Emotion-Focused Couples Therapy: The Dynamics of Emotion, Love, and Power

398 Pages·2008·37.009 MB·English

by  Leslie S Greenberg, Rhonda N Goldman

Emotion-Focused
Couples Therapy
The DYNAMICS of
EMOTION, LOVE, and POWER
Leslie S. Greenberg
Rhonda N. Goldman
AMERICAN PSYCHOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION
WAS H I N G T O N, DC
Copyright © 2008 by the American Psychological Association, All rights reserved. Except
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Greenberg, Leslie S.
Emotion-focused couples therapy : the dynamics of emotion, love, and power /
Leslie S. Greenberg and Rhonda N. Goldman,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4338-0316-1
ISBN-10: 1-4338-0316-X
1. Emotions. 2. Self. 3. Marital psychotherapy. I. Goldman, Rhonda N. II. Title.
BF531.G74 2008
362.82'86—dc22 2007031800
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A CIP record is available from the British Library.
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
CONTENTS
Preface vii
Chapter 1. Introduction 3
I. Theory of Emotion-Focused Couples Therapy 17
Chapter 2. Emotion 19
Chapter 3. Affect Regulation 41
Chapter 4. Motivation 59
Chapter 5. Interaction 91
Chapter 6. Culture and Gender Ill
II. Couples Therapy: An Emotion-Focused Perspective 135
Chapter 7. Intervention Framework 137
Chapter 8. Therapeutic Tasks: Focusing on Interactional
Cycles 171
Chapter 9. Therapeutic Tasks: Focusing on Individual
Emotional States 199
III. Working With Specific Emotions 225
Chapter 10. Anger in Couples Therapy 227
Chapter 11. Sadness in Couples Therapy 259
Chapter 12. Fear in Couples Therapy 283
Chapter 13. Shame in Couples Therapy 315
Chapter 14. Positive Emotion in Couples Therapy 351
References 365
Author Index 385
Subject Index 391
About the Authors 405
CONTENTS
PREFACE
Two major events have influenced the explosion of interest in emo-
tion-focused couples therapy (EFT-C) over the past decades. First, EFT-C
has had sufficient research to be viewed as an evidence-based approach to
the treatment of marital distress, and this has promoted its recognition. Sec-
ond, a paradigm shift has been spurred by (a) psychological research on the
critical role of attachment processes in adults and couples and, possibly even
more important, (b) the more basic research on emotion, attachment, and
the brain. Emotional and relational processes now are seen as central in
development and change from infancy to adulthood (Schore, 1994, 2003).
These are the processes at the heart of EFT-C, and they are seen as what
needs to be addressed in psychotherapy if enduring change is to be effected.
Emotion is no longer seen as the result of cognitive change alone but rather
as the raw material that needs to be accessed and changed, and attachment
is seen as a key affect regulating process. Finally, by working with such
powerful experiences as attachment, dominance, and emotions ranging from
love to hate, EFT-C has a human quality to it that appeals to clients and
therapists alike by getting to the heart of the matter. Whatever the theo-
retical persuasion of therapists, most agree that for real change to happen
the process must be "hot," meaning emotion must be activated for transfor-
mation to occur. The authors of this book argue that it is emotion that fuels
couples conflict and that access to alternative emotion is the ultimate anti-
dote to those conflicts.
This book addresses how to help couples identify negative emotional
interactional cycles, how to get underneath them to the primary emotions
that both produce and are produced by them, and how to work to transform
these emotions into adaptive, more functional ones, thereby changing inter-
actions. The authors explicate how to work with both the couple and the
individuals in couples therapy, to focus on and shift underlying core pro-
cesses related to both attachment and identity so that couples may form
healthier relationships and become more self- and other-regulating.
