Emotions in Adlerian Psychotherapy and Counseling
Individual psychology views the individual as a unit, as opposed to a collection of personality traits, which add up to a total personality. The individual strives to overcome a perceived minus or inferiority by establishing a goal and a direction of movement. The individual is an indivisible whole, a body-mind unit, striving to belong to the larger units of humanity and the cosmos. In this context, if the Adlerian premise is correct, emotion and feeling should emerge as an aspect of the individual’s effort rather than as an independent force within the personality.
Subjectively to the individual, however, it often appears otherwise. He is “overcome with emotion”, “governed by emotion”, “mute with emotion”. He may see that the emotion has such power over him that he “couldn’t help it,” “my anger got the best of me and drove me to it.” Emotion allows the individual to deny responsibility for his own actions and to see himself as a victim of irrational forces beyond his control but residing within him.
Looks are deceiving. Ultimately, we cannot understand human behavior and character unless we accept that the individual is indivisible and responsible. The alternative view, seeing personality as the mere sum of inputs, dissolves the individual into independent forces. In fact, there can be no indivisible and responsible personality unless the individual is a self-directed, goal-setting, self-selecting, and self-determining entity.
What are emotions for in human life? They seem to mobilize the individual in movement towards a goal. It is interesting that the very etymology of the word emotion alludes to a sensation of movement: e = out, movere = to move. Inherent in this is a sense of movement, a movement from one point to another, or a movement in one direction. Sometimes this movement can be a strain against the movement, standing still, or hesitating. Sometimes it can be a retrograde movement.
Adler places the individual in his social environment, without which the individual is really unthinkable. The individual is born, develops and matures in a social field. The meaning or direction of this social field, which acts as an omnipresent social gravity, is Adler’s Gemeinschaftsgefühl, social interest, social consciousness, or community feeling. It is striking that Adler identifies this as a feeling, Gefühl. The individual’s goal is revealed emotionally and expressed in action. This behavior may, at one extreme, resonate entirely with social interest; at the other extreme it can be diametrically opposed to social interest. The first could be seen as conjunctive and the second as disjunctive.
I think it would be incorrect to classify the emotions themselves as conjunctive or disjunctive. They only have meaning or sense as part or aspect of the total movement of the person. It would be tempting to see love and admiration as a conjunction unto themselves, but what about love and admiration for the Führer and a violently pursued ideal of racial purity? Clearly this love carried with it hate and aggression. And would it be disjunctive to hate injustice and oppression and mobilize forces against them? Our actions, emotions and goals can only be evaluated with reference to the “absolute truth” of Gemeinschaftsgefühl.
Emotion must always be present in everything the individual does, even if this is not always obvious. Emotions express our assessment of our situation and our intended response. As such, we can expect the excitement to be especially noticeable when the lifestyle is under pressure from the environment. A person whose priority is to avoid stress and failure will react emotionally to impending dangers. Your emotion will heighten your awareness of the danger, focus your entire being on coping with the situation, and mobilize all the necessary inner forces to that end. At the same time it will shut down awareness of other aspects of the environment that seem irrelevant.
The individual is a mind-body unit and emotions directly express the mind-body link, as if they were thoughts expressed in the body. This is Adler’s organ dialect or what today we would call body language. We often speak of ourselves as moved by experiences. Even memories can have this effect. A thought can be felt in its bodily effects. We know we are in touch with some meaningful experience when we feel it in our bodies. This can be a quickening of the pulse, a start, nervous tension and increased awareness. But also a threatening experience can make us cool. It is this that can lead us to feel that we have no control over our emotions, and in a sense that is true. However, it is true that we have caused our own emotion, only by consciousness. The Way of Life and its vast network of targets have been vigilant in the largely unconscious activity of ensuring our existence. We are only amazed that we can be mobilized for our own defense so quickly and without our conscious intervention.
Adler once said that all character traits, including the full range of possible emotions, are present from the beginning of our lives and that lifestyle represents individual selection of a subset of these as most promising for behavior. his life. In this sense, the Lifestyle is the more or less rigid concentration of one’s own internal forces, a form of psychic sclerosis or inflexibility. This also applies to the individual’s range of emotions. Adler noted that as a person ages he acquires the face he has produced by the emotions habitually playing on his features. The misanthrope will specialize in pessimistic and aggressive moods, which are prolonged emotions over time. He will inhabit such moods and mold his face and even his entire body to express them. For this reason, if we become skillful Menschenkenner, we can read the character of our fellow men. It also raises the possibility that a movement in the opposite direction may take place: that awareness of, say, a rigid posture or fixed facial expressions may reveal to the individual deeply ingrained habits of thought and attitude and stimulate him to reflect on how he is producing them. .
