Where Are the Emotions? How Emotion-Focused Therapy Could Inspire Systemic Practice

Abstract

Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) is based on the assumptions that humans are emotionally organized beings and that emotional change is key to enduring cogni-tive and behavioural change. In line with neurobiological research (Damasio, 1999), emotions are understood as an evolutionary information processing and problem-solving system that help people survive by offering rapid implicit judgements and action tendencies. Emotions offer messages about threats to our fundamental needs, they help us decode what is going on in our relationships, and signal others about the current relational state we feel we are in. Without emotions, learning seems impossible. Based on previous experience, emotions organize action tendencies in accordance with our needs and goals-much faster than any conscious analysis. This emotional information processing system evolved due to its adaptivity. However, emotions can also go wrong. They can be misleading, too intense or destructive in their expression. Emotion is not "always right." It should neither be mistaken as the conclusion nor the action itself. Emotional schemes provide information that needs to be listened to and handled in an interplay between bottom-up processing and conscious reflection. Greenberg (2015, p.66) suggests a dialectically constructivist view on emotion: "We construct what we feel by attending to a bodily felt sense and symbolizing it in awareness, and our construction is informed and constrained by what we feel in our bodies." Seen this way, emotion and cognition are inextricably intertwined.