Strengthen yourself, adjust your mood and create new meanings.
The theoretical premise of emotional focus therapy is that traditional psychotherapy overemphasizes conscious understanding and cognitive behavior changes, while ignoring the core role of emotional changes in the treatment process.
Although emotional focus therapy does not deny the importance of creating new meanings and behavior changes, it emphasizes the importance of perception, acceptance and understanding of emotions.
Emphasize the importance of emotional and physiological response during treatment.
Emphasize the importance of emotional changes in psychotherapy.
As the basic system of our meaning, communication and behavior orientation, emotion determines the degree of who we are. Not "I think therefore I am", but "I feel therefore I am".
The latter is the basic idea of emotional focus therapy, that is, we feel first and then think, and we often think only within the scope of feeling.
Therefore, emotional changes are regarded as the basis of lasting cognitive and behavioral changes.
In emotional focus therapy, help visitors to better identify, experience, accept and explore emotions, discover the meaning of emotions, transform emotions, and flexibly manage emotions, so that visitors can better understand the important information provided by emotions and make themselves and their world more meaningful.
Similarly, tourists are better at using this information to make their lives more adaptive and full of vitality.
In psychotherapy, emotions focus on physical experiences, and visitors not only accept these experiences, but also directly influence them to promote emotional changes.
In this kind of treatment, the core problem is to help visitors identify when they need to use guidance to adapt to their emotions and obey the changes needed to adapt to their emotions.
When do you need to change your uncomfortable mood?
When do visitors need to adjust those emotional reactions that are too strong for them?
The key idea of this treatment method is that in order to obtain the information provided by emotions and realize the changes needed by emotions, visitors
Focused emotional therapy is an empirical, comprehensive and experiential therapy.
This is because this therapy combines the elements of visitor-centered therapy, gestalt therapy, empirical therapy and existentialism with contemporary theories of emotion, cognition, attachment, interpersonal relationship, psychoanalysis and narrative, and dialectically constructs a new basic theory.
The theoretical basis of emotional focus therapy is that organisms have an innate tendency to exist, grow and improve.
Growth tendency is regarded as a part of adaptive emotional system. It is this view that emotions dominate the most important content in our lives.
Emotion is a signal that we are affected by important influences, which are usually related to the deepest interests and the most important interpersonal relationships.
For example, anger leads to interpersonal distance. In view of this, calming anger is the most direct way to improve interpersonal communication.
Therefore, interpersonal conflicts can be repaired by changing people's emotional expression.
Pain must be allowed and accepted so that it can be fully felt and listened to.
Therapy is considered to be a process of promoting conscious choice and rational action by approaching and perceiving the inner experience and feelings.
One of the goals of treatment is to change the unsuitable emotional response and get the adaptive emotional response, so as to guide the process of life perfection.
The psychological phenomenon of dysfunction stems from many different emotional mechanisms.
For example, lack of emotional awareness, avoiding or alienating emotional experience, obtaining unsuitable emotional schema, rigid or dysfunctional narrative meaning creation, conflicts between different components of self based on emotion, and unresolved emotions between self and others.
The purpose of emotional focus therapy is to help visitors develop their emotional potential and intelligence.
Emotion will reveal what is most important to people in the current situation, and guide people to take actions required by the situation in order to obtain the results that people need or hope.
The core idea of emotional focus therapy is that "in order to change a certain emotion, people must first feel this experience".
In emotional focus therapy, visitors should be helped to confirm, experience, accept, adjust, explore and create narrative meaning, and transform, apply and flexibly manage emotions.
Therefore, visitors will be more tolerant of the emotions they have escaped in the past, and can better extract the important information contained in the emotional response, which usually reveals the individual's needs, goals, interests and so on.
However, the tendency of growth and development is different from the tendency of self-realization, which emphasizes that people should realize their full potential, that is, they should be the best themselves.
Emotional focus therapy believes that people's growth and development tendency is gradually mature and complicated in the process of adapting to the environment, enhancing their viability and discovering themselves.
This kind of motivation derives what is a valuable condition, and then affects people's self-concept, that is, what kind of person they should be in the eyes of others.
Self-concept is regarded as a derivative of self-realization maintained by self-realization tendency.
However, when the situation of life makes it difficult for people to realize this denial or distortion, people will have anxiety or use defense mechanisms, and generally show a certain degree of psychological anxiety.
In Jane Linde's view, what needs to be solved is not the content of perception, but the perception mode of experience, that is, the experience structure and mode of disabled people.
In this case, effective treatment should directly guide visitors to pay attention to their current experience, and influence their physiological state and meaning creation with the performance of experience.
