Helping Clients Victimized by Intimate Partners Through Stages of Change: An Emotion-Focused Approach
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Helping Clients Victimized by Intimate Partners Through Stages of Change: An Emotion‑Focused Approach João Leal1,2 · Carla Cunha1,2 · Anita Santos1,2 · João Salgado1,2 Accepted: 15 September 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Intimate partner violence results in extensive negative mental health outcomes including depression, posttraumatic stress, and anxiety. Moreover, victimized partners who experience cumulative episodes of abuse over time can also present severe affect dysregulation and interpersonal difficulties. Preliminary evidence for existing psychological treatments shows that these are globally effective on a symptomatic level and in reducing revictimization. Nonetheless, systematic reviews show high attrition rates and suggest that future interventions need to address a wider range of emotional difficulties and contextual challenges according to readiness for change. In this article, our goal is to contribute to the development of more responsive interventions that are tailored to individual experiences of violence with a focus on personal values, self-determination, and autonomy, as well as promoting adaptive coping and safety. More specifically, we describe how the intervention principles and experiential tasks of a neohumanistic model, emotion-focused therapy, can be integrated into a mediating readiness for change framework to help victimized clients receiving psychological treatment. We address four main problematic contentaffective states that may hinder the therapeutic progress (interrupting fear of change, decisional pain, overwhelming safety concerns, and long-term interpersonal injuries), their association with stages of change, and how they can be resolved insession using emotion-focused principles and interventions. The implications for future research are also discussed. Keywords Intimate partner violence · Emotion-focused therapy · Stages of change model · Psychotherapy · Victimization
Introduction This paper describes how intervention principles and experiential tasks from emotion-focused therapy (Goldman & Greenberg 2015; Greenberg 2015) can be integrated in a tailored stages of change model (Prochaska & Norcross 2014; Reisenhofer & Taft 2013) to help clients victimized by intimate partners receiving psychotherapy. Our goal is to * João Salgado [email protected] João Leal [email protected] Carla Cunha [email protected] Anita Santos [email protected] 1
University Institute of Maia-ISMAI, Av. Carlos Oliveira Campos‑Castelo da Maia, Avioso S. Pedro, 4475‑690 Maia, Portugal
Center of Psychology at University of Porto, Porto, Portugal
2
contribute to the development of psychological interventions that are more flexible in addressing personal experiences of violence, respect the client’s autonomy and self-determination, promote safety, and support adaptive coping by facilitating access to internal and external resources (Sorrentino et al. 2020). Intimate partner violence is the most commonly committed crime agai
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