son seemed to be, but this soon transformed into his fear that his son would
fail and be terribly wounded. Desh felt sadness about how he could not protect his son from the pain he had experienced in life. In this case Desh’s upset
feeling was signaling more primary concerns.
Vague feelings of sadness or anxiety are often reactions to underlying
feelings that need attention to be deciphered. Consider the following example. Bill wakes up in the early hours of the morning, in a half-awake state,
feeling disturbed. His usual calm is clearly disrupted. Inside, things feel rocky,
and he has vague images of a jagged, spiky terrain inside him. This is very
different from the calmness he usually feels when he wakes. He normally may
not even be aware of the general, calm background feeling when he wakes. It
comes to light only on mornings like this, when it is no longer there. These
ragged, ruffled feelings, differing from the smooth plane on which he normally surfs into wakeful awareness, are telling him in a most uncomfortable
way that all is not well. He remembers a conversation with his lover the night
before that did not end well. Polite friendliness summed it up, which was not
the way they usually ended an evening. They had both felt hurt and distant
and had not known what to do, except to sleep on it. They had already talked
for most of the evening, and things had become worse rather than better.
Bill is anxious and disturbed. This feeling tells him that “this relationship is
rocky; things are not going well.”
Emotional “disorder” of the type described in the preceding example
often reflects internal disorganization. Therapists need to help clients pay
attention to these states so that they can explore them to understand the
information they provide. Bill’s rocky, jagged feeling of disruption represented
a desire for comfort and care. These emotions are constructive and unpleasant,
and they tell people something about the way they are conducting their lives.
Feeling upset is a general signal that something is amiss. The term upset
connotes disorder; disarray; confusion; and feeling disturbed, agitated, and
stirred up. The state of being upset generally masks a more primary feeling
that is not yet recognized. Clients often do not feel their core emotions of
anger and hurt; instead, they are aware only of their irritability. However, this
irritability is a signpost pointing toward the original feeling. It is an indication that the person needs to search internally for what is troubling him or
her by taking time to focus on bodily feelings.
INSTRUMENTAL EMOTIONS
Instrumental emotions are the third category that adds to the complexity of sorting out emotions. They are learned expressive behaviors or experiences that are used to influence or manipulate others. This process might be
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conscious or nonconscious. The emotion can be manipulative and/or have a
secondary gain. Typical examples are the expression of anger to control or to
dominate or “crocodile tears” to evoke sympathy.
People express instrumental emotions because they have learned that
other people will, they hope, react to these emotions the way they want.
Often clients may not be aware that they have learned to use these instrumental feelings for the gains they bring. For example, a client may have learned
that when she cried, people were kinder to her. Now she automatically cries
to evoke sympathy. Instrumental emotions are expressed either consciously
or automatically to achieve a goal. A client may have learned that getting
angry is likely to intimidate people or that crying makes them more sympathetic. Instrumental emotions are often more like general emotional styles
than momentary reactions. Over time they often become part of the person’s
personality, such as being dominant, overly dramatic, or shyly demure.
Instrumental emotions that clients express without any awareness of
their intention can be quite problematic. The sadness one client expressed
with sighs and heavy eyes was quite demanding of attention and support. He
was afraid to ask for attention, so instead he hoped that sighing would get the
desired response. Another client’s uncertainty and anxiety were expressed
by hesitating or appearing confused. This attracted helpers who saved her
by taking charge. When people use these instrumental expressions too frequently, without being aware of what they are doing, they can often end up
driving others away because the people receiving these signals end up feeling
manipulated. Some family therapists refer to people as “showing” emotions
rather than feeling them to highlight the instrumental use of emotion. For
example, a wife may show depression or sadness, whereas a husband may
show anger or boredom. This language helps emphasize the communicative
aspects of this type of emotion and helps to focus on the interpersonal pull
some emotions may be intended to have. A more negative term for instrumental emotions is manipulative feelings.
The intentions in instrumental expressions can be more or less conscious. Being consciously coy or seductive may be playful and exciting, but
doing this without awareness can be problematic. Consciously expressing
anger when feeling offended is quite different from automatically expressing anger to intimidate and control. Coaching here involves helping people
become aware of the effects and intentions of their emotional expressions.
Then they need to find more direct ways of expressing themselves and stating
their needs.
