Emotionality as Personality Processes: If one changes one, one changes two!

What is it about?

We offer a simple heuristic framework to organize the diversity and scope of powering up the mechanism of emotional processing in psychotherapy with clients with personality pathology. More than looking at concrete interventions or tasks, we want to observe the constituent emotional change processes as they are facilitated in-session. We hypothesise that psychotherapists usually engage with the client as a single person, but they can also be observed as engaging with two persons in the room, separately. We illustrate clinical evidence favouring a bifocal or dualistic formulation of self-processes or self-strivings within the client with personality pathology when working with emotion in-session.

Featured Image

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

Photo by Ehimetalor Akhere Unuabona on Unsplash

Why is it important?

The choice, or at least the awareness, of which of the two persons (competing self-organizations) in the client is dominant, or which of them the therapist wants to bring into focal awareness can be important, as each may involve different emergent emotional states and processing requirements. We believe it may help therapists to manage the serious difficulties across personality disorders, like patient’s shifting phenomenological experience of themselves and others as well as the corresponding difficulty integrating those.

Perspectives