Emotion-focused therapy for complex trauma: An integrative approach.

Humanistic psychotherapy research 1990–2015: From methodological innovation to evidence-supported treatment outcomes and beyond

“…In turn, empty-chair dialogues have been used to effectively address complex trauma (Paivio & Greenberg, 1995;Paivio & Pascual-Leone, 2010) and unresolved relationship issues (Greenberg & Malcolm, 2002;Greenberg, Warwar & Malcolm, 2008). Paivio, Holowaty, and Hall (2004) found that complex trauma clients who engaged in empty-chair dialogues evidenced more pre-post change than those who did not, independent of the therapeutic alliance.…”

Narrative Processes Coding System: A Dialectical Constructivist Approach to Assessing Client Change Processes in Emotion-Focused Therapy of Depression

“…In terms of future research, specific client indicators that provide detailed criteria for the identification of narrative and emotion problem and change markers in therapy session video tapes have been recently identified for the development of a Narrative and Emotion Processes Coding System (NEPCS; and manual. Ongoing studies in our Narrative Processes research lab at York University are investigating the prevalence and pattern of NEPCS patterns in recovered versus unchanged client treatment subgroups drawn from EFT, Client centered therapy and Cognitive therapy treatments of depressions (Boritz, 2012;Boritz, Angus & Constantino, 2012) as well as for use in the treatment of trauma (Paivio & Pascual-Leone, 2010). As noted by Angus (2012), it will be important for future studies to investigate the specific steps and therapeutic strategies that help depressed clients shift from unproductive engagement in Same Old Stories to accessing and symbolizing primary emotions for adaptive action tendencies and unexpected story outcomes in differing treatment approaches and clinical samples.…”

Facilitating Emotional Processing: An Experimental Induction of Psychotherapeutically Relevant Affective States

“…The literature on cognitivebehavioral treatment of anxiety and fear exposure suggests that for emotional processing to be successful, the exposure to emotionally arousing stimuli or situations involves the integration of corrective information and thus the restructuring of cognition (e.g., Deacon and Abramowitz 2004;Foa and Kozak 1986;Rachman 1980;Samoilov and Goldfried 2000). In other therapeutic approaches, the claim for integrated emotional-cognitive information processing has been explicitly applied to a broader range of psychological problems, e.g., in Hayes and colleagues' exposurebased cognitive therapy for depression (Grosse Holtforth et al 2012;Hayes et al 2005), in emotion-focused treatments of depression, trauma and interpersonal problems (e.g., Greenberg and Safran 1987;Greenberg and Watson 2006;Paivio and Pascual-Leone 2010;Pos et al 2003), or in psychodynamic/experiential interventions (Fosha 2001). Across these issues and approaches, it has been argued that therapeutically helpful emotional processing involves the integration of cognition and affect, i.e., emotional arousal and expression coupled with cognitive-reflective exploration or meaning making (for reviews, see Greenberg and Pascual-Leone 2006;Littrell 1998;Whelton 2004).…”

“…Pascual-Leone and Greenberg's sequential model of emotional processing was used as the framework for a manualized treatment for complex relational trauma (Paivio and Pascual-Leone 2010), and has also been the focus of an emerging line of research on emotion in psychotherapy (Kramer et al 2015a;Kramer et al2015b;McNally et al 2014;Pascual-Leone 2009). Even so, because the original model relies on the observation of processes in the therapy of patients who were working through target issues, a direct, experimental investigation of the different kinds of emotion component states would be an important contribution.…”