Instrumental emotions, however, often involve a lot of emotional intelligence. People need to be quite skilled to be able to use emotions to achieve
a certain response or to communicate in a social situation. A person may
pretend to be embarrassed to indicate that he or she knows the social rules
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and is aware that he or she is not complying. In such a case, the person is
skillfully using emotion to influence other people’s views of him or her. For
example, even though a man may have had no intention of wearing a tie to
a meeting, he may pretend to be embarrassed so that others think he made a
mistake. Similarly, people may express moral indignation to communicate to
others that their values are in the right place and that they are good people.
Someone may bow his head and drop his eyes to show deference, or he may
stare another person down to show his power. The art of social role-playing lies
in the instrumental expression of the correct emotion at the appropriate time.
BASIC AND COMPLEX EMOTIONS
Still further distinctions about emotions help in identifying primary
emotions. People not only have basic emotions of sadness, anger, fear, shame,
and so on, but they also have many more complex emotions, such as love,
pride, guilt, embarrassment, compassion, envy, and ecstasy. These too can be
the source of great emotional intelligence, depending on whether they are
primary, secondary, or instrumental emotions. In early human history, when
primitive people sensed danger or violation, the emotional parts of their brains
led them to feel a basic emotion, such as anger or fear, and they simply fought
or fled. With the development of greater cognitive abilities, more complex
feelings—such as guilt, remorse, resentment, and embarrassment—emerged,
as well as subtle feelings of wonder, appreciation, compassion, and love. These
complex emotions integrate a lot of information, blend emotions with each
other and with cognition, and give people a very high-level sense of themselves and the world, but they do not have as clear an action tendency as the
basic feelings do. The complex feelings tell people whether they are feeling
on top of the world or down in the dumps. These feelings are more a source
of information than of action tendencies. Thus, in coaching people toward
primary emotions, it is important to not only work with the basic emotions
of sadness, anger, fear, and shame, but also to recognize that primary feeling is
often more complex and that it is idiosyncratic. These complex feelings also
need to be acknowledged for the helpful information they can provide.
“ME” AND “IT” EMOTIONS
It is important to make one final distinction to help understand people’s emotions. Some emotions are felt in response to an external situation,
whereas others arise mainly because of internal reasons related to how people
see themselves. Many emotions that people experience in the present are
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responses to external cues; these emotions give meaning to things in the
world, offering information about situations in relation to well-being. For
example, fear of the dark alerts people to the possibility that there could
be something dangerous lurking in it. People who have a healthy fear of
external threats, such as approaching predators, should pay attention and act
accordingly. As a rough guide, these healthy reactions to the world are about
real threats in the world such as real violations. They are basic “it” emotions
(Dahl, 1991). They need to be experienced in awareness for the information
they give about how to act, and they should be expressed in an appropriate
manner. Thus, people need to experience and express their current anger
when they have been wronged, and act on their interest when they are surprised, and act on their fear of being run over by a car. These are healthy
experiences and expressions.
Other emotions are more interior. These are “me” emotions, and they
often involve people’s beliefs about themselves. “Me” emotions affect how
people feel about themselves and influence how they handle their emotions.
All past- and future-related emotions are by definition internal, because they
are not felt in reaction to a current real-world situation. They are based on
memory of a past event or anticipation of a future event. In addition, specific
emotions, such as sadness and shame, tend to be more “me” related, whereas
others, such as anger and fear, are often more “it” related. “Me” emotions, such
as embarrassment at standing out or feeling sad and hopeless, often need to
be explored for their meaning and the feeling that underlies them rather than
expressed out loud. However, there is no simple formula for this. Clients, with
the help of their emotion coaches, always need to figure out whether it would
be better to express and act on a feeling or to explore and understand the
feeling. Clients need to understand what each emotion is telling them about
their lives and decide for themselves in each instance what is the best course
of action. “Me” and “it” emotions can be primary, secondary, or instrumental.
