The Transforming Power of Affect: Emotion-Focused Therapy with Leslie Greenberg, Ph.D.
Dr. Greenberg will discuss the role of emotion in therapeutic change, employing a trans-diagnostic, trans-theoretical perspective on working with emotion based on three ideas: (1) Emotion is central in psychological dysfunction; (2) Both acceptance and change of emotions are important in cure of emotional disorder; and (3) Work on transforming the underlying emotional cause of psychological dis-ease is important for enduring change and differs from modification of symptoms and provision of coping skills.
Using video clips to illustrate, he will discuss six major principles of emotional change in psychotherapy: awareness, expression, regulation, reflection, transformation, and corrective experience. He will propose changing emotion with emotion as a basic principle of emotional change and that one of the best ways to transform amygdala-based fear, sadness and shame is with another emotion often empowering anger and the sadness of grief. He will discuss transformation by synthesis as a process in which one emotion changes another emotion and how this can be used to change memories by a process of memory consolidation. Moment by moment attunement to affect, and the use of gestalt methods of dialoguing with parts of self and imagined significant others in an empty chair to access emotion will also be discussed.
Learning Objectives:
1. Identify different types of emotional expression.
2. Review principles of emotional change and supporting research.
3. Learn about changing memory by memory reconsolidation
4. Learn how to access adaptive emotions to produce change.
5. Learn to identify phases in emotional processing to resolve self-criticism.
Leslie Greenberg, Ph.D Leslie Greenberg, Ph.D. is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Psychology at York University in Toronto and the primary developer of Emotion-focused therapy. He has received the Distinguished Research Career award of the International Society for Psychotherapy Research as well as the Carl Rogers and the Distinguished Professional Contribution to Applied Research of the American Psychology Association. He also has received the Canadian Psychological Association Professional Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology as a Profession. He is a past President of the Society for Psychotherapy Research. He has authored many books on emotion in psychotherapy including Emotion-focused therapy: Theory and Practice (2015), Emotion-focused Couples Therapy: The Dynamics of Emotion, Love and Power (2008), Case Formulation in Emotion-Focused Therapy (2015), Emotion -Focused Therapy of Generalized Anxiety (2017), and Emotion-focused Therapy of Forgiveness (2019). Most recently he published Changing Emotion with Emotion (2021). He currently trains people internationally in emotion–focused approaches.