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Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer 2004 (°C 2004) Emotion-Focused Therapy: An Interview with Leslie Greenberg Denise M. Sloan Over the past 30 years Leslie Greenberg has developed and refined the EmotionFocused Therapy (EFT) approach. This therapy model stands apart from other, humanistic-based approaches in its focus on empiricism. In addition, EFT is one of the few therapy models that is truly integrative in nature, combining clientcentered, gestalt, and cognitive principles. This paper includes a recent interview with Greenberg in which he describes the development of EFT and his views regardingfuturedirectionsofEFT,aswellashisviewsonthefieldofpsychotherapy more generally. KEY WORDS: psychotherapy; emotion; experiential; humanistic; integrative. Leslie Greenberg was born and raised in Johannesburg South Africa and attended high school with another well-known clinical psychologist, G. Terence Wilson. Interestingly, Greenberg didn’t originally pursue a career in psychology. Instead, he obtained a master’s degree in engineering. After working in the engineering field for several years Greenberg realized that his work in the engineering field left him desiring greater human contact. Fortunately for the field of psychology, Greenberg decided to pursue training in clinical psychology. He obtained his Ph.D. in psychology in 1975 and became a faculty member of the Department of Counseling Psychology at University of British Columbia in 1975. He remained in that position until the mid 1980’s when he accepted a faculty position in the Department of Psychology at York University where he remains today. Early on in his career Greenberg devoted considerable effort to become informed in a variety of therapy approaches. As a consequence Greenberg pursued training with a variety of leaders in the psychotherapy field, such as Rogers, Pascual-Leone, and Minuchin. These diverse psychotherapy training experiences

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Journal of Contemporary Psychotherapy, Vol. 34, No. 2, Summer 2004 (°C 2004)

Emotion-Focused Therapy: An Interview

with Leslie Greenberg

Denise M. Sloan

Over the past 30 years Leslie Greenberg has developed and refined the EmotionFocused Therapy (EFT) approach. This therapy model stands apart from other, humanistic-based approaches in its focus on empiricism. In addition, EFT is one of the few therapy models that is truly integrative in nature, combining clientcentered, gestalt, and cognitive principles. This paper includes a recent interview with Greenberg in which he describes the development of EFT and his views regardingfuturedirectionsofEFT,aswellashisviewsonthefieldofpsychotherapy more generally.

KEY WORDS: psychotherapy; emotion; experiential; humanistic; integrative.

Leslie Greenberg was born and raised in Johannesburg South Africa and

attended high school with another well-known clinical psychologist, G. Terence

Wilson. Interestingly, Greenberg didn’t originally pursue a career in

psychology. Instead, he obtained a master’s degree in engineering. After

working in the engineering field for several years Greenberg realized that his

work in the engineering field left him desiring greater human contact.

Fortunately for the field of psychology, Greenberg decided to pursue training in

clinical psychology. He obtained his Ph.D. in psychology in 1975 and became a

faculty member of the Department of Counseling Psychology at University of

British Columbia in 1975. He remained in that position until the mid 1980’s

when he accepted a faculty position in the Department of Psychology at York

University where he remains today.

Early on in his career Greenberg devoted considerable effort to become

informed in a variety of therapy approaches. As a consequence Greenberg

pursued training with a variety of leaders in the psychotherapy field, such as

Rogers, Pascual-Leone, and Minuchin. These diverse psychotherapy training

experiences

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106 Sloan

Address correspondence to Denise M. Sloan, Department of Psychology Temple University,

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122; e-mail: [email protected].

105

0022-0116/04/0300-0105/0 °C 2004 Human Sciences Press, Inc. ultimately culminated in Greenberg’s development of EFT, which is truly an

integrativetherapyapproach.WhatsetsEFTapartfrommanyotherintegrativetherapy

approaches is its emphasis on empirical support. Throughout the development of

EFT Greenberg has attempted to demonstrate the efficacy of EFT and has taken

on the difficult task of attempting to identify the change processes in

psychotherapy. Demonstrating his dedication as a clinical scientist, Greenberg

has published over 100 journal articles. He has also written several books on the

topics of EFT, empathy, and change processes in psychotherapy. In addition,

Greenberg has served as President of the Society for Psychotherapy Research

and has served on a number of journal editorial boards including, Journal of

Consulting and Clinical Psychology, Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, and

Journal of Marriage and Family Therapy. Has also been the recipient of several

large grants from both Canadian and American funding agencies.

