Emotion-Focused Therapy for Generalized Anxiety Disorder: An Overview of the Model

Generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) is a severely debilitating disorder characterized by high comorbidity and a negative impact on overall well-being. Cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) is the most recognized psychological treatment of GAD. Although CBT is well-established, it is also shown that not all clients benefit from it. The goal of this paper is to highlight an emerging model of working with GAD patients from the perspective of emotion-focused therapy. It is comparable to mainstream CBT theories in so far as it proposes that the client is not avoidant of emotional experience or of its processing in general, but rather, that it is specific triggers that the client is afraid of. Contrary to mainstream CBT theories, change is not facilitated through emotional habituation to difficult triggers (or emotions), but rather through the restructuring and transformation of problematic emotion schemes through a sequence of emotional processing steps. These steps include overcoming emotional avoidance, differentiation of, and staying with, core painful feelings (such as loneliness/sadness, shame, and terror/fear), articulation of the unmet needs contained in those feelings and the expression of an emotional response to those feelings/needs, typically compassion and healthy, boundary setting, protective anger. A case illustration is provided.