This possibility seems to me to be offered by practices such as the Alexander Technique and certain martial arts. You can become aware of your mood by reading your own body language. It is commonplace that it is possible to effect changes in one’s emotional state by making changes in one’s body, for example through exercise, going for a walk in the country, etc. David K Reynolds recounts how he was once professionally required to pose as mentally ill to assess the treatment of patients in US mental health institutions. He was able to change his posture and bodily attitude to become an individual so depressed as to be admitted to these institutions as a genuine case, passing the professional evaluation. As he tells it, it was actually a genuine case and at the end of the exercise he would have to act on himself in the opposite direction to become the real David K Reynolds again.
Of course, since they must always be present, emotions play a very important role in Adlerian and in all other counseling and psychotherapy. The Dreikursian recognition reflex itself is the emotional jolt the client feels when he feels a deep truth about himself within. The emotional reaction reveals what is genuinely felt. We know that we are in contact with the soul of the client, when we can feel the emotions of the client. By recounting their Early Memories and other key materials, clients unerringly reveal their emotional attitudes, which emphasize their Private Logics, Biased Apperceptions, and value systems. In addition, the client also feels this: he realizes by his own reaction to what he says that these things have a special meaning for him. And by asking a client to recount an early memory, we can get the client to revisit emotional states. One client of mine in particular did not understand how deeply she felt her childhood treatment by her mother until certain events and situations were relived in this way. When he felt this resentment again, he had to admit that this feeling had been with him all his life since childhood. Adler says that the task of psychotherapy is to allow the client to feel the living truth. This truth can never be merely an idea. It is only true when it is felt.
Sometimes we describe psychotherapy and counseling as the talking cure, as if it were just a rational dialogue. The entire process is permeated and mediated by emotion. It is emotion that unites the joint activity of client and therapist. It is emotion that underpins the client’s transference and the therapist’s countertransference.
Every significant event in psychotherapy is an emotional event. The relationship between therapist and client, if successful, is based on emotional bonds of trust and acceptance.
Adler also said that feelings are not arguments. Clients and people in general, who need to absolve themselves of responsibility for their own actions, are happy to identify their feelings as independent of their will. In truth, they are not independent of our will, but apparently independent of our conscious control. They appear in our conscious mind as clouds that have blown in to darken our inner sky. But the mind has produced them and the mind can, by taking responsibility, eliminate them. Soft feelings. When they don’t seem to fade, it’s because we keep them in existence, fueling their fire because they suit our purposes. I think of a client who kept alive a deep resentment against her mother because she justified her lack of accomplishment and immaturity. He supported his system of self-pity and victimhood, which absolved him of the responsibility of fully playing his role in life. He could claim special consideration from the world at large. It was only when he felt that resentment that he understood its poisonous effects. As he moves away from that old position, the client is visibly freed from the need to continually produce and reinforce feelings of resentment and self-pity.
A client recently gave me an Early Memory that reminded her of being a child, not wanting to go to a party to face possible humiliation of rejection by other children, hiding under a bed. his sadness and misery were tangible. A nagging feeling that I had missed something led me to revisit this Early Memory a week later, sensing a deeper purpose. The purpose of the hiding place was to be found, comforted and helped. The client smiled when she realized this, and also remembered her childhood disappointment when her father walked into the room and didn’t see her!
The Lifestyle can be thought of as a security system, identifying the great dangers of life and erecting the defensive measures that must be taken care of to keep the person safe. Part of this system is constant perimeter surveillance to identify approaching danger. The person shows this in the irritations to which he is subjected. The person who feels loss of control must react when his sense of control is threatened. The person who needs to feel significant must react when their inferiority is in danger of being exposed. The pleaser must notice any feelings of rejection or non-acceptance. The emotion at the base of all this is a deep existential anguish, which makes the person eternally vigilant and vulnerable. At the other end of the spectrum is the person who feels at peace with the world, accepted and self-accepted, and whose basic emotion is closer to the full development of Gemeinschaftsgefühl.