Tuesday, June 24, 2014

Read: Emotion-focused Therapy: Coaching Clients to Work Through Their Feelings

Title: Emotion-focused Therapy: Coaching Clients to Work Through Their Feelings
Author: Leslie S. Greenberg
Published: American Psychological Association, 2002

I had the honour to attend a seminar conducted by Greenberg several years ago and it took me a while to get my hands on a copy of one of his books from the local library. It took me more than two weeks to read this book.

This book illustrates Greenberg's ideas about the role of emotions in life and in therapy. Written in a systematic and clear fashion, the author drew references from his clinical experiences and insights to discuss how individuals, couples and parents can more effectively deal with difficult emotions in everyday life.

For parents who would like to learn to be effective emotion coaches for their children, there is a chapter in this book that discusses the topic of emotion coaching in parenting. It was stated that in Gottman's (1997) (The heart of parenting: How to raise an emotionally intelligent child.) study, emotion-focused mentoring of children's feelings was found  to have a soothing effect on children and led to a change in their parasympathetic nervous system responses.

A book to be added as a resource on the shelves of anyone interested to learn to deal more effectively with one's feelings.