Ron, is
a 42-year-old man who works out of his home as a day-trader. Depressed and lonely, he feels
misunderstood by his wife and seeks relief through a variety of impulsive
actions, including drinking, over-eating and having brief affairs with other
women. At the beginning of the
second session of therapy, he confronts the therapist on the treatment’s
emotional focus. “I just don’t see
why it’s important for me to go into my feelings here. As far as I can tell, they just get in
the way, especially when I’m trading.
If you want to succeed as a day-trader, you’ve got to keep your emotions
under tight control -- that’s my problem, I let my feelings carry me away, and
then I always make bad trades.
I’ve lost a lot of money that way.... If you were having brain surgery,
you sure wouldn’t want your surgeon to get emotional on you. I just don’t see the point of stirring
up feelings. What I need is help
controlling my feelings better!”
Ron’s therapist, a male third year graduate student, wasn’t sure how to
respond to Ron’s challenge. He’d
already given the client the standard speech about emotions being important in
the first session, but he didn’t know how to answer his client, or even if he
should answer. He reflected the
Ron’s concerns, but that didn’t seem to satisfy Ron, so the therapist brought
the issue to supervision. The
supervisor suggested that it would be useful to tell the client more about why
emotion is important for human functioning and how it can be useful to access
and explore emotions in therapy.
The student’s questions also made the supervisor aware that he needed to
do a better job helping his students understand the importance of emotion in
the change process.
Materials designed to
accompany the book Learning Emotion-Focused Therapy: The
Process-Experiential Approach to Change from APA Books.
©2003 Robert Elliott, Jeanne Watson, Rhonda Goldman, and Leslie Greenberg
http://www.process-experiential.org/learning