In this interview Greenberg describes how he came to develop EFT, the

core features of the model, and his predictions for the future of EFT. Greenberg

also describes his views regarding the psychotherapy field more generally.

DS (Denise Sloan): Could you briefly describe emotion-focused therapy (EFT)?

LG (Leslie Greenberg): Basically EFT is based on two fundamental ideas.

Empathic attunement to affect is very important so that within an understanding

relationship being attuned to someone else’s feelings is very important in

helping to build affect regulation. So within the context of an empathically

attuned affect regulating relationship one pays attention to particular kinds of

processing difficulties that people have. Then you try to do different things at

different times to facilitate different kinds of emotion processes. So everything

is saying that it’s important to pay attention to emotion but that there is both a

relational form of helping regulate affect through empathy but then you are also

engaging in specific differential interventions. Doing different things at different

times. You can either be paying attention to the moment by moment processes

by asking someone to pay attention to what’s going on inside their body—this is

making a specific moment by moment intervention. Or by asking someone to

imagine somebody or talk to somebody you’re trying to facilitate the kind of

processing they do within a larger task. There are these larger tasks that we have

identified, initially we identified about six or seven types of affectively based

problems, like unresolved bad feelings towards a significant other and internal

conflict. So we’ve defined different kinds of problems that are then worked on

with a focus on emotion. That’s another form of active intervention.

DS: How is EFT distinct from other therapy models?

LG: First, EFT is focused on emotion and it sees emotion as the prime mover in

human experience so that cognition and behavior are, so to speak, dependent on

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Emotion-focused therapy 107

affect. In EFT you are trying to work to change people’s emotions. Many non-

empirically based therapies do work in different ways with emotion. EFT is also

different in that it’s empirically based. Its effectiveness has been shown and it’s

a systematic way of working with affect. There are other approaches that work

with affect but they haven’t been studied, they are not as systematic and they

haven’t been spelled out and based on observation.

DS: In terms of affect driving cognition, what is your view on CBT based

approach of cognition or behavior driving therapy. That is, if you act or think in

a particular way, you will then feel that way?

LG: Right. I see problems with that. I think cognitive therapy is useful as a brief

intervention to teach people coping skills. Coping is a laudable thing but coping

isn’t quite the same of basic restructuring or basic change. To be able to talk to

yourself and say, “it’s okay, don’t get anxious” or “think of something more

positive like don’t worry.” I think those things do help people cope and people

want to be able to cope better but I’m not sure that the coping necessarily leads

to change so then you spend the rest of your life coping. What I’m trying to do

is get to the deeper underlying determinants that I see as affectively based. If

you can get a change in that then you no longer have to do the coping because

you’ve actually changed. I do think that practicing things in the real world and

having success experience will lead you to change. So that sometimes if you

cope better and you act in the world and then you have success experience you

are then actually getting experiential feedback that will change your deeper

structures. In that case, you might get change over the long run with coping but

I’ve seen too many people who cope and they live by coping but when things

get too intense or a crisis occurs the coping skills can’t cope and then they

collapse. These people need to go through a deeper change process.

DS: How many sessions are needed in order for a deeper change process to

occur?

LG: What we found in our research is that people that come in for therapy for

clinical depression, which is what we’ve studied most, can benefit substantially

by 16 sessions. If when they come in they have a capacity to experience, that is,

they are able to attend to their own bodily felt experiences and they are able to

label them, and at least they experience at this level. However, people that have

come in and are very cut off from their emotional experience, that is, they are

not able to symbolize their own experience, for these individuals by about the

end of 16 sessions they began to look like the people who were successful in

treatment who came in with a capacity to experience. So it seems like these

people who are not able to be minimally aware of their experience at the

beginning were not as successful at the end of therapy. I would say that if we

gave these people another 16 sessions that would be about right for them. So it

really depends on the person.

