Undoing emotion blocks: Two chair enactments

To heal troubled souls and minds, clients need to experience the emotions that go with their stories. Understandably clients protect themselves from feeling their dreaded, emotions. They fear that if they allow these emotions, they will fall apart, disintegrate, and be unable to cope, so they do all in their power to not feel. However, what they resist, persists, so blocking is not an effective solution. In this workshop we will look at ways to help clients undo their emotional blocks

This workshop will present an emotion-focused approach to unblocking blocked emotions. It will give clinicians practical and specific interventions to help clients experience themselves as agents in the blocking process. Two chair dialogues will be discussed and demonstrated in which one part, the interrupter, is guided to enact the blocking process to help clients become aware of how they block their emotions

This workshop is designed to help you:

1. Identify markers of self interruption
2. Understand clients’ experience of blocking
3. Discriminate between the concepts of self protection and avoidance
4. Discriminate different steps of unblocking of emotions
5. Learn to promote unblocking using two chair enactment at markers of self interruption

 

Day 1 Emotional Blocking

Introduction to E motion focused therapy

The experience of Blocking

No words for emotion

Act of Self Protection and Self Control

Video tape examples

 

Day 2 Unblocking interrupted emotion

Model of the resolution process

Two chair enactment

Steps of the intervention process

Video tape example