PRODUCTIVE AND UNPRODUCTIVE EMOTIONAL PROCESSING
Since the first edition of this book, my colleagues and I (Auszra,
Greenberg, & Herrmann, 2013; Greenberg, Auszra, & Herrmann, 2007)
have made an important new research-based distinction in describing emotion processing in therapy. In our research on the treatment of depression,
interpersonal problems, and couples’ distress, we found that increased emotional arousal predicted outcome. Although we found that higher emotional
arousal predicted outcome, as clinicians we knew that some emotional arousal
was productive and some was not productive, and we wanted to encourage
only productive arousal. We had found a correlation around .33 between
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arousal and outcome, leaving a lot of variance unaccounted for. We also knew
that our therapists themselves discriminated between therapeutic arousal and
countertherapeutic arousal, and so unproductive process was curtailed because
the therapists worked to facilitate change in unproductive manners of processing toward more productive forms of processing. So clinically we knew that
not all arousal is good arousal. In general, in emotion-focused therapy (EFT),
therapists need to decide if and when to facilitate higher arousal. In the case
where therapist and client come to the view that a client’s current arousal is not
productive, or is even harmful, the therapist needs to know how to work with
the unproductive arousal to help the client achieve more productive emotional
processing. Over the last decade, we therefore set out to develop a measure to
discriminate productive from unproductive emotional processing.
On the basis of theory and qualitative research and surveys of therapists, a
scale of client emotional productivity was developed and tested. Client emotional
productivity was defined as a client experiencing a primary emotion in such a way
that (a) the useful information inherent in an adaptive emotion can be extracted
in the service of problem resolution (the signal feature) or (b) a maladaptive
emotion being expressed in a sad way shows the potential of being transformed
(the transformation feature; Greenberg, Auszra, & Herrmann, 2007). In other
words, a client should process a primary emotion in such a manner that, depending on whether the emotion is adaptive or maladaptive, either the utilization or
transformation of the emotion appears possible.
Even though getting in touch with primary emotion is essential in facilitating emotional change, effective emotional processing involves more than
simply activating primary emotional experience. To be productive, primary
emotions require a particular manner of processing, which we refer to as being
contactfully or mindfully aware of the emotion (Greenberg et al., 2007). In our
measure, contactful awareness is defined by the following seven criteria, all of
which have to be more present than not for a client’s emotional experience
to qualify as productive: (a) attending, (b) symbolization, (c) congruence,
(d) acceptance, (e) regulation, (f) agency, and (g) differentiation (Auszra,
Greenberg, & Herrmann, 2013). These criteria, which characterize productive emotional process, not only help practitioners to differentiate between
therapeutically productive and nonproductive emotion processes but also
guide them toward effective intervention by drawing their attention to those
dimensions of clients’ emotional processing that need to be worked on.
Attending
At the most basic level, the client has to be aware of the activated primary emotion and attend to it. This involves paying attention to primary
emotional experience and allowing and tolerating live contact with it. Clients
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often are unaware of their emotional responses; for example, they might nonverbally express emotions without being aware that they are doing so. One
client, while talking to his abusive mother in an empty-chair dialogue, was
clenching his fist and speaking with an angry tone, but when he was asked
by his therapist what he felt at the moment, he responded that he felt nothing (see Chapter 5 for details about chair work). Although the client visibly
expressed some form of anger, he was not aware of what he was feeling. In
instances like these, therapists can help clients increase awareness of their
emotion by focusing attention to their nonverbal activities (e.g., “I’m aware of
what you are doing with your hands, what’s that expressing or feeling like?” or
“I hear some anger in your voice, are you aware of feeling angry?”). Attention
can be guided to nonverbal expression, to bodily experience, and to internal
physical sensations.
Symbolization
Once a physical or emotional reaction is felt in awareness, it has to be
symbolized (generally in words, but could also be in painting, movement,
etc.) to be able to fully comprehend its meaning. Labeling and describing
emotional responses enables clients to use the informational value inherent
in primary emotion. It also promotes reflection on the emotional experience
to create new meaning that in turn helps people develop new narratives to
explain their experience. In judging whether clients’ emotional expressions
are productive, it is important to note that clients do not have to be able to
label their emotional experience exactly; they simply have to be engaged in
a process of trying to symbolize what they are experiencing. The following is
an example of a productive symbolizing process:
Client: I don’t know what I feel. All I know is that I am not happy
about what happened.
Therapist: Something like “I feel it was sort of a loss, maybe sad or
disappointed.”
Client: Yeah, I guess that is what it is. It just wasn’t what I expected.
In some way it’s dashed some of my hopes.
Therapists, through empathic attunement to affect, try to help clients
enter the highly subjective domain of their unformulated personal experience. Therapists serve as surrogate information processors and are constantly
engaged in helping their clients to put words to what they feel. It is important
to note that in the dialectical constructivist view espoused by EFT, meaning
is created in the process of symbolizing the emotion and that the emotional
experience constrains how it can be symbolized but does not fully determine
it. Thus how the emotion is symbolized influences what it becomes.