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108 Sloan

But overall I would say about 16 sessions is a good minimum dose for helping

someone with these more active emotionally-focused methods to help get to

core issues and begin to deal with them. But people who come into therapy

without good emotion skills would need at least 32 sessions. People with more

chronic or severe concerns would need longer.

DS:32sessionsstillseemslikeashortdurationforchangingthetypesofunderlying

structures you’re talking about.

LG:Yes.Thisisnottotalpersonalityrestructuringeitherbuttheemotionalmethods are

very effective or powerful at getting to core issues very rapidly in a deeper way

so then it’s in line with the claim that the therapy gets at core material. You can

make quite a lot of gains in a fairly short period of time.

DS: Do clients have “homework” assignments between sessions?

LG: We have begun instituting more and more homework. This is something

that hasn’t been emphasized much but I think the idea of practice between

sessions is really a good one. The kind of homework or practice that we use is

often more awareness-type homework. However, we don’t rely on the

homework to produce the change but more to consolidate things that have

happened in sessions already. We don’t give homework to go out and try

something that the person hasn’t done already but if they get a shift in their self-

critical voice such that it becomes more compassionate we would ask people to

pay attention to that and practice being more self-compassionate during the

week. But we wouldn’t do something like this until it had happened in a session

first. So it’s more practice or consolidation of gains already made.

DS: EFT seems to have key elements of other therapy models yet its different in

some seemingly critical ways, so I’m curious how EFT was developed?

LG: Yes. I’ve also been talking mostly about the individual therapy but not the

couples therapy that is also part of the whole EFT package. I was trained

originally as a client-centered therapist and then as a gestalt therapist but I was

also worked with Laura Rice who was a student of Carl Rogers so I very much

started out as a process researcher as well as being trained in psychotherapy. I

was studying tapes of therapy from day one. A lot of EFT was developed

through the research focus on what makes people change. The first book Laura

Rice and I wrote was called Patterns of Change and we were studying how

people change. I then looked at these therapies I was being trained in for what

seemed to be the most active change processes. We tried to look at how to

measure these processes and so on. At this point I began integrating client

centered and gestalt therapy and I was very interested in cognition at the level of

cognitive science. I did my minor in cognitive development at that same time I

studied with Pascual-Leone, a student of Piaget, and so I was very interested in

the processes of cognition and affect. But I wasn’t interested in cognitive

therapy, which is a very primitive view of cognition. Instead, I was very

interested in the role of attention, in Piaget notion of schemes or schema, and

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Emotion-focused therapy 109

then in emotion theory. So I was bringing all of that to bear on studying the

process of change through the lens of cognition and emotion and how these

processes take place. So I integrated all of these things but essentially I was

integrating a client-centered relationship with gestalt therapies more active

interventions, with a type of cognitive view of how meaning is created in

people. And then I was psychodynamically informed as well. I had read a lot of

psychodynamic material. I began to study specifically how people resolve

intrapsychic conflict within themselves, or in gestalt terms splits, which are

more conscious conflicts, and I built my first model of change process. The

resolution process looked like a conflict between two people except it was

between two voices in one person. I was simultaneously very interested in

couples and family therapy so I did training in family therapy with people like

Virginia Satir and then Minuchin, and then I went to Palo Alto and studied with

people there who used a systemic approach. After that I began to direct my

attention at how couples resolved conflicts and we built an emotionally focused

couples therapy based on similar sorts of ideas that emotion was very important

but now there was interaction as well. So what I did was integrated lots of

different things and from my family therapy

experienceItooktherapistdirectiveness,fromfamilyworkwherethetherapistwas

more structuring and guiding and this all fed back into influencing my approach

to individual therapy. From this I came up with the idea of the therapist as an

emotion coach- - that what the therapist is actually doing is acting as a

facilitative coach where they are helping people be more aware of their feelings,

regulate their feelings, transform their feelings, and so on. So EFT is an

integration of lots of different strands but at its most fundamental it’s an

integration of client-centered and gestalt within a cognitive-affective science

framework.

