Chapter summary: shows how important details of a situation or context can be used to evoke and maintain an emotional response, for the purpose of embodying it.
When we are working with an emotional difficulty to resolve it, the work is almost always in relation to a particular situation. Therefore, in working with emotions, it is important to stick to one situation as much as possible, unless of course it is helpful to refer to other situations. It is possible that triggering many situations from memory when we are working with an emotion in one situation can make the emotional experience simply too much to handle. It could also dissipate the emotion as the brain gets busy with the distraction of processing the many cognitive and behavioral aspects of the other situations. In some people, the brain’s attempt to distract from the focus on an unbearable emotion or its frantic search among other situations for a solution to end the suffering in the first situation can even become a defense against staying with an emotion. We will see in the next chapter that when we are working with an emotion in one situation, other emotions can pop up in rapid succession, either as a sign that the current emotion is too much to bear or as a pattern of avoiding the suffering involved in staying with one emotion. Therefore, in emotional embodiment work, as a general rule we stay with one emotion in one situation at a time, unless of course there are reasons not to.
An emotion can be thought of broadly as an assessment of the impact of a specific situation, or a series of situations, on a person’s well-being. One’s reaction to a situation depends on the person’s understanding of the situation. It is contingent upon what the person thinks is feasible in terms of what can be done to cope with the situation. For example, if I have my computer bag stolen at a train station, my emotional reaction would vary depending on whether I think my passport is also in the bag and whether I remember that I just made a complete backup of my computer that very morning. It would also depend on whether I have enough resources through insurance or other means to replace the computer. So it can be said that one’s emotional reaction to a situation is determined by one’s cognition of the situation and one’s behavior (perceived as feasible) in the situation. According to Barrett, the brain rapidly simulates a number of emotional reactions to a situation based on a variety of cognitive and behavioral predictions, and it chooses one as the most feasible reaction on the basis of past experiences in similar situations and constant updating of information about the current situation.1 Please note that none of these processes need to be conscious. Some of it can be, but they are unconscious more often than conscious.
When clients come to us, it is usually to seek relief from a situation that stresses them emotionally. In order to help them, we need to first support them to clarify their understanding of the situation and of the feasible coping behaviors available to them. It is possible that their emotional difficulty might resolve just from cognitive or behavioral change. This might be true not only for emotional experiences that have to do with the present but also for those that have to do with the past. Guilt that one feels in relation to another person can at times be resolved through a heartfelt apology, whether the incident in question is recent or far in the past. Understanding that another person had a good reason for separating from you that had nothing to do with you, for example, can contribute to your healing, whether it happened last week or forty years ago.
In general, emotional difficulties that have to do with the present are more resolvable through cognitive and behavioral change than those having to do with the past. For example, in a current situation involving domestic violence, cognitive and behavioral change can be seen as immediate and feasible remedies for emotional suffering. A cognitive change from “he beats me because he is jealous” and “he is jealous because he loves me” to “not everyone who loves is either as jealous or as physically abusive” is a step in the right direction. Changing from “I cannot imagine leaving the relationship” to “I have made concrete plans to leave the relationship in a day or two and there is no going back” is a positive behavioral development in the dire situation. Both can shift the way one feels in the current situation.
However, even in ongoing situations, some might have to work through the unpleasant emotional consequences standing in the way of necessary cognitive and behavioral changes. For example, one might have to work to manage the fear that might surge when one contemplates leaving the abusive situation. Given the increasingly lower levels of capacity for affect tolerance in the general population, emotional embodiment work might even be necessary in a large percentage of cases where the situation causing the difficulty is still active.
Please note that a situation of domestic violence is often complex. For example, there are many other reasons, such as finances, that might prevent a person from leaving an abusive relationship; and love is not always present in situations of battery. I add this caution so that no reader, especially one who has experienced domestic violence, is confused by the very limited example I have presented above.
The need to increase capacity for the emotional experience is all the greater when the situation causing the emotional distress is in the past. The inability to get over a past relationship, despite having replaced it with another one, is an example of a situation where there is no way around having to do the hard emotional work. Otherwise, healing changes in one’s cognition (believing that the current partner is in no way inferior to the one that got away) and in one’s behavior (spending more time with the current partner as opposed to avoiding her) might not be possible. This would especially be the case when the person shut down the brain and body physiology to cope with an intolerable emotional experience in the past and has not been able to resolve it ever since, because of a lack of capacity to tolerate the emotional experience of processing it. Because cognition and behavior also depend on the body (we saw how in chapter 6), the body that is shut down from intolerable emotion would make it difficult to change cognition and behavior to resolve the emotional difficulty.
