First Course

Resolving emotional Injuries: Letting go and forgiveness

This workshop will present an emotion-focused approach to resolving emotional injuries. It will give clinicians practical and specific interventions to help clients resolve the anger and hurt in their relationships with others.. The use of empty chair dialogues to access and work through emotions related to the injury will be discussed and demonstrated

This workshop is designed to help you:
1. Understand the phenomenon of emotional injury and forgiveness
2. Discriminate between forgiveness and letting go
3. Discriminate different emotions involved in the resolution process
4. Learn steps to promote forgiveness or letting go.
5. Understand different emotional change processes involved in empty chair dialogue

Second Course

(First Webinar) Unblocking blocked emotions

To heal troubled souls and minds, clients need to experience the emotions that go with their stories. Understandably, clients protect themselves from feeling their dreaded emotions. They fear that if they allow these emotions, they will fall apart, disintegrate, and be unable to cope, so they do all in their power to not feel. However, what they resist, persists, so blocking is not an effective solution. In this webinar, Leslie Greenberg will explore ways to help clients undo their emotional blocks.

(Second Webinar) Working with Shame and Anger

Shame and anger both appear to play a crucial role in therapeutic change. How to work with them in psychotherapy often presents challenges to therapists and clients alike. In this webinar, Leslie Greenberg will discuss each of these emotions, their relationship with each other, and how to work with each of them to produce change. An underlying experience of shame often manifests in overt anger. It is easier for people to feel angry than to feel shame. Anger protects against shame. On the other hand, people often feel ashamed of their anger. Because anger is so often socially unacceptable, people feel ashamed of being seen as losing control. Shame and anger are often sequenced, and they interact. Therefore, anger can be both a consequence of shame, a cause of shame or a cure of shame. Shame at times can also help people transform anger into harmony and conciliation, or into healing apology or submission. In this webinar, Leslie Greenberg will discuss how to transform shame, often with anger, and how to overcome suppression of anger. Arrested anger is a major cause of dysfunction; therefore, access to previously unexpressed anger, not only anger management, is therapeutic.

Third Course

The Transforming Power of Emotion: An Emotion Focused Approach

First Part of this workshop will discuss:

• The role of emotion and emotional awareness in function and dysfunction and the importance of working with core painful amygdala-based emotion.
• The use of process diagnosis in an emotion-focused approach to identify different types of emotional processes.
• Differential intervention based on process diagnosis will be demonstrated.
• The use of differential interventions based on process diagnosis.
• Six major principles of emotional change in psychotherapy will be presented: Emotion, Awareness, Expression, Regulation, Reflection, Transformation and Corrective Experience.

Videotaped examples of evidence based, methods for evoking and dealing with emotions in self-criticism will be presented and discussed. There will be also moments of discussion.

Second Part of this workshop will discuss:

• The method of case formulation in an emotion focused approach
• The stages of an emotion-focused therapy

Videotaped examples of an evidence-based method for evoking and dealing with emotions in self-criticism and in emotional injuries from the past with significant others will be presented and discussed.

Forgiveness and letting go of emotional injuries will be presented with video-taped examples.

Discussion.

There is a growing interest in how to work with emotion in psychotherapy. Different schools have developed different perspectives and different methods which were compared in a recent book (Greenberg, Thompson & Malberg, 2018). This workshop will take a further step by offering a trans-diagnostic, trans-theoretical perspective to working with emotion. This is based on two main ideas:

• Emotion is central in many forms of psychological dysfunction and its cure
• Both acceptance and change of emotions are important in its cure, regardless of type of emotional disorder.