DS: Given the different influences in the development of this therapy model

what would you say have been the major changes to the model over time?

LG: I guess I would say that I started off with much more of a following rather

than leading approach. It was more a mirroring kind of approach with more of a

view that there were resources within the individual that they needed help to

access—an actualizing tendency within. It’s moved to more of an interpersonal,

co-constructive view where what I’m doing in the room is contributing

something more to the environment. I’m not only helping people to access their

resources and mirroring what they said but I’m also leading, adding something

but in a very subtle way, by guiding the process within a client’s proximal zone

of development, just trying to guide with what could be useful at this time and

that it’s the two of us together that are creating something new. So now not

everything is coming from the individual, whom my presence helps to free up,

but that there’s something actually happening between the two of us, that is, the

change process. I think that’s one of the important evolutions of the model. I

think doing couples therapy and family therapy made me more comfortable with

being more active, that is, giving more suggestions without feeling like the

therapist is potentially distorting the client or being too intrusive. We’ve always

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110 Sloan

adopted the approach that the therapist is not the expert on the client’s

experience. It’s really the client who is the expert so the issue was how do you

make a contribution without imposing it on clients or distorting their own

experience. Eventually we came up with the idea that we are more process

directive not content directive, so we don’t tell the client what they are feeling

or suggest to them what they’re feeling, but we suggest to them ways that they

might use to better connect with or process their own feelings. For example,

guiding clients to pay attention to what’s going on in their body or to speak to

somebody in an empty chair, I’m making suggestions that I think will help

clients process their emotions in particular ways so I’m being quite directive in

process but not in content.

DS: It seems like empathy is a real core feature in EFT and that a therapist needs

to establish empathy first and then build off of that. In a lot of clinical training

programs empathy is not something that tends to be part of training.

LG: Yes, you’re right. I think that’s the greatest tragedy. When I was in graduate

school I started from day one in training in empathy and that was what my

fundamental training was. At York University I run a fourth year counseling

course and it has a lab component that is two hours per week and that’s all

empathy training. I also have graduate students in their first year do their

practicum that is based on empathy and empathy training. I really believe

empathy is fundamental and the waves of fads in training are amazing to watch.

It’s one of the great losses because it used to be that empathy was being taught

and trained in many programs and now that’s just disappeared completely

mainly with the dominance of CBT as an empirically-supported treatment.

Somehow the emphasis on empathy has just been lost. Rapport is what is talked

about in CBT. Rapport is not empathy.

DS: I agree. Empathy is really an essential skill for therapist and I doubt anyone

could be an effective therapist without having good empathy skills. I also think

many people don’t appreciate just how difficult it is to learn how to truly listen

to clients.

LG: Exactly. Empathy is the most critical skill. From the base of empathy you

can also understand the tension between following versus leading. It’s really

crucial to first have these following or listening skills before you get into

leading. It took me many years before I started integrating the two. Many

students in training and therapists in general want to lead, they want to do

something, but the real skill is to listen, to be present and to really hear what’s

going on. So ideally I would like to have students do two years of basic empathy

training and just be in that listening mode before they begin to do more active

interventions. It’s very difficult to listen really clearly and then to listen to

affect. Listening to emotion is very important.

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Emotion-focused therapy 111

DS: Clearly the therapist ability to listen and listen to affect is critical in the EFT

model. Given that, do you think it’s important for students in training to be in

therapy themselves?

LG: I think it’s very beneficial, particularly when working with emotions. It’s an

a-rational process so you can’t just teach people rationally how to work with

emotions without them actually experiencing the emotions themselves. To tell

people that avoidance of emotions is not good and that experiencing pain is

useful you have to really experience that facing your own pain has been useful

for you, as the therapist, to believe it. There are certainly a lot of rational

reasons for thinking experiencing pain would not be helpful. I think experiential

learning is important.

