality, from neuroscience to culture. Part III discusses implications for assessment and intervention. Bringing together a number of international scholars, this book will appeal to all researchers, clinicians, educators, and policy experts interested in understanding how emotions affect the development of children's morality and aggression.

Children vary in their response to the death of a loved one. Some children develop relatively few symptoms or problems, while others face significant or prolonged symptoms, such as posttraumatic stress disorder or anxiety. Similarly, children vary in their circumstances and preferences. Thus, clinicians who work with bereaved children must customize interventions to meet the specific needs of each individual child. This book presents integratedg grief therapy for children---an evidence-based model for treating bereaved children that draws extensively on cognitive-behavioral, family systems, and narrative approaches to therapy. The model shows clinicians how to assess the needs of bereaved children, treat common distressing symptoms (depression, posttraumatic stress disorder, anxiety, and behavioral problems), and address the grief itself while fostering resilience. Because emotional and behavioral problems following grief are manifested in different ways, the model allows for flexibility based on the age, symptom presentation, and needs of the child. And because the inclusion of a surviving parent or caregiver is critical to working with grieving children, the model involves the parent in the interventions. With a thorough literature review on bereavement in childhood, extensive case examples and dialogues to illustrate therapeutic techniques, and over 20 activity handouts that therapists can photocopy and use in sessions, this book provides everything needed to treat bereaved children.

Developmental theorists have long speculated that emotion and cognition are inseparable components of the developmental process. Some even suggest that the two components are fully integrated by school age. Yet, despite considerable theoretical work describing this interaction, relatively little empirical work has been conducted on the subject. This volume addresses the codevelopment of emotional and cognitive processes by integrating theoretical and empirical work on these processes. The first part of the book demonstrates the codependence of emotional and cognitive processes, noting that both processes are clearly necessary for successful regulation of thought and behavior and that children with early adjustment difficulties often have deficits in both types of processing. The second part considers possible neurological and genetic mechanisms for the emotion-cognition link. Finally, the last part explores implications for clinical and educational research, highlighting atypical emotional and cognitive processing and its effect on adjustment in academic and social settings.