Changing Emotion with Emotion

Emotional suffering fuels clinical distress, yet few training programs equip therapists to address it. The work outlines emotion-based strategies that help clients fully experience and transform painful feelings into adaptive responses. Interventions include memory reconsolidation, chair work, and imaginal reentry.



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 amp ldquo arrive at, amp rdquo or fully experience, their painful maladaptive emotions, and then amp ldquo leave amp rdquo 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.