In this post I describe three aspects of experiencing emotions that make psychotherapy effective. These components can be summarized in 3 questions that we can ask ourselves as we work to process our emotions:
What precisely do I feel?
How does the emotion show up in my body?
How do I make sense of my emotional experience?
Getting started
Imagine you are sitting in a library that has all of your memories stored in it. You pick up a book from a shelf that is labeled "Holiday Party 2014, Fight with Fiancé." With some hesitation, you open the book and start reading.
The first page of your book is the introduction. It has one simple sentence in it:
"Stacy and I had a fight and broke up."
You remember that fight. But you are in a different place right now, emotionally. You are not feeling particularly aggravated when you read this sentence. You move on and start reading page 2. This page has a brief description of your fight:
"I saw Stacy flirting with another man in the holiday party. I told her that infidelity was a deal breaker and that we had to cancel the wedding."
Your memory is a bit more alive now. You remember that man. You can't believe she went along with him. Anger is starting to build up. But you know, this is over. You take a sip of water, and the anger dissolves. You tell yourself that this is just another thing that's happened in the past. You remain composed, and don't let this experience get to you.
You move on to page 3. It looks like this page reveals a little more about what you felt that night. "Is it a good idea to keep reading or should I just bottle up all the emotions?" you wonder. You brace yourself as you start reading page 3.
"I went to the bar to get Stacy her favorite drink. They played loud music and I felt energetic and light. The venue was packed. I was winding my way back to our corner, holding two cold drinks in my hands. Then I saw them. The man leaned over Stacy's shoulder and whispered something into her ear. Seeing her laugh in that moment broke my heart. I felt a knot in my stomach and wanted to throw up. When I saw how she looked at him, I knew it: I never made her feel butterflies in this way. I was furious and at the same time embarrassed and disappointed. I wanted to disappear. I felt so sad... I always thought that our love meant something, but I wasn't sure about it anymore. I think she never loved me."
These last four words keep echoing in your head, "she never loved me." You tried to get these words out of your head so many times before, but here they are. Your shoulders drop, you feel heaviness in your body. You feel as sad and betrayed now as you did that night. You forget that you are in the library, it feels like December 2014 all over again. Reading all the details about that night brought it back to life. You need another moment before you are able to snap out of it.
Deepening the emotional experience
Whenever we recall a memory or think about something that had happened to us, we have a choice. We can describe it in dry and vague language, keeping our emotional distance from it, or we can describe the memory in great detail to make it so vivid that we can almost re-live it. So, revisiting a memory may feel either emotionally activating or pale. Research on the efficacy of experiential psychotherapy maintains that deepening the emotional experience is conducive to positive therapy outcome. In other words, engagement and exploration of vivid feelings as part of a reflective process is an important aspect of successful therapy.
There are several elements of emotional experiencing that often lead to positive outcome. One component is promoting emotional arousal and reflection on the aroused experience. Another component is increasing the level of granularity of emotional experience, which is the degree of specificity and precision we exercise when trying to put our feelings into words.
Going back to the library scenario: If you are looking to work on your intimate relationships, and you suspect that this event plays a role in who you are as a partner nowadays, then processing what happened for you in that holiday party back in 2014 may be important. If we liken the task of emotional processing to reading a book from "The Library of Your Memories," then reading more pages will represent deepening the emotional experience. In our example, the more you read you may notice more details about the experience, more feeling words, and more personal statements (from the general statement, "Infidelity is a deal breaker" to the vulnerable, personal statement, "Seeing her laugh in that moment broke my heart").
In life, as in therapy, we don't have to get near the fire if we don't want to. But if we muster the courage to get closer to the fire, we may benefit from its warmth. Let's take a look at how the power of emotion can be utilized therapeutically.
Emotional arousal
Emotions are felt in the body. If what you read in "The Book of Memories" was a real experience, you probably would have noticed some bodily sensations beginning to build up. Anger may be felt as tightness in the fists, jaw, or between the eyebrows, sadness may be felt as heaviness in the chest or limbs, etc. When we let ourselves experience our emotions, we may notice that they are varied, and range in intensity (also called "emotional arousal"): From not feeling much or even feeling numb, to feeling "a little uneasy" all the way to "out of control, ready to explode." Turning our attention inwards in this way is a part of what researchers call "emotional experiencing."
Emotional arousal has long been considered an important aspect of emotional processing and experiencing. First and foremost, because when we let ourselves feel an emotion it means that we are no longer avoiding it, and that's often the first step in changing any emotion. Arousal is therefore especially important for individuals and with regards to emotions that represent avoidant tendencies.
Missirlian et al. (2005) found that when therapists elicited higher levels of expressed emotional arousal in the beginning stages of therapy, these emotions were more accessible for clients to process during therapy. As a result, towards the end of therapy, clients displayed lower levels of expressed arousal and higher levels of reflective processing. This suggests that through accessing strong feelings clients were able to construct new meaning of their experience.
Notably, emotional arousal does not always benefit the therapeutic process. Just like more and more sugar doesn't necessarily make a cake tastier, there is a limit to our capacity for emotional arousal and therefore its helpfulness in therapy. The window of tolerance is a term used to describe the zone of arousal in which a person is able to function most effectively. It then becomes the therapist's job to help the client lower the emotional activation if they feel overwhelmed by it, and to gradually and empathically heighten the emotional activation if the client is holding back in a way that is unproductive. Another important consideration in facilitating emotional arousal is the relationship between the therapist and client. High emotional arousal is productive only when there is a strong therapeutic alliance between the therapist and client (Iwakabe, Rogan, Stalikas, 2000).
