A recent article by Leslie S. Greenberg, PhD, who received an APA award for Distinguished Professional Contributions to Applied Research, brings our understanding of emotions to its highest, most articulated level.
What he states, based on recent research, is that "Emotions are our greatest friends and at times our worst enemies." Emotions are a constant part of our lives and, whether they work consciously or unconsciously, direct much of what we do."
At one time, emotions were seen as essentially disruptive or dangerous to everyday functioning and needed to be controlled or avoided. Much of cognitive therapy was based on the idea that emotions were essentially destructive, or at best, not very functional in everyday life.
What Dr. Greenberg has come to understand is that emotions are
" fundamentally an adaptive resource." By that he means that emotions have been preserved because they have been highly adaptive in our interactions with the environment. Because of their flexibility they are able to quickly adjust to changing environments and circumstances. Emotions also carry an " action tendency and a meaning system" that influences our response to the events of our world.One of the adaptive elements of this
action tendency, is that it is rapid and fast-- faster than cognitive/thinking processing. This makes us respond quickly to danger, before our thought process has been able to figure out what is happening.
The main point of his article, and the part that is most critical to anyone reading this blog because of an interest in how therapy may change one's life, is that Dr. Greenberg believes that
in order to assess the adaptive benefits of emotions, emotions need to be processed rather than avoided or controlled. This is a critical shift from our understanding of how to deal with emotions. When I was studying for my doctorate, the emphasis was on increasing cognitive abilities to control and diminish the impact of emotions. Emotions were seen as byproducts that
followed cognitive/thinking, and that they were often unimportant or at best, primitive responses of the organism.
Therefore, this is a dramatic shift that states that EMOTIONS and the PROCESSING of emotions is critical to any kind of improvement either in therapy, or in one's own self-help program. If we avoid emotions,if we believe that they are bad, if we are afraid of them, if we believe that we will be destroyed them, if we attempt to ignore them, or if we hide them from others and ourselves, we will NOT be able to access their adaptive benefits.
Dr. Greenberg does state that there is a dangerous aspect to emotions as well. If intense negative emotions are activated and if they are experienced to be of such an intensity and power that they threaten the psychological well-being of the person – –for example, intense rage or intense terror, those aspects will block any kind of processing and whatever useful information that may be present will be lost. We must be aware that because of their power emotions have both an intensely positive aspect and an intensely negative aspect and that we must traverse the middle path.
(Read his full article in the APA journal,
American Psychologist, November 2012, "Emotions, the Great Captains of Our Lives: Their Role in the Process of Change in Psychotherapy")
