Emotional Mastery and Life Strategy: Moving to Solutions

Abstract

Now that the client has made himself familiar with all of the emotions involved in the problematic situation, and is aware of his own Survival Strategy, work begins on achieving suitable solutions in the next step. The most important thing here is that the client is enabled to deal with the emotions involved now in a different way so that he can, as required, act against his Survival Strategy. The aim is that the client can respond in the future more flexibly and appropriately to various situations and persons, so that symptom formation is no longer necessary.

But how can these solutions be made attractive and motivating for the client? How does he develop adequate perseverance and frustration tolerance for this change process?

An embodiment-access can also be valuable for the answer to these two questions. Usually the therapist has already drawn up a therapy plan and defined the corresponding therapy goals with the client when they started working together. These are now taken up again on the basis of the insight from the Survival Strategy and Emotional Field, and bodily anchored. This is done with the aid of the exercise “The New Path.” Here the target state is not only “embodied” and linked with the picture and motto, each emotion from the field also receives the esteem due to it in terms of its contribution to the life history and a new role on the way to the goal. This type of work promotes acceptance to a high degree. In order to structure the change process within the Emotional Mastery in a way the client can understand, the alignment with the client’s own value system (see client 13) serves as an overriding orientation, and the so-called Life Strategy as a concrete guideline. It provides in just a few words a clear description of which development fields await the client.