Live Recorded
Approximately: 7 hours
Working with emotion is essential to psychotherapy, and therapists commonly encounter challenging emotional processes in session. For example, many clients present with reactive symptoms that are often mistaken for the main problem: anxiety, depression, hopelessness, addiction, rage, distress, feeling overwhelmed, avoidance, or withdrawal.
These reactive symptoms often mask deeper emotional issues at the core of a client’s distress. To help clients move forward, therapists need skills to recognize, access, and work with the underlying emotional processes that drive those symptoms. Without these skills, even experienced therapists may feel stuck or unsure how to help.
This workshop offers 20 practical, evidence-based skills to address these and other common emotional issues. Drawing on evidence from neuroscience, evolutionary biology, and psychotherapy process research, these skills are designed to help you assess what is happening emotionally in session and intervene in ways that support movement and change. The approach is integrative and can be applied across modalities and client populations.
Video recordings of real therapy sessions will illustrate how emotional processes unfold in session and how specific interventions can help shift them.
In this workshop, you will learn how to:
- Recognize and assess productive and unproductive emotion states and different emotion types (adaptive/maladaptive, secondary/protective, instrumental) and learn how to work with them differentially
- Apply techniques to track and explore emotional processes in session
- Use collaborative case formulation to identify clients’ core emotional issues
- Work with clients who are overwhelmed by their emotions by using deliberate and automatic emotion regulation techniques
- Access, activate, and deepen emotions with clients who have trouble accessing and expressing their feelings
- Process emotions productively
- Change maladaptive emotions with adaptive emotions
Dr. Leslie Greenberg is a Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Psychology at York University in Toronto, Ontario. He created and co-developed Emotion-Focused Therapy for individual and couples. He received a Distinguished Research Career Award from the Society for Psychotherapy Research (SPR) in 2004. His work has also been acknowledged with the Carl Rogers Award of the American Psychology Association, the Canadian Council of Professional Psychology Program Award for Excellence in Professional Training and the Canadian Psychological Association Professional Award for distinguished contributions to Psychology as a profession. In 2012 he was awarded the American Psychological Association Award for Distinguished Professional Contribution to Applied Research. His teaching style is highly praised and his workshops are well-known for their atmosphere of authenticity and warmth.