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Congruence
Sometimes there is a discrepancy between a client’s verbally symbolized emotional experience and the nonverbal emotional expression. A client
might smile while talking about feeling miserable and hopeless or speak in
a meek voice when expressing anger. Such incongruence can be an indicator that the client is not fully allowing the emotion (e.g., for fear of being
overwhelmed by it or of being judged and negatively evaluated by the therapist). In addition, because emotional expression in therapy is a highly interpersonal process, clients do not get the full benefit of important therapeutic
relational processes that are at work here, the most important of which is the
validation and acceptance of previously restricted or unexpressed feelings by
an empathic other. Accordingly, when noticing incongruities between verbal
and nonverbal behavior in their clients, therapists help their clients, not by
confronting them or the discrepancy, but by helping them become aware of
their underlying feeling—for example, by empathically directing their attention to their nonverbal behavior or primary experience.
Regulation
Another key aspect of productive emotional processing is emotion regulation. The activated emotional experience has to be sufficiently regulated
so that it is not overwhelming. The client needs to develop and maintain
a working distance from the emotion (Gendlin, 1996) and to cognitively
orient toward it as information, thus allowing for an integration of cognition
and affect.
An important distinction has to be made between the intensity of emotional arousal and depth of emotional processing. It is depth of emotional
processing and not sheer intensity of emotional activation that is the primary
focus in EFT. The regulation of otherwise overwhelming and disintegrating
emotional arousal is crucial in facilitating the necessary depth of emotional
processing. Even though completely unrestricted arousal might be a highly
therapeutic experience at times, at other times it can be a disruptive negative experience in which the client feels like he or she is falling apart. For
instance, when a client reexperiences a traumatic situation in therapy and
is flooded by the emotional intensity, has difficulties maintaining or loses
contact with the therapist, and/or cannot respond to the therapist’s interventions, the emotional experience becomes potentially retraumatizing and
nonproductive. The same is true for a client experiencing intense rage in
therapy, with the therapist getting the sense that the client is unable to control his or her arousal or the expression of the anger. So when evoking the
client’s bodily experience of primary emotions, therapists have to be aware of
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signs indicating that a client is overwhelmed by the intensity of the emotion.
If that is the case, therapists have to work toward helping clients regulate
their underregulated distressing emotion. This involves immediately gaining
some distance from overwhelming negative feelings such as trauma-related
fears, paying attention to breathing, and developing self-soothing abilities to
alleviate and ease core shame and anxiety during the course of therapy.
Acceptance
Another important aspect of a productive emotional processing is
acceptance of emotional experience—in particular, acceptance of unpleasant
and painful emotional experience. Acceptance refers to the stance a client
takes toward his or her emotional responses. For clients to really experience
their painful feelings and personal meanings, they need to listen to their
own experience in an open and receptive manner. This involves clients
(a) accepting that they are feeling the way they are feeling without negatively evaluating themselves for it or trying to get rid of the emotion and
(b) accepting the emotional experience as information and recognizing it as
an opportunity to gather information about something that is important to
their well-being as opposed to negatively evaluating the emotion or trying to
suppress it. In other words, they have to develop an exploratory attitude and
manner toward their emotional experience. Therapists have to pay attention
to signals that might point to lack of acceptance of emotional experiences.
Lack of acceptance of dreaded feelings (“I don’t want to go into it because
I don’t think I’ll ever get out of it”) could be indicated by clear signs of discomfort when confronted with feelings (e.g., client moves around nervously
in the chair or squeezes back tears) or negative evaluation of the feeling or
self for feeling the feeling (e.g., “I hate it when I get so weepy”). One male
client, for instance, a 50-year-old carpenter, when confronted with feelings of
shame and fragility after losing his job, said, “That is not the way I want to be.
It was always me other people came to for help. I just don’t want to be such
a wimp.” Therapists can help clients like this gain more acceptance of their
emotion by providing a safe, empathic, and validating relationship. In addition, it might also be useful to empathically explore the underlying cognition
and to identify the negative “voices” associated with the nonacceptance of
certain feelings (e.g., “So, for you, feeling like this is a sign of weakness, and
you cannot be weak?”).
Agency
Productive emotional processing also involves the client being an active
agent rather than a passive victim of the emotion. This involves the client
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taking responsibility for his or her emotional experience and acknowledging
it as his or her own personal construction of self and reality. That means that
a client should not regard other people and their actions as responsible for
the way they are feeling (e.g., “My husband always makes me feel so sad”).