The core of Jane Linde's thought is that human experience is complex, and only a few parts can be clearly expressed in grammar. People's experiences are always beyond what they can express in words or concepts, but if people pay attention to their experiences, they can usually find words or symbols to describe them. Focusing includes choosing vocabulary according to experience and finding the most suitable pair of experience and vocabulary.
So the process and goal of treatment is to gradually clarify the unclear meaning.
Gestalt therapy principle is the core component of emotional focus therapy.
Like Rogers, Pierce pointed out that
In gestalt therapy, conflict refers to the inconsistency between the self-image that an individual tries to achieve and the trend of self-realization. In gestalt theory, it is believed that internalized value conditions will interfere with individual self-realization, because internalized value conditions make people act and experience according to them.
Gestalt theorists also put forward the self-processing process model.
According to this model, the self obtains existence through the connection with experience.
As a result, the ego moves out of the individual and becomes a processing process under the guidance of field theory.
Both emotional focus therapy and dynamic system theory regard self as the result of processing. From a technical point of view,
Therefore, the ego is formed on the surface of the individual, not at a certain depth inside.
Moreover, the ego is constantly changing. As long as the contact boundary between the organism and the environment changes, the self will change accordingly to meet needs, solve problems and deal with obstacles.
From this perspective, there is no so-called true self, field (environment)
The dialectical constructivist theory of emotional focus therapy on self-formation comes from these views on self-function. This theory regards the ego as a dynamic organizational system, that is, the ego is not only an executor, but also in the process of continuous development, influenced by the interaction between the ego as an executor and the environment.
Existentialists tend to face the future, thinking that people have been working hard and are motivated by goals and ideals. They firmly believe in possibility, potential, talent and ability.
As far as existence is a godsend, there are many inevitable anxieties, such as limitation, freedom, loneliness and meaninglessness.
People realize that the anxiety caused by these ultimate worries will lead to the activation of defense mechanisms, thus hindering people's ability to make sincere choices.
For existentialists, realizing these ultimate worries will lead to anxiety and defense.
In emotional focus therapy, the degree of conformity between self-concept and experience is no longer regarded as the main pathological mechanism of dysfunction, but as the way of experience construction.
In addition, people think that obstacles are not only caused by unacceptable experiences, but also include dysfunctional emotional regulation and maladaptive emotional reactions, which usually come from the pain accumulated by individuals in past experiences.
However, everyone has the potential to create and act, and has the ability to perceive and choose.
This therapy believes that
Man is a dynamic system of self-organization, constantly exchanging with the environment, shaping and being shaped by the environment in various ways.
In emotional focus therapy, emotions lead us to discover what is good for us and what is bad for us.
People are born with meaning, and constantly strive to find meaning. Our main motivation is that we consciously and voluntarily discover the meaning of life. Meaning can't be given, you must pursue it to get it.
Emotional focus therapy holds that multiple emotions are the channels to gain insight into the needs, hopes or goals of visitors and their action tendencies related to emotions, which is the core principle of this therapy.
Constructivists also believe that the construction and knowledge we live on are not truth, and we can't directly know the truth. By organizing and infinitely approaching the truth, we are close to the truth.
From the viewpoint of dialectical constructivism, although there is no so-called true self, there is a "true self experience".
This kind of real self-experience refers to some moments when an individual subjectively feels a certain functional state, and the experience is true, profound and sincere. Then, the individual will take these experiences as his or her true self. Even if these experiences happen for the first time, visitors often describe such moments as "I can be myself" or "I have discovered my true self".
Gradually understanding each component, such as the key part, the blocked or hindered part, and treating these components as an aspect of self will help to promote the understanding of these components, that is, I have a certain relationship with these components, rather than identifying them as self.
This means the possibility of alternative choices, because my fear or my sense of unworthiness or unlovable is only one part of me.
When danger or trauma occurs, people will experience emotional disasters and intense pain, which often makes people try to escape these emotions completely.
When emotional escape or emotional numbness, the consequences of trauma are shelved, but this shelved trauma is precisely the key to post-traumatic difficulties.
Dysfunction usually stems from the way people create experiential meaning and their narrative explanation of themselves, others and the world.
Meaning, fundamentally speaking, is not the internal content of experience itself, and experience itself is meaningless.
The development of adaptive identity needs the ability to narrate, understand and integrate the most important life events in our lives, and the development of this ability can also establish a divided and internally consistent self.
Emotion can help people confirm what is most important for happiness and prepare for action. Similarly, emotions regulate experience, provide direction for experience, tell us what is most important, know what is most important, tell us what we need to do and who we are.