Name

Greenberg, Leslie

Introduction

In his academic career, Leslie Greenberg has led the development of two innovative, research-supported psychotherapy approaches – emotion-focused therapies (EFT) for individuals and couples. Both approaches have been significantly developed with both theory and research over the past 30 years. This entry will focus on Greenberg’s development of the emotion-focused couples approach.

Career

Leslie Greenberg was born and raised in Johannesburg, South Africa. He moved to Canada with his wife Brenda in 1965 and first completed a master’s in systems engineering at McMaster University in Hamilton. He went on to complete a PhD in Clinical Psychology at York University under the tutelage of Laura Rice, a former student of Carl Rogers. It was his early humanistic and experiential training that solidified his belief in the power of the therapeutic relationship characterized by empathy, genuineness, and unconditional positive regard to effect change, along with the growing field of emotion theory. He was thus convinced that a focus on underlying emotions was integral to the change process. In 1976, he moved to the University of British Columbia, to be an assistant professor of counseling psychology, where he remained until 1986. It was there that he developed emotionally focused couples therapy as a young professor along with his graduate student Susan Johnson (Greenberg and Johnson 1988). He had completed a sabbatical in 1980 at the Mental Research Institute in Palo Alto, California, where he learned about the psychotherapeutic treatment of couples and families. Based on this experience, Greenberg was surprised and impressed with the importance of power dynamics in relationships. This interest was likely influenced by his political experiences as a young boy growing up in apartheid-ruled South Africa. In 1986, he returned to York University to be a professor where he has remained ever since. In the 1990s, he focused on the development of EFT for individuals but refocused on development and study of EFT for couples in 2000 after receiving a grant to study the process of forgiveness in couples therapy.

Contributions to Profession

Greenberg’s interest in studying couples evolved in part from his research on intrapsychic conflict resolution that he later applied to couples, in which he found that softening of an internal, blaming critic led to resolution. Greenberg’s first outcome study was followed later by process-outcome research showing that peak session conflict interaction was deeper in experiencing and more affiliative than the interaction in poor session conflict episodes (Greenberg et al. 1993). This supported the basic presupposition of the therapy approach that the presence of partner’s experiencing primary emotion and sharing these with each other via in-session enactments predicts success.

Over the years, Johnson further integrated attachment theory into the model and successfully promoted its development, also establishing further empirical support for its effectiveness. Greenberg later conducted research on EFT-C evaluating the effects of the treatment for couples who partook in short-term therapy when one member had an unresolved emotional injury resulting from the partner’s actions. Couples in treatment scored significantly better than waiting-list controls on all indices of change (Greenberg et al. 2010). Woldarsky Meneses and Greenberg (2014) then created a model of forgiveness in couples and showed that when forgiveness occurs, the injured partner shifts from secondary anger to primary sadness or hurt expression, to which the offending partner must respond supportively. In kind, the offending partner takes responsibility and offers a heartfelt apology for the injury, expressing shame, a state of profound vulnerability, which the injured partner accepts. In addition, vulnerability expression during sessions was linked to improvement among couples seeking to heal from emotional injuries (McKinnon and Greenberg 2013).

The resurgence of Greenberg’s effort to develop EFT-C and investigate it further leads to further developments in the model. In time, the name was shortened to emotion (rather than emotionally) focused in part to represent the growing approach that could be applied to both individuals and couples and in part to distinguish it from Johnson and colleagues’ approach. The expanded 5-stage, 14-step model is described in a book by Greenberg and Goldman (2008). The model focuses more intently on the role of emotion in couples therapy and the importance of both self and system change through the promotion of both self-soothing and other-soothing (Goldman and Greenberg 2013). To conceptualize couples’ difficulties, a circumplex model was adopted that describes functioning along the dimensions, attachment or affiliation, and influence. Both are seen as interacting and key sources of conflict in couples and are addressed in the process of change. In addition, a third dimension of attracting/liking is posited that, while less fundamental than attachment or identity, is separate from the attachment system that is largely governed by the core emotion of fear.

Cross-References