Six principles for working with emotions

In this video, Les Greenberg explains the six important principles when working with emotions in Emotion-Focused Therapy.
This video is an excerpt taken from two training videos featuring Les, available to purchase at the following links:
www.cpcab.co.uk/shop/item/les...
www.cpcab.co.uk/shop/item/les...
This material includes an EFT therapy session, commentary about the session from Les Greenberg and 40 minutes of bonus content.

[@iamlindavilela]

Six principles for working with emotion
1. **Awareness**
Turns what happens to you, what’s passive, into something you’re an agent of, you now know what you’re feeling and it’s yours.
2. **Expressing emotion**
Expression is where we use a chair dialogue and you express the emotion to somebody.
3. **Emotional regulation**
Helping people get to an emotional place where they can process their emotions when it gets too overwhelming
4. **Reflecting on emotion**
Where insight, understanding patterns and creating new narratives occurs. This is when you reflect on your emotional experience.
5. **Transformation of emotion**
Changing emotion with emotion: You can’t really change an amygdala-based emotion with reason, it is impenetrable to reason. The way to change emotion is with another, more powerful, stronger emotion.
6. **Corrective emotional experience**
Changing emotion with emotion, but now in the interpersonal relationship. In therapy, it often has to do with the therapist.
Example: Expecting to be shamed when saying something to the therapist, but instead being valued and validated. That experience changes the emotion through the interpersonal relationship between the therapist and the client.

[@ahmedmeshref]

MUCH appreciated! 🙏🏼

[@misss.7863]

Thank you!

[@lagr9059]

Awareness, Expressing Emotion, Emotional regulation, Reflecting on Emotion, Changing Emotion with Emotion, and Corrective Emotional Experience

[@sajjadabbaszade7436]

Great, Tnx a lot dear generous Les

[@zhenyatatkova7569]

7

[@samdg1234]

What exactly is meant when Les Greenberg says at 1:47, "You can't really change an amygdala-based emotion with reason"?
Does he mean that an amygdala-based emotion cannot be changed with reason in very many people?
Does he mean that an amygdala-based emotion cannot be changed with reason to a significant degree in people?
I find it hard to believe that an absolute statement such as would result from dropping the word 'really' would be true - as in the following;
"you can't -really- change an amygdala-based emotion with reason"
Any help would be appreciated. Thank you.

[@r.g.j.leclaire8963]

I think what he means by "really" is that you can "apparently" change it, that is, you can suppress or use all other kinds of defenses, that might to greater or lesser extent diminish the experience of the emotion, but it is not actually changed. I would personally add that it is too mechanical to think that you can simply change an emotion with an emotion, too. There's a dynamic between emotional experiences (often anxiety over the experience of an emotion due to attachment patterns), and becoming comfortable with feelings and processing the childhood experiences that are locked in memory that lead to self-negation is important in this process (imo and experience).

[@ancabostinariu6550]

I think that he really means that the emotion will remain amigdaala based but that you can eventually be able make sense of it an not remain stack having it again and acting on it.
Thisbis how i interpreted what he said

[@Tamarahope77]

@@r.g.j.leclaire8963 I think what he means by changing an emotion with an emotion, is that an amygdala-based emotion such as anger over mistreatment as a child can eventually give way to another emotion of sadness and grief over unmet needs, which can in turn generate responses of self-soothing and self-compassion. I see this as part of the "processing the childhood experiences that are locked in memory" that you referred to. After all, Leslie Greenberg refers to memory reconsolidation in his book about Emotion Focussed Therapy and Bruce Ecker similarly refers to EFT as a therapy that is transformative in that it unlocks early learnings and reconsolidates them.

[@user-sn9vn7vw9d]

If I'm good at English, I'll be able to understand what the video says...

[@SelcukAslandr]

Greenberg ?