Recognising your emotions, rather than ignoring or controlling them, can help you learn a lot about yourself, writes Sylvia Thompson
Are you becoming more frazzled as Christmas approaches? Are you feeling angry at the competing demands placed on you or do you feel sad at this time of the year?
Well, rather than you suppressing or controlling these feelings, Canadian psychology professor, Prof Leslie Greenberg believes it's best to acknowledge and examine them so that you can find out if they are telling you something useful or not.
Born in South Africa and a Canadian citizen, Greenberg, one of the founders of Emotion Focused therapy, was in Dublin last week to give workshops to health professionals at St Patrick's Hospital. "In the West, we have been trained to be overly rational and to control our emotions rather than use them as a source of information," he says.
"If you think about adolescents at the age of 16 or 17 when they start to realise that they can plan. At this stage, they also try to control what they feel with their rationality because sometimes their feelings can be so overwhelming and painful.
"But it seems to me that higher stages of development require more sophisticated ways of being than trying to control emotions or not have them."
Greenberg suggests that we should adopt a "friendly, curious and exploratory attitude" to our emotions by "acknowledging, recognising and paying attention to them".
However, this is when things get a little more complex because many of us cover up our fundamental feelings with other ones. "A stereotypical male who feels fear or shame will express anger or drink alcohol or get violent whereas stereotypically, women will cry when what they really feel is anger about being unfairly treated or oppressed," he says.
Greenberg suggests that we all have a set of basic emotions which are anger, sadness, fear, disgust, shame, happiness/joy, interest/excitement and love. And, on top of these, we place secondary emotions such as hurt, guilt, etc. His emotion-focused therapy encourages individuals and couples in therapy to work back to their core emotion and find out if it's a maladaptive one or a useful one.
"You have to find out when to change an emotion or be changed by it," he says.
"For instance, at Christmas time, some people feel angry but if you explore that emotion, they are really feeling sad. At these times, we have to slow down and pay attention to our feelings and to what our partners are feeling because a lot of emotion is being transmitted non-verbally.
"One of the best responses to emotion is empathy rather than trying to fix things, and one of the best ways of calming yourself is to tell an empathetic listener how you feel," he says.
In emotion-focused therapy, emotions are defined as basic, secondary or instrumental emotions. Instrumental emotions are used to manipulate a situation.
"When people use emotions in a manipulative way, it's usually because of unresolved issues from their past."
Greenberg admits that to understand your emotions fully takes a lot of self-knowledge.
So, he suggests if you feel sad at Christmas time, you can try to access memories of when you did feel connected to other people and think about what things you can do that will make you feel good or help you regulate your emotions. "For instance, you could think about the three people you would most like to thank and then thank them," he says.
Greenberg's therapeutic approach has developed as a kind of reaction to the cognitive behaviour therapy that now dominates psychological practice throughout the world.
"I trained and worked as an engineer and then changed to study psychology in 1968. Over the last 30 years or so, I have seen the cognitive-behavioural approach [based on the premise that you can change your behaviour by collecting evidence to test whether your thoughts are realistic or not] become the predominant approach but it is clear to me that emotions are the most fundamental way of reacting and that they can give us very important information for survival.
"Therapies that control emotions - such as cognitive therapy and medication management - have helped a large number of people. However, they can be overused and there can be side-effects. Today, too many people are cutting themselves off from their feelings - cutting themselves off from too much of what makes them feel human and truly alive," he says.
While there is no organisational network of health professionals who use emotion-focused therapy as a therapeutic tool, Greenberg regularly travels to different parts of the world to train health professionals in its theory and techniques.
"We have also done scientific trials and found that this therapy is effective in the treatment of trauma, interpersonal problems, depression and marital distress," he says.
Now 61 and professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, Greenberg practises yoga regularly and freely admits that his approach is comparable to Eastern ways of looking at emotions.
"I believe that if you change your emotions, you'll change your thoughts. It's about finding harmony in yourself and integrating head and heart for healthy living."
See www.emotionfocusedtherapy.org