Nowwhetherthat’sthroughpersonaltherapyorsomeformoftrainingthatinvolves

experiential aspects I think is very important. I do think that to be a good

therapist, personal therapy is probably highly beneficial.

DS: One thing that I’ve noticed in supervising beginning therapist is that they

often collude with the client in avoidance of negative emotions. The beginning

therapist seems to not want to make the client feel bad and doesn’t seem to

appreciate the importance of the client experiencing negative emotions in

therapy.

LG: Exactly. I do find that with my students that those who have been in therapy

haveadeeperappreciationandalsotheyarenotdoingthatsortofthingofcolluding or

trying to help the person feel good and stay away from difficult things.

DS: If a student didn’t want to go to therapy, for whatever reason they had, what

would you recommend to them in place of personal therapy?

LG: That’s an interesting question. Well, in my book, Emotion Coaching, I have

a number of experiential learning exercising that people could do on their own.

I’m not a great fan of self-help books but there are certain books that propose

how you can work on this for yourself with awareness training. Things like

mediation and personal reflection kinds of experiences are useful. One doesn’t

need to be in therapy in order to increase awareness. So there are other ways to

accomplishing this through personal relationships, focusing, self-reflection,

etcetera but it is a matter of always working on oneself to always be more

aware.

DS: Do you think there’s an ideal type of client for EFT?

LG:Theidealclientissomeonewhoisalreadyabletosymbolizetheirowninternal

experience so that they take very readily to this process. But clients who

probably benefit greatly are those who some would call alexithymic, who don’t

have the ability to put words on their emotions. These individuals could benefit

a lot from learning this kind of process but they’re not the ideal client. Basically,

EFT applies to people who are good for therapy in general and that means that

they are not too hostile, avoidant, and don’t have severe personality issues, such

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112 Sloan

as borderline personality and self-harming behaviors. These individuals are not

the ideal clients for really any type of therapy.

DS: Given that, what would you suggest for someone who is highly avoidant of

emotions?

LG: I’ve been quite impressed with aspects of the dialectical-behavior therapy

approach for people with severe problems. I think the idea of an intense

psychoeducational program, where you put people in a classroom and you teach

them about the importance of facing emotions and they are given homework

exercises. At the same time the client is in therapy where what they are learning

in the classroom is being put into practice in a more intense manner in a

validating relationship. I think the problem is that if you don’t have the

educative piece you spend a lot of time on the front end of therapy trying to

educate clients and that changes the nature of the relationship between the client

and the therapist. A therapist can’t really be empathic because they have to teach

and kind of convince and persuade. So if it is broken into two components that

run in parallel that would be my suggestion for working with more avoidant

clients. For example, people with more psychosomatic disorders are often quite

avoidant and I think you need to teach them on the one hand, but then you need

a really empathic, nurturing relationship to help them do the work and do it with

another person. If you just do the homework outside the context of a

relationship this does not recognize as important the role of the empathic

relationship in helping us deal with our own affects. It’s not just an individual

skill, it’s actually a relational phenomenon-the dyadic regulation of affect.

DS: I asked you about how you thought EFT has changed over the years, where

do you see the EFT model going?

LG: Well, first let me go back for one moment to say something about how EFT

has changed. The biggest change has been its explicit focus on affect. EFT

didn’t start with its focus being explicitly on emotion. So that’s been one of the

big changes, to

bemoreandmoreclearonitsfocusonemotion.IntermsofwherewillEFTgo,well, what

I think would be important to do is expand its empirical evaluation in relation to

other populations. We’ve mainly worked with depression and interpersonally

based problems but working with anxiety and eating disorders would be good

populations to expand EFT to. Also, moving into more preventive domains of

developing emotional awareness training modules for use with adolescences and

young adults. This training would have to be done at an experiential level, but

the goal would basically be helping people become more emotionally

intelligent. Not in the global sense of do you have intelligence but how do you

actually use your emotion intelligently. Enhancing peoples skills and abilities in

emotion awareness, utilization and transformation. So moving into preventive

domains will be important. In terms of the couples therapy, I think there’s room

for more development theoretically. We’ve dealt a lot with affiliation and

attachment but not a lot with power, definition of reality and autonomy issues.

