The Matrix of emotions: a compass for navigating throught emozions and rackets
Keywords:
Racket, authentic feelings, racket feelings, emotions, Transactional Analisys, Emotional Literacy, Emotional Literacy Emotion regulationAbstract
Emotional dysregulation is now considered one of the central processes underlying psychopathology (Gratz et al., 2015; Iwakabe, 2023). From this perspective, working on emotion regulation is a common goal across different psychotherapeutic approaches and a central factor in the process of change (Gross and Ford, 2023). In terms of Transactional Analysis, work on emotional regulation was initially explored by English (1971, 1972), who emphasized the difference between authentic emotions and racket (parasitic) emotions, and by Steiner (1984), who first introduced the concept of “emotional literacy,” which was subsequently widely adopted by other approaches.
This article