More often than not, when people go to therapists for help, the symptoms they seek relief from (physical, energetic, cognitive, emotional, behavioral, or relational) have emotional difficulty as their cause. The evidence-based therapeutic modality of emotion-focused therapy approaches all mental health issues as emotional problems.2 Often, what looks like a person’s reaction to a situation in the present is actually the person’s reaction to a situation in the past that the current situation has triggered deep within the person’s unconscious. That is what transference reactions are all about—the stuff that is usually worked through in therapy or as a result of reflections from close friends.
When people are emotionally distressed, they can usually pinpoint one or more situations as the cause, but sometimes they do not know what is causing their distress. It is possible that their unconscious is trying to manage their distress by hiding the connection between their emotional suffering and a situation in their present or past that might be more clear to others around them. Or they may just report a psychophysiological symptom and say they have no idea what might have caused it. For example, a person might report that they have been depressed and do not know why. Or, one might present asthma as a possible psychophysiological symptom after medical examinations had failed to produce an organic cause, such as allergy. A person might also present cognitive symptoms, such as noticeable difficulties in their ability to remember or plan, or behavioral symptoms, such as no longer having the motivation to get up early in the morning to continue writing their book—a symptom I can attest to—with no knowledge of the symptom’s source. They might present a physical symptom such as chronic pain and even insist that there is nothing psychological about it, even after they have pursued many medical options in their quest for a cure and have come up empty.
Usually, with a little bit of inquiry, we can find a situation in the present or the past as a place to start in searching for the cause of a symptom. There are some questions that are particularly helpful in unearthing situations that might have some link to a client’s suffering. We can ask questions such as the following:
In a real-life case of a person who suffered from depression, it turned out the cause was a recent breakup. He did not think the relationship had anything to do with the depression because he was really not all that involved in the relationship, and he had been the one to end it. In the real-life case of a woman who reported asthma with no medical diagnosis or psychological condition as its cause, it turned out again that it had to do with the ending of a relationship a year prior. She had broken up with a man whom she said she had loved more than anyone else, because he had disappointed her in some way. Again, she did not think her asthma had anything to do with it, because it was she who had ended it. The example of her treatment through emotional embodiment and the surprisingly quick outcome can be found in chapter 2.
Sometimes, merely connecting an emotional reaction in a current situation with a past situation, which would be a cognitive insight or change, is adequate to resolve the symptom. Here is a real story that provides a dramatic example. A young woman who was having a psychotic episode called her mother during the episode and said, “Mother, I am standing next to an open window on the sixteenth floor of a high-rise building. I am going crazy. Unless you tell me what I need to know, I am going to jump.”
Here is what her mother said in reply: “Please do not jump. Please sit down and hear what I have to say, as this could come as a shock to you. Your father had another family in a neighboring town—a family with children—the whole time you were growing up.”
We have known since the time of Sigmund Freud that family secrets can cause tremendous upheaval in the psyche and can result in severe mental illness. Thus, when the young woman heard what her mother had to say, she became clear, got down from the window, and was cured of her psychotic episode.
Here is a less dramatic example from couples therapy. A man became convinced that his wife was cheating on him, and he started thinking about hiring a private detective to follow her. The couple’s therapist knew the man well because he had seen him separately in individual therapy for a while, and the therapist discerned that the intensity of the husband’s jealousy might have been triggered by a current stressor in the husband’s life: the possibility of job loss. The therapist reminded the husband that he had witnessed such episodes of jealousy between his parents too many times, and he suggested that the fear of losing his job might be somehow triggering it now. That led to the man snapping out of his emotional trance and reacting to the current situation with his wife differently.
Given the intensity of the emotion involved, I would have thought this situation needed deep work with the emotion to change the cognition. So when I heard this story from a colleague, I was reminded of the power of cognition in bringing about change.
At times, linking a present situation to the past resolves the issue in the present. Pointing out to a client that their reaction to their wife appears to be a known reaction to their mother might be enough to change the reaction to the wife. Sometimes this helps to get the person to a place where they can start to process the emotions involved, now that their intense reaction to a person in the present is somewhat lessened. With the insight that the reaction to the wife might have to do with past experience with the mother, the client might calm down enough and become agreeable to working with the emotion that is now less intense.