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Emotion-focused therapy 113

In the circumplex model both affiliation and autonomy are important. We’ve

sort of dealt with only a one dimension of affiliation but I’m very interesting in

the affect related to power, dominance, and autonomy and thinking about how

to work with people in relationships dealing with these more autonomy related

emotions.

DS: There’s seems to be a lot of emphasis on manualized treatments,

particularly ones that are empirically-supported. What’s your view of

manualized treatments?

LG: Actually I think the phase of manuals is now dying. The move has been that

way and funding has required it but I think there are mounting criticisms on the

deficiencies of manualization, so I think the romance with manuals is about to

be finished. We were sort of in a position of writing some type of manual but I

don’t think you can manualize a complex interaction. I think manualization is

easier in CBT approaches, which are more much psychoeducational, dydactic

and much more explicit. So you can manualize things that are less interactive

and more dydactic. However, I think there is some benefit to manuals because it

forces one to specify what one does. I also think you could think about first

generation manuals but we’re now probably onto third generation manuals,

which are the manuals that are attempting to get more flexible and more

complex. I think specification of what the therapist does or tries to do is a good

thing but I thing that overly rigid manualization doesn’t really work. I do think

the efforts to continue to specify what the therapists do and write some sort of

complex flexible manual is a good thing and it’s generating fourth and fifth

generation manuals that are more flexible. That is important. For example,

we’ve developed a manual that is more marker guided so it doesn’t state “do

this” rather it states “if this, then this.” If a client is in a particular state, then this

type of intervention would be most appropriate. So this is the kind of thing that

gives you flexibility.

DS: On a broader topic, how do you envision the field of psychotherapy in the

future?

LG: I’ve never been much of a prognosticator. I say moving toward integration.

This is a hope but I think a prediction as well. Eventually I think we will

integrate but more immediately I think we are on the cusp of moving toward an

ABC therapy, which is an affective behavioral cognitive therapy and integrating

these three elements. But I think that still doesn’t do enough justice to the

psychoanalytic and motivational components, which are so complex they are

very difficult to specify and manualize. But eventually Ido see the field moving

to much greater integration and then that would be a biological, affective,

behavioral, cognitive, motivation, interactional, social kind of integration. My

hope would be that eventually students would come into programs and they

wouldn’t be trained in different therapies but instead they would train in how to

work with affect, cognition, behavior, and interaction. They wouldn’t be taught

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114 Sloan

cognitive therapy, object relations therapy. There wouldn’t be schools. Instead,

there would be processes being taught.

DS: Do you see that being far into the future?

LG: Yes, I don’t think we’re there yet.

DS: How do you think managed care has affected psychotherapy?

LG: Well in Canada we don’t have managed care but I think it’s been the worst

blow to therapy that’s occurred in the short time therapy has been around

because it’s only been around 50 or 60 years. I have a wonderful anecdote; it is

a Canadian one. A hospital administrator who is an M.B.A. came in and took

over the running of the hospital and he called the head of psychology and said,

“I see that the average time of contact between patient and doctor in the hospital

is 8 minutes but in psychology its one hour. Could you reduce it to 8 minutes?”

This highlights the administrator perspective over the function of what

therapists are doing. So managed care is just how to be quicker, more efficient,

more effective without any attention to what it is that is being done. Managed

care has favored brief interventions that are highly specified and I think it has

damaged the development of psychotherapy quite severely.

DS: What do you think about prescription privileges for psychologists?