This book has grown out of Leslie S. Greenberg's desire to integrate his
experience at York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada, over the past 20
years of working with both individuals and couples using an emotion-focused
approach to therapy. Prior to his return in 1986 to York University, from
which he graduated with a PhD in 1975, he had been working intensively for
a number of years with couples and families at the University of British Co-
lumbia (UBC). During that time, in collaboration with his graduate student
Sue Johnson, he developed a promising integrated experiential systemic ap-
proach to couples therapy. On returning to York University, Greenberg de-
cided to refocus his efforts on developing and studying an experiential ap-
proach to individual therapy, an enterprise in which he had been engaged
with his mentor, Laura Rice, since he was a doctoral student. At that point,
Johnson and Greenberg agreed that she would continue to promote and de-
velop the couples approach, which she has done admirably.
At York University with Rice, where Greenberg received a major Na-
tional Institute of Mental Health grant to study the experiential change
processes in the individual therapy of depression (R. Goldman, Greenberg,
& Angus, 2006; Greenberg, Rice, & Elliott, 1993; Greenberg & Watson,
1998), he thus refocused on individual therapy. Although he continued to
practice and teach couples therapy, it was only in 2002 that Greenberg
turned back, with the help of a grant from the Templeton Foundation's
Campaign for Forgiveness Research, to actively study the process of for-
giveness in both individual and couples therapy. This project afforded him
the opportunity to begin more explicitly integrating his approach to couples
and individuals.
Greenberg trained initially at York University in the 1970s in indi-
vidual therapy (as both a client-centered and a gestalt therapist) and there
was exposed to a systems approach; he also did some training with Virginia
Satir. Greenberg grew more involved in systems therapy when he went to
UBC, where he worked for a number of years with couples and families. Struc-
tural and systemic therapies were becoming very popular; after further train-
ing with Satir in 1980, on his first sabbatical from 1981 to 1982, he com-
pleted an externship in systemic approaches at the Mental Research Institute
(MR1) in Palo Alto, California, under Carlos Sluzki. It was there that
Greenberg began integrating the emotion-focused perspective that he had
been developing for individual therapy (Greenberg & Safran, 1981, 1984,
1987; L. Rice & Greenberg, 1984) with a systemic interactional perspective.
Greenberg became particularly impressed with the importance of interac-
tional cycles and hierarchy in systems but also saw how much the systemic
approaches ignored affect and internal experience. He returned from the
externship at MRI to UBC with the intention of integrating humanistic-
Viti PREFACE
experiential and systemic interactional perspectives, to which he had been
recently exposed. It was out of this context, in collaboration with Johnson,
that EFT-C was developed (Greenberg & Johnson, 1986a, 1986b, 1988).
Rhonda N. Goldman's interest in EFT-C dates back to graduate school,
where she worked under the tutelage of Greenberg. Her primary focus during
graduate school was on individual EFT therapy. Early on, she was strongly
attracted to social constructionist views of human nature (Averill, 1980;
Gergen, 2001; Harre, 1984) and saw emotions as largely cultural construc-
tions shaped by social context and learning. As she studied and worked in
the field, she became more convinced of the universality of emotion and the
strength of the biological components of emotion (Ekman, 1984; Frijda, 1986;
Izard, 1991). On witnessing what a brilliant therapist Greenberg was and
seeing the powerful effects of both the client-centered relationship and ge-
stalt therapy techniques to address people's core pain, Goldman thought it
most important to be involved in the articulation of the EFT model. Specifi-
cally, she wanted to break down and spell out the behaviors and actions of
the EFT therapist. She thus endeavored to create and validate the Experien-
tial Therapy Adherence Measure (R. Goldman, 1992) for her master's the-
sis. It was in this project with Greenberg that she developed a measure for
rating the varieties of empathic responses, such as explorations and conjec-
tures, along with other responses, such as exploratory questions and immedi-
ate feedback that the EFT therapist uses in working to facilitate change in
emotional processes during therapy. As her interest in couples therapy grew,
it became clear to her that the therapeutic techniques that she saw as so
effective in individual therapy were not sufficient by themselves for couples.
Although the individuals themselves were distressed, one needed a model
that accounted for the interaction that was often bigger than the couple
itself. Goldman then began to study systems theory and how it could be inte-
grated with individual models in work with couples. She was particularly
impressed by the work of Satir, who skillfully integrated systemic principles
with interpersonal warmth. Goldman, in working with Greenberg, was im-
pressed with the power and simplicity of the EFT-C model to bring about
change and finally felt she was able to bring her thinking full circle by inte-
grating the social context with the individual focus.
