Psychotherapeutic Interventions for Emotion Regulation

Book excerpt: In recent years, a profound revolution in psychotherapy has brought affects to their rightful place. Along with cognitions, drives, and behavior, affects are one of the modalities that must be interpreted by theory and embraced by therapy in understanding both normal and pathological personality development. Here, John Omaha synthesizes a vast range of information about affect regulation and presents for readers an intervention, Affect Management Skills Training (AMST), that can be used with clients to regulate affects. The first four chapters of this book assemble current empirical and theoretical information about affect into an overall picture of how self-structure emerges in infancy, and what can happen when the infant-caregiver dyad malfunctions. The second part of the book is the center of Omaha's work where he presents clinical skills for psychotherapeutic interventions for affect regulation that are the focus of the book. The seven basic and several ancillary AMST interventions are designed to help clients remediate deficits in affect regulation and to promote the emergence of a more adaptive, positively functioning self. AMST, a bilateral stimulation protocol derived from EMDR, will be of interest to all clinicians working with clients who need to work on affect regulation.