Status Updates From Emotion-Focused Therapy: Co...

This is okay. It's essentially gestalt therapy shot through the framework of discrete emotion theory. A gradualist step, which is important, but I'm not learning much. Acceptance of emotion leads to transformation of emotion. Integration of more emotions leads to more flexible action tendencies. Growth is knowing there're always alternatives to reach you ends. Idk, you may get as much just watching Inside Out.

There's a strong utopian pragmatics to EFT, that the patient be directed to grow; to expand, integrate, take in more of their being; to suffer no dwelling, spirals, and upended becomings, as if restriction itself were self directed violence. But it's only in a totally atomised life that oppression becomes the actions of one. Isn't a coach always addressing a team? And before the coach, was there not the rule maker?

Decided to give this book another go, and the second edition is waaay better. Leslie cuts out all the problematic rhetoric about emotional intelligence being a higher stage of civilisation, etc etc. Glad he realised how messed it was to essentially, if not explicitly, call traumatised people savages.