Rather, the client owns his or her emotions as based on personal goals, needs,
and concerns in particular situations (e.g., “I feel sad and lonely about our
distance”). So clients should feel that they are having the emotion rather
than that the emotion is having them. Agency also entails the client assuming an active role in the emotional change process, seeing himself or herself
as the primary agent in changing the way he or she is feeling and not seeing the therapist as one who will take away negative feelings or expecting
that the solution lies in shifting circumstances or other people altering his or
her behavior. For example, an emotionally abused wife in therapy needs to
access anger at the maltreatment to gain a sense of entitlement (e.g., “I don’t
deserve to be treated like that. I have a right to be treated with respect”),
allowing her to shift into a more assertive and resilient self-organization as
opposed to hoping that her feelings of being depleted will go away once the
husband becomes more considerate. A client has to show some willingness
and motivation to actively work with the emotion, particularly in the context of the experiencing of maladaptive emotion. This involves exploring the
emotion, using it as information, or actively expressing it. Lack of willingness
to actively work with an emotion is sometimes indicated by the client focusing on external factors (e.g., “Once I’ve found someone who really cares for
me, I will feel better”), resigning himself or herself to the emotion (e.g., “I
am worthless, that is a fact”), or treating the emotion as a symptom that he
or she wants to get rid of (e.g., symptom talk: “No matter what I do, when
I get up in the morning everything is grey. I just want it to stop. I am just so
tired of it”). Emotion coaches try to facilitate agency in their clients by having the client speak from an “I” position (e.g., “I feel angry” rather than “It
makes me angry”), to take responsibility for the emotion (e.g., “I am sad” or “I
do feel hurt or ashamed”), relating the emotion to the self and exploring the
reasons or meanings in the emotion (e.g., “I feel this shame because I have
such difficulty being wrong”), and finally connecting the emotion with what
he or she wants or needs.
Differentiation
Finally, for emotion utilization and transformation to occur, a client’s primary emotional expression has to be differentiating over time. Fundamentally,
the client is not stuck in the same emotion but is exploring and differentiating
new aspects of experience. This means that his or her emotional awareness
needs to be in the process of expanding, as indicated by the client verbally
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differentiating an initial emotional reaction into more complex feelings or
meanings or into a sequence of other feelings or meanings, or that new feelings
or aspects of the feeling emerge (Lane & Schwarz, 1992). In other words, the
client goes beyond basic symbolizations of distressing feelings such as “feeling
bad” or “not well” or “afraid.” A client might say, for example, “When that
happened I felt bad . . . as if something important was taken away from me. But
not just bad, it also made me angry, because it felt not right.” It is important
to note, however, that differentiation does not only refer to the cognitive,
verbally symbolized side of the meaning-making process. Differentiation could
also entail that an emotion is shifting, is more fully allowed, or is more freely
expressed, or that it’s expression changes. For example, when faced with his
physically and emotionally abusive father in the other chair during empty
chair work, a client first froze in fear. Then he started to cry, fully allowing the
painful experience and allowing the therapist to see him in his pain. In this
instance, the emotional process was moving forward and was fluid, without
the client explicitly verbally differentiating his experience. Thus, in assessing whether a client’s emotional expression is therapeutically productive,
an emotion coach has to look for some signs of “movement,” either verbal
or nonverbal, indicating that a client’s meaning-making process is not stuck
or blocked. Coaches promote differentiation in their clients by adopting a
curious attitude and a highly exploratory style both verbally and nonverbally.
They might conjecture, “Sounds like you not only felt angry but also hurt,” or
ask an exploratory question, “What does that feel like inside,” or give direction, “Stay with that feeling and follow where it goes.”
HOW DOES ONE ASSESS EMOTION?
We have discussed many different kinds of emotion: primary, secondary,
instrumental, adaptive, maladaptive, basic, complex, “me,” “it,” productive,
and unproductive. How does one tie it all together to do an assessment?
Assessing emotion involves making a process diagnosis. An emotion coach
assesses a client’s current emotional expression, not a personality style or
trait. This involves determining the type of emotion being expressed in the
session. Process diagnosis thus involves the moment-by-moment assessment
of the emotional states of mind the person enters, is stuck in, or leaves and
the sequences of these states. The following sources of information are used
in assessing emotion states:
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knowledge of the function of adaptive emotion,
knowledge of universal emotional responses,
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