The purpose of writing this book is to bring together the authors' learn-
ing in both individual and couples therapy that has occurred over the past 20
years since the seminal presentation of EFT-C and to expand the EFT-C
framework into an even more integrative approach by further focusing on
working with self and system, by promoting both other- and self-soothing,
and by dealing with both adult and childhood unmet needs. In addition,
Greenberg and Goldman focus more explicitly on how to work with emo-
tion, which they see as the bedrock of the therapeutic process. This effort
brings the authors full circle, back to the 1980s, to the first efforts of EFT-C
to integrate individual and systemic perspectives.
PREFACE ix
A COMMENT ON THE NAME OF THE APPROACH
The term emotionally focused therapy first appeared in the original couples
book in 1988 and was used by Greenberg and Johnson to describe the couples
approach. Why have we now adopted the term emotion-focused therapy7.
Greenberg, Rice, and Elliott (1993), in their efforts to develop an integrative
experiential approach to individual therapy—and being opposed to the de-
velopment of new schools of individual psychotherapy, to add to the over
500 hundred existing named approaches—referred to their manualized expe-
riential approach to the treatment of depression as process experiential to
clearly identify it as belonging to the existing major school of experiential-
humanistic therapy. Subsequently, Greenberg (2002a) decided that on the
basis of the developments in emotion theory that treatments such as the
process experiential approach, as well as some other approaches that empha-
sized emotion as the target of change, were sufficiently similar to each other
and different from existing approaches to merit being grouped under the gen-
eral title of emotion-focused approaches. Encouraged by publishers, and on
the basis of this being the term gaining use in general psychological research,
we decided to use the more American phrasing of emotion-focused to refer to
therapeutic approaches that focused on emotion, rather than the original,
possibly more English term (reflecting both Greenberg's and Johnson's back-
grounds) emotionally focused. We have thus used this term throughout the
volume rather than the more English phrase emotionally focused that we used
initially to describe the couple therapy approach.
The subtitle The Dynamics of Emotion, Love, and Power reflects our ef-
forts in this book to discuss how to work with the major emotions of anger,
sadness, fear, and shame, as well as the positive emotions, and to focus on
both the affiliation and influencing motivations that govern interaction. Love
and power are the two most potent terms to describe the motivational, emo-
tional, and interactional issues that pervade couples' relationships. This book
focuses on how to work with the flow of these ever-changing emotions and
motivations that so influence couples' moment-by-moment interactions.
Hence the subtitle—The Dynamics of Emotion, Love, and Power.
PREFACE
Emotion-Focused
Couples Therapy
1
INTRODUCTION
Marriage will never be given new life except by that out of which true
marriage always arises, the revealing of two people of the Thou to one
another.
—Buber(1958,p.51)
On the basis of developments in research on emotion over the past
decades, in this book we expand the original theory of emotion-focused couples
therapy (EFT-C) to view affect regulation as a core motive that organizes
attachment, identity, and attraction. In this view, affect regulation does not
mean control of emotion but the process of having the emotion one wants
and not having those emotions one does not want. We argue that adopting
an affect regulation lens helps us understand human behavior and couples
interaction in more observable and concrete terms. We thus offer that couples
conflict results from breakdowns in both other- and self-regulation of affect,
and we look at ways to work in couples therapy to help the couple, and each
individual, regulate the emotions of anger, sadness, fear, and shame, as well
as love and other positive emotions. We thus expand the initial EFT-C frame-
work of promoting other-regulation of affect to include work on increasing
self-regulation of affect. This then adds work on the transformation of the
pain of unmet childhood needs that often organizes responses in the present
to the encouragement of the expression of adult unmet needs for closeness
and validation, which has been the hallmark of our approach to couples
therapy. We see this addition as an explication of what has always been im-
plicit in this approach but now is spelled out more clearly in this book.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/11750-001
Emotion-Focused Couples Therapy: The Dynamics of Emotion, Love, and Power, by L.
S. Greenberg and R. N. Goldman
Copyright © 2008 American Psychological Association. All rights reserved.