Dysfunctional positive affect: To clear the pain of unrequited love

Feeling the pain of rejection by someone you love is one of the most difficult experiences that we can have as human beings. Often, this terrible feeling is, in part, based on an unrealistic idealization of the lost lover. This protocol assists your client in focusing on those aspects of the remembered love relationship that retain the intense positive affect, so that a disinvestment process can occur, and the client can come to see the former relationship more realistically, with all its good and bad aspects. Clients in this situation will generally feel some relief from their previous obsessive thought pattern (i.e., pleasant memories of the ex-lover, quickly followed by feelings of intense loss and grief). Freed from this pattern, the client is more easily able to accurately access their options and move on. When setting up this protocol, the positive representative image, the LOPA for the positively felt emotion, and the location of that number in positive body sensations, are elicited.

Book Section

English

Jim Knipe

Knipe, J. (2010). Dysfunctional positive affect: To clear the pain of unrequited love. In M. Luber (Ed.), Eye Movement Desensitization (EMDR) Scripted Protocols: Special Populations (pp. 459-462). New York, NY: Springer Publishing Co