ABSTRACT
Cognitive therapy has a long tradition of research and conceptual modelling and core issues of this approach are the emphasis on client’s empowerment, the focus on positive thinking, and the use of different strategies, e.g. “homework,” as tools for enhancing self-knowledge. The cognitive approach to counseling is based on the belief that learning comes from personal experience and counselors work on the client’s ability to accept behavior, clarify problems and difficulties, and understand the reasoning behind the importance of setting goals. But in the last decades, there have been several new developments in the field of cognitive therapy, the so-called “third wave cognitive therapy”: the introduction of mindfulness (Kabat-Zinn, 2003), the Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, ACT (Hayes, 2004), the Dialectic Behaviour Therapy, DBT (Linehan, 1993, 2014), the low intensity C.B.T. (Bennett-Levy, Richards, & Ferrand, 2010), the cognitive-relational approach, that give a central role to attachment (Rezzonico & Meier, 2010). All the third wave approaches pay a strong emphasis on emotion regulation, introducing in the cognitive therapy new ideas and new therapeutic tools. The chapter tries to give an answer to the main question: what and how of these new entries in the field of traditional cognitive therapy can be eligible to be selected, modified, and adapted to be of use also in counseling interventions, given the specific structure of counseling and the specific role of the counselors. The major focus of the chapter will be on the emotion regulation processes, from emotions awareness to behavioral regulation, presenting some major techniques: the “slow-motion” technique to explore the present experience, the practical application of some emotion regulations strategies, some basic mindfulness attitudes, that appear good candidates for the counseling field. The description of the real experience of a counseling protocol for young adults and focused on emotion regulation will help to better explain what presented in the chapter, giving evidence of the possibility to implement effectiveness research in case of counseling intervention.
