2012/06/01 by Hans Welling · 3 citations
Medicine · Neuroscience · Psychology · #Attachment and Relationship Dynamics #Clinical psychology #Cognitive psychology #Desensitization (medicine) #Developmental psychology #Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing #Identity, Memory, and Therapy #Intervention (counseling) #Mechanism (biology) #Medicine #Memory and Neural Mechanisms #Psychology #Psychotherapist #Sequence (biology) #Transformative learning
paper · doi:10.1037/a0027786
openalex publication_date 2012/06/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/15
Transformative emotional sequence (TES) is proposed as a common princi-ple of therapeutic change underlying a number of therapies: Emotion-focused therapy (EFT), coherence therapy (CT), accelerated experiential-dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP), and eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR). TES consists of emotional activation of a problematic emotional state followed by the activation of adaptive emotional state(s) within a short window of time. The resulting change is the creation of a permanent connection between previously unintegrated maladaptive emo-tional memory networks and adaptive emotional networks. Memory recon-solidation provides a plausible explanation for the mechanism underlying the effectiveness of TES. I compare TES to exposure, and argue that it is the intervention of choice for transforming maladaptive emotions, whereas ex-posure is most appropriate for accessing disowned and avoided experiences.