Les Greenberg: Working With Core Emotion

Length: 102 minutes

ORDER CODE: BVL214873

Copyright date: ©2020

Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) views underlying unprocessed painful emotions (such as the sadness of lonely abandonment, the shame of inadequacy and the fear of separation or danger) as being at the core of presenting problems.This series with psychologist Les Greenberg shows how he gets to the dis-ease underlying the client’s symptomatic presentation, based on the notion that you have to arrive at a place before you can leave it. The empathic relationship between therapist and client provides the safety that the client needs to be able to go deeply into those painful emotions, hitherto felt to be too frightening, and to reclaim the healthy need, action tendency and more adaptive emotions connected to the painful emotions. In the therapy session, Greenberg helps the client to access both her core feelings of being unseen and unloved and her automatic ways of interrupting her emotions. The interruption protects her from her pain but also blocks her freedom of expression and produces bodily tension, pain, and suffering. In an emotionally poignant process, she gets to her core pain and expresses it to an imagination of her mother sitting opposite. Greenberg and the client work together to access her painful emotions and the needs embedded in them, and to help the client break her sense of lonely isolation and confirm her growing sense of worth. The session is followed by commentary by Greenberg.