On Becoming Emotion Focused

A therapy pioneer draws connections between his life and his transformational approach to psychotherapy.

The question of whether emotion-focused skills is an inborn talent or can be acquired through learning is an intriguing one. On Becoming Emotion Focused attempts to answer that question - whether such attunement is a product of nature (implicit learning) or nurture (explicit learning) while also illustrating, through the unraveling of author Les Greenberg’s personal experiences, how people can best learn to become emotion focused.

For Les Greenberg, becoming emotion focused was a theoretical, scientific, and personal journey. The development of a therapeutic manner and skill was far more subjective than the conceptual development of the theory, and involved many individual threads of experience, some explicit, some implicit. In this book, he delves into the core aspects of how he became an emotion-focused psychotherapist, with attempts to make visible what threads informed the development of this approach to theory and practice.

The evolution of the theory and practice of emotion-focused therapy (EFT) has been interwoven with Les’ life context and personal development, and it has been a delicate balance to give appropriate weight to each. This book is a unique contribution to the field in revealing the contribution of the theorist’s life to the development of a major theory and practice in psychology. EFT, perhaps more than any other approach, best exemplifies how the implicit and explicit forces blend together to create holistic understanding.

Leslie S. Greenberg, PhD, is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of psychology at York University in Toronto, Canada and the primary developer of emotion-focused therapy. He has authored many books, the most recent being Changing Emotion with Emotion (2021). He has received the Distinguished Research Career Award of the International Society for Psychotherapy Research, as well as the Distinguished Professional Contribution to Applied Research from the American Psychology Association. Dr. Greenberg has also received the Canadian Psychological Association Professional Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychology as a Profession. He is a past president of the Society for Psychotherapy Research. Although retired, Dr. Greenberg is still currently training and supervising people internationally in emotion-focused approaches.