Emotion-focused Therapy of Depression
Dr. Les Greenberg
April 14 & 15, 2011
Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) of depression is an evidence based treatment that helps people activate their depressogenic emotion schemes to make them amenable to alternative emotional adaptive responses to situations. Access to emotions such as empowering anger at violation and sadness at loss, as well as more compassionate sentiments toward the self, help people modulate their affective reactions and this helps them combat depressogenic feelings of powerlessness, hopelessness, contempt and shame. This leads to a change in self and self-other narratives.
The workshop will begin with a discussion of the role of emotion and emotional awareness in function and dysfunction. The importance of working with amygdala based emotion will be emphasized. The use of process- diagnosis to identify opportunities for intervention and different types of emotion will be discussed. Differential intervention based on process diagnosis will be demonstrated. Six major principles of emotional change in psychotherapy; Emotion Awareness, Expression, Regulation, Reflection Transformation, and Corrective experience will be discussed.
Videotaped examples of evidence based, methods for evoking and dealing with emotions in Self-critical depression and in Dependent depression will be presented and discussed. The micro-skills of moment by moment empathic attunement to affect, and the use of gestalt methods of dialoguing with parts of self and imagined significant others in an empty chair will be demonstrated.
Educational Objectives:
- Learn to identify different types of emotional expression.
- Learn how to intervene differentially with emotion
- Learn how to access adaptive emotions to produce change.
- Learn to identify phases in emotional processing to resolve self-critical splits and
unfinished business.
Outline for Workshop
Day 1 – Morning: Emotion-focused Therapy
- Introduction to the approach
- Emotion: theory and Research
- Emotion Assessment
- Video tape demonstration
Day 1 Morning after the Break:
- Treatment Principles
- Markers and Tasks
- Video Tape Demonstrations
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Lunch – on own
Day One Afternoon: Framework for Emotion–focused Intervention
- The bonding phase
- The evoking and exploring phase
- The transformation phase
- Video Tape Demonstrations
- Case formulation
Day One Afternoon (after the break) Specific Methods 1: Self Criticism and Two Chair Dialogue
- Working with Self criticism in Depression
- Model of resolving Self Criticism
- Video Tape Demonstration of Two chair dialogue
Day Two Morning – Specific methods 1: When the self-critic is annihilating
- Self soothing
- Video Demonstration
Morning after Break – Specific Methods 2: Unfinished business and Empty chair dialogue
- Working with Dependence in Depression
- Model of resolving Unfinished Buisness
- Video Demonstration
Lunch – on own
Day Two Afternoon: Unfinished business and Empty Chair Dialogue (cont’d)
- Resolving Hopelessness
- Video demonstrations
Day Two Afternoon after the break: Summary Discussion
- Themes in the treatment of depression
- Types of difficulties encountered