Often, to get to a past situation that is triggered in the present but is buried deep in the client’s unconscious, or to get a real felt sense of connection between the present and the past that is needed for a therapeutic change, it is necessary to embody the emotions in relation to the present situation. An example of the first instance is a woman who, after embodying her suffering from jealousy caused by her suspicion that her husband is cheating on her, can shift her attitude toward her husband upon recognizing that this jealousy is a feeling she often used to feel in almost all her close relationships. An example of the second instance is a man who, after acquiring a capacity to tolerate the fear of dying triggered by his girlfriend leaving him, states that he had always known that his inability to let go of his girlfriend had to do with his traumatic separation from his own mother as an infant immediately after birth, but he had not been able to “feel” the connection to such an extent before.
When a client is very upset about a situation, if the upset cannot be resolved by working with cognition, emotion, or behavior in relation to the current situation, therapists often look for a past situation that might be triggering the present activation. In emotional embodiment work, the question often arises as to which situation to work with—present or past—when both possibilities are available. Here, the general rule is to work with the situation that is more emotionally evocative. It makes sense to work with the situation that is more emotionally charged to begin with, to develop a greater capacity for emotions in that situation, so that the person is in a better position to work with the other situation emotionally, because that might be the situation that really holds the key to the resolution of the problem. If both situations are emotionally evocative, one has to apply further discrimination. At times, people who have had a lot of therapy have a tendency to regress to familiar situations from the past, with familiar emotional experiences. This could even be a defense against experiencing the pain resulting from what is happening in the current situation. In such instances, it makes sense to choose to work in relation to the present situation. I usually try to work with the present, not the past, unless of course the involvement of the past and the need to work with it becomes clear in working with the present.
If one is unable to discover a situation that might have a relationship to the symptom, one can look for any situation in the person’s life that is stressful emotionally or otherwise to begin the process of embodying emotions. People with a tendency to form physiological symptoms, such as chronic pain, in relation to psychological problems might find it difficult to come up with emotionally meaningful situations to work with, partly because such people also tend to have poor access to emotions, limited psychological insight into their situations, and insufficient understanding of the connection between their psychological and physiological conditions. In these and other cases where it is difficult to locate a situation to work with, we can take the person’s detailed history—their history of adverse experiences in childhood as well as adulthood, and the support they did or did not have as children for their emotional experiences—and use this information as the basis for guiding the client toward emotionally difficult situations.
One can also work with the client’s dreams, as dreams tend to efficiently capture what is going on in a person’s life. Dreams with an emotional charge can serve as situations in the search for emotions to embody. They show the ability of the unconscious to handle emotional experiences that are hard to process consciously. I once worked with a woman who could not make the commitment to marry her long-term boyfriend because of her enmeshment with her mother. The woman was shaken by a dream in which she repeatedly stabbed her mother to death. Processing the sheer horror and other intense emotions she accessed through the dream, with the support of the class in which I worked with her, helped her finally make the commitment to marry a few months later.
Speaking of dreams and embodiment, when you wake up from a disturbing dream that you cannot remember, try the following: grab the disturbed feeling with your awareness and expand it in your body so as to create a greater capacity for it. When I do that, I almost always retrieve fragments of the dream, if not the whole thing, back into my awareness.
If all efforts to identify a relevant situation, past or present, come up short, we can use the distress that drove the person to seek our help as the initial emotion to embody, moving forward from there. We saw in chapter 9, which discussed different kinds of emotions, how we can start at the very basic level of sensorimotor emotions of feeling bad or feeling stressed in the brain or the body physiology. We can then use the specialized emotional physiology of the face and the throat to express the emotion vocally and through facial expression, to differentiate such simple primitive emotional experiences into more complex ones. We can also use vocalization and facial expression in this way in cases where we have a situation to work with, but emotions are hard to come by because of lack of affect development or social inhibition. In either instance, the embodiment of emotion can lead to situations emerging from the unconscious that have a bearing on the person’s suffering.
Here is an example that illustrates both instances. I once worked with a person who was suffering from a great deal of stress. We knew this stress probably had to do with a recent breakup, so we had a clear situation. But working with the situation and trying to tie it to the stress went nowhere, with strong psychological and physiological defenses in place against the emergence of other emotions involved. In this context, sensing the discomfort and pain of the stress and moving it toward vocal and facial expression not only helped the person access more differentiated emotions, such as sadness and loneliness; it also led to the person making a clearer connection between the distress and the breakup, as well as a connection between current emotions and childhood situations that made the present experience of separation all the more unbearable. This helped the person process both the distant and the recent situations in the here and now.