LG: At first I was quite in favor of them and I saw the conflict as a power fight

between psychology and psychiatry. However, after speaking to some friends of

mine, most of whom are psychiatrists, I now think that maybe getting

prescription privileges for psychologists would produce more of a headache

than it is really worth. I think it’s not such a desirable thing to get into. I think it

changes the role of the psychologist. I was of the opinion that it’s a fairly simple

process to give prescriptions but if you have to start getting into the full range of

complexities in order to rule out all kinds of medical factors and so on it just

detracts from doing your central psychological interventions, so I’m not so in

favor of it. It’s not something I would push for.

DS: What recommendations would you give to beginning psychotherapists?

LG: For people really interested in psychotherapy I don’t think the academic

establishment is the best way of getting experience. I do think having a good

theoretical background is good but this is sort of the broader question of the split

between research and practice, and the two are not always so close. For a

student I think getting training in empathy and getting supervised clinical

experience are the two most important things in training to be a psychotherapist.

I would emphasize getting lots of good supervision. I still think that the best

form of training is through supervision. Unfortunately, especially in the CBT-

type programs, I think

studentsdon’tgetenough“handson”experiencewithrealclientswhoarecomplex.

Students need supervision beyond doing manual guided treatments, applied to

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Emotion-focused therapy 115

all kinds of cases to deal with a full complexity of things. So I think it’s how to

get training that’s doing real psychotherapy and good supervision and for

students to seek that out the best they can.

DS:IagreewithyouthatmanyPh.D.clinicaltrainingprogramsemphasizeresearch at

the expense of clinical training. Do you think that this emphasis has changed the

type of people applying to Ph.D. clinical programs?

LG: Yes. It certainly changes people who pursue it into being that kind of

person, with a research focus. The European model is actually a lot better. In

Europe they are looking at creating standards for the whole of Europe. Basically

their program for psychotherapy is that you get the M.A. degree and then you do

two to three years of specialized training in psychotherapy. A Ph.D. is a

research degree but not a practice degree. I think we have this extreme

confounding in that you need a Ph.D. to be a registered psychologist, and you

need to be a registered psychologist to practice. What we’re really trained to do

is research and not practice. I think there’s a problem in that people that are

more interested in practice probably do seek other ways of training, so they do

Psy.D. programs and so on.

DS: Or they state that they are interested in pursuing research to gain admittance

to Ph.D. clinical programs but what they really desire is to be a clinician.

LG: Exactly. The Psy.D. program was an attempted solution to this problem but

I don’t think it solved it, although I don’t know that much about Psy.D.

programs because we don’t have them in Canada. Ideally you wouldn’t need a

Ph.D. in order to be a registered practitioner and you would have some other

form of real training that was appropriate to practice and then a Ph.D. would

truly be a research degree. I don’t see that happening but that’s how it is in

Europe and it’s actually a better model.

DS: I’ve asked you a lot of questions and I’m wondering if there’s anything you

feel would be important to add.

LG: Well, related to this last topic, I do think there’s a human encounter in

therapy and the human element that’s very undervalued and underemphasized in

a Ph.D.type training environment. Ultimately, therapy is an encounter between

two people and it’s a very personal experience. I think therapy transcends

scientific study or some of the elements transcend scientific study,and thenit’s

not valued sufficiently or paid sufficient attention. I believe in the scientific,

investigative component but it’s how to get a balance between both the human,

interpersonal perspective and the scientific, investigative perspective and to

value them both. Whereas now it’s more valuing of the scientific, objective

perspective and devaluation of the more human helping perspective and this is

unfortunate. It would be best to integrate these two perspectives with respect for

both.

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116 Sloan

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Press. Greenberg, L. S., & Paivio, S. (1997). Working with emotion in psychotherapy. New York: Guilford

Press. Greenberg, L. S., Rice, L., & Elliott, R. (1993). The moment by moment process: Facilitating

emotional change. New York: Guilford Press. Horvath, A., & Greenberg, L. S. (Eds.). (1994). The working alliance: Theory, research and

practice. New York: Wiley. Rice, L., & Greenberg, L. S. (Eds.). (1984). Patterns of change: An intensive analysis of

psychotherapeutic process. New York: Guilford Press.