Emotion focused

Alliance-Focused Training developed in parallel with the principles of emotion-focused therapy (beginning with Greenberg & Safran, 1987, Emotion in Psychotherapy, Guilford Press). Within this framework, emotions are understood not simply as biologically driven signals but as constructed meanings—forms of lived information that emerge from our ongoing efforts to make sense of experience in relation to self and other. They provide continuous feedback about how we organize and interpret our experience as biological and relational beings situated within specific contexts.

While emotions are biologically grounded and have evolved adaptive functions in human survival, they are also shaped through learning, culture, and narrative; they embody the stories we tell about ourselves and our relationships. From a constructivist perspective, emotions function not only to safeguard biological and learned goals, but to organize and reorganize meaning systems in the face of changing interpersonal realities.
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Alliance-Focused Training thus tracks both patients’ and therapists’ emotional and meaning-making processes, using a range of interventions to activate affective experiences that can be reflected upon, symbolized, and reconfigured. The mutual regulation of emotion—how patients and therapists co-create and co-regulate their emotional experience—is a central process through which new meanings and possibilities for change emerge.