Emotion-Focused Therapy: Coaching Clients to Work Through Their Feelings

Preface

I. Emotional Intelligence: What It Is and How to Promote Its Development

1. Emotions and Emotional Intelligence
2. Distinguishing Among Varieties of Emotional Expression
3. The Therapist as an Emotion Coach
4. The Steps of Emotion Coaching

II. The Arriving Phase: Coaching for Emotional Awareness

5. Arriving at a Primary Emotion
6. Coaching to Evaluate Whether an Emotion Is Healthy

III. The Leaving Phase: Moving on by Accessing Healthy Emotions

7. Identifying Maladaptive Emotions
8. The Transforming Power of Affect: Facilitating Access to Alternate Adaptive Emotions and Needs

IV. Applying the Skills of Emotional Intelligence

9. Lessons About Anger and Sadness From Psychotherapy
10. Transforming Fear and Shame in Psychotherapy
11. Coaching for Emotional Wisdom in Couples
12. Emotions in Parenting

Epilogue

Additional Resources

References

Author Index

Subject Index

About the Author

Leslie S. Greenberg, PhD, is a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, where he is director of the Psychotherapy Research Clinic. A primary developer of Emotion-Focused Therapy for individuals and couples, he is the leading authority on working with emotions in psychotherapy. His integrative work has been embraced by practitioners from diverse theoretical backgrounds, including cognitive–behavioral, psychodynamic, interpersonal, and solution-focused.

He is coauthor of several major texts in the field, including Emotion in Psychotherapy: Affect, Cognition, and the Process of Change (with Jeremy Safran); Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples (with Susan Johnson); Facilitating Emotional Change: The Moment-by-Moment Process (with Laura Rice and Robert Elliott); and Working With Emotion in Psychotherapy (with Sandra Paivio).

Dr. Greenberg is a founding member of the Society for Psychotherapy Integration, a founder of the Society for Constructivism in Psychotherapy, and a past president of the Society for Psychotherapy Research. He has published extensively on research on the process of change.