What is it about?
We argue that psychotherapy is nothing but emotion regulation, because it tries to reach a patient's goals with therapeutic methods that can, as we suggest, all be identified as either emotion regulation per se (closing the gap between perceived and desired emotions) or meta-emotion-regulation (closing the gap between perceived and desired emotion regulation behaviors).
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Why is it important?
This view offers, among other things, the possibility of unifying the vast varieties of different therapy schools and approaches, where each of them is just a different (but sometimes overlapping) part of the same map.
Perspectives
I am aware that the article may seem quite radical, especially if people understand emotion regulation as just the thing you do when you are experiencing an unpleasant emotion.
Lorenz Kraft
Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Psychotherapy as hierarchical emotion regulation., Journal of Psychotherapy Integration, November 2025, American Psychological Association (APA),
DOI: 10.1037/int0000376.
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