Labeling our emotions
Another component of processing emotions (and regulating emotions, in particular) is being able to put them into words. Going back to the holiday party scenario, you may ask yourself "what exactly do I feel?" At first, you may think, "I feel bad." But if you try to describe what feeling "bad" consists of, specifically, you may find yourself saying something like:
I'm angry at Stacy.
In fact, I'm enraged.
I feel betrayed.
I'm also angry at myself.
I'm ashamed that I didn't see it coming.
I feel hurt that she chose someone else.
I feel inadequate, I question my self worth.
I feel sad that I lost this relationship.
I'm afraid. What if I never find someone else?
As we turn inward, we often uncover new layers of nuance in our emotional experience. Naming all the different emotions in such detail can feel a little bit like a rollercoaster, but it can also help us understand the subtleties of our experience. And with increased clarity comes the ability to employ more effective coping strategies and ultimately resolve painful feelings.
Different people may find it more or less difficult to differentiate their emotions. The ability to name emotions with specificity and precision is captured by the term emotional granularity. Research suggests that higher levels of granularity are related to better emotion regulation. When in distress, individuals who experience their emotions with more granularity are less likely to use maladaptive emotion regulation strategies such as binge drinking, aggression, and self-injurious behavior. They may also experience less severe anxiety and depression.
Whether you know exactly what you feel or tend to experience your emotions as puzzling and incomprehensible, psychotherapy provides an opportunity to explore the world of emotions in a way that promotes adaptive coping and can help you resolve painful emotional experience. It is an effective way to harness your emotional differentiation skills, expend your emotional vocabulary, and increase your comfort in expressing emotions. This hard work can have a lasting effect on your well-being and help you feel more emotionally balanced.
Reflection on emotional arousal
The last component of emotional processing I will describe in this post is personal reflection. Deeper emotional experience involves both a focus on bodily felt experience and the creation of new meaning (Whelton, 2004). As we turn inward and find better, more accurate words to describe our experience, we can find ourselves engaging in deep reflection: Drawing connections between our thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations. Wondering how our emotional experience impacts our self view and view of others. Exploring how our past experience has shaped us and starting to make peace with who we are as a result. As we begin to trust our therapist more, we may also become more open to hearing other perspectives on the stories we tell ourselves.
Experiencing high emotional arousal in and of itself can help us adapt to powerful emotions, making even extremely distressing emotions more tolerable. However, when arousal is accompanied by reflection and meaning-making, the emotional experience can change completely. The negative emotion not only loses its grasp on us, but can make room for completely new emotional experiences to emerge, such as empowerment, pride, peacefulness, and joy.
Final thoughts
For any therapeutic process to be helpful, it's important that you feel comfortable with your therapist, and that you have a sense of control over the course of therapy.
With your consent, your therapist may help you access painful emotions and feel them during session. The sooner you feel ready to talk about your emotions in a way that brings them to life, the more effective, and ultimately shorter, the therapy may be.
Experiencing your emotions in session may include turning your attention to your bodily sensations, looking for the right words to describe your experience, and trying to make sense of it.
Processing emotion is most effective when we operate within our window of tolerance. If you feel a little detached and "in your head," your therapist may empathically encourage you and help you to heighten your emotional arousal. If you feel too raw and overwhelmed, your therapist may help you slow down and ground yourself, before continuing to process the emotion.
If weekly therapy is not enough for you: writing a journal is another great way to increase emotion granularity and assist in emotion regulation.
References
Barrett, L. F., Gross, J., Christensen, T. C., and Benvenuto, M. (2001). Knowing what you’re feeling and knowing what to do about it: mapping the relation between emotion differentiation and emotion regulation. Cognition & Emotion. 15(6), 713–724.
Elliott, R. K., Greenberg, L. S., & Lietaer, G. (2004). Research on experiential psychotherapies.
Greenberg, L. S., Korman, L. M., & Paivio, S. C. (2002). Emotion in humanistic psychotherapy. In D. J. Cain (Ed.), Humanistic psychotherapies: Handbook of research and practice (pp. 499–530). American Psychological Association.
Iwakabe, S., Rogan, K., & Stalikas, A. (2000). The relationship between client emotional expressions, therapist interventions, and the working alliance: An exploration of eight emotional expression events. Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, 10(4), 375-401.
Kashdan, T. B., Barrett, L. F., & McKnight, P. E. (2015). Unpacking emotion differentiation: Transforming unpleasant experience by perceiving distinctions in negativity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1), 10-16.
Missirlian, T. M., Toukmanian, S. G., Warwar, S. H., & Greenberg, L. S. (2005). Emotional arousal, client perceptual processing, and the working alliance in experiential psychotherapy for depression. Journal of consulting and clinical psychology, 73(5), 861.
Pascual-Leone, A., & Yeryomenko, N. (2017). The client “experiencing” scale as a predictor of treatment outcomes: A meta-analysis on psychotherapy process. Psychotherapy Research, 27(6), 653-665.
Whelton, W. J. (2004). Emotional processes in psychotherapy: Evidence across therapeutic modalities. Clinical Psychology & Psychotherapy: An International Journal of Theory & Practice, 11(1), 58-71.
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