Sometimes people report emotions without a situation attached to them. In the process of embodying emotions that emerge first, situations arise sooner or later, which can then be used to keep the emotions alive or to evoke other emotions. Once a situation is identified, we can gather concrete details about the situation to zero in on another specific emotional reaction to a specific aspect of the situation, which we can then work with. The situations and their details then help to keep the emotion alive as we work to embody them further, if necessary. When working this way, we need to mention the situation’s details as often as necessary to keep the emotional response on track and prevent it from dissipating. Repeating statements about situational details, such as “You saw your child lying in a pool of blood after the accident,” helps keep whatever emotion you are working with alive. Details of a situation can also help in managing the level and intensity of an emotional experience. When we need to reduce the level of emotion and its intensity, we can refer less often to the emotionally charged details, and we can refer to them more if we need to increase the level and intensity of the emotional experience.
The situational details can also be helpful in evoking emotions in other ways. They can give us information on how we might be using cognitive, emotional, and behavioral defenses against emotions. If we felt angry then and continue to feel angry now, we might be stuck in anger as a defense against vulnerable emotions. If we did not act to protect ourselves physically then and are unable to do so now, challenging ourselves to act physically in ways to protect ourselves now can enable us to access the anger and embody it so we can get to a place of empowerment. If we try to ignore a person’s abusive behavior toward us by limiting our cognition, with thoughts such as “I deserved to be treated badly,” we can challenge such cognition to grasp the abuse so we can move from self-blame and shame and toward anger on the way to resolving the situation.
Emotional reactions are specific. They are specific to a specific understanding of a specific aspect of a situation and what we perceive as feasible in terms of behavior to cope with that aspect of the situation. Therefore, the more concrete the clients are in terms of cognitive and behavioral details of the situation, the more likely we can help them to arrive at the specific emotional reaction to work with. For example, if a client is upset about not having good experiences in relationships and wants help to change this difficulty, we have to clarify whether we are talking about personal or professional relationships. If we are dealing with personal relationships, we have to ask about which specific personal relationship or relationships they are having difficulty with. We have to ask about details of the specific personal relationship: what is the other person’s name, how long they have been in relationship, what aspects of the relationship are troublesome, etc. We have to ask about the details of a specific interaction or instance that was troublesome that serves as an example of the difficulty they have in that aspect of the relationship, in order to get to a concrete emotional reaction to work with.
The client’s reply to this level of specific, detailed inquiry might be as follows: “I have difficulty in personal relationships. At the moment I am most troubled in my relationship with my wife. The sexual aspect of the relationship is what is most troubling to me. Specifically, my wife does not respond to the extent I wish she would, and that upsets me. Let me give you a recent example. Last Thursday, after the kids were asleep, I started to have a sexual impulse toward my wife. When I reached out with sexual desire, she batted my hand away. It upset me. I thought that this is a hopeless situation. I just gave up, turned away from her, and tried to calm myself to sleep.” We now have a specific upset, an emotional reaction to work with.
The more we can get clients to describe the situation that bothers them, and the more concrete the details of the situation are, the more likely they will have an emotional reaction we can work with. There are of course exceptions to every rule. Sometimes clients come in highly upset or anxious without much insight into what is triggering these reactions from the unconscious. It is possible that trying to get clients to understand where such reactions are coming from might be helpful in managing the extreme reactions. In other instances, as we have seen, such attempts to help the client understand the situation might fail, or they might only alleviate suffering for the time being. In such cases, as we have already mentioned, deeper work with the embodiment of the emotion available might be necessary to bring about change in the client’s understanding of the situation and their suffering.
During an emotional embodiment session, once the situation is defined and its details are known, one does not have to go through all the details again each time. Doing so could be distracting as the brain busies itself with cognitive and behavioral aspects of the situation. It is sufficient to use certain key phrases that connect crucial, emotionally evocative aspects of the situation with the emotion itself. You can use statements such as “the pain you felt in your heart as you saw him with his new wife,” “the fragmentation you felt when your boss told you that you were no longer wanted,” “the terror you felt when you realized that all exits were blocked,” or “the shame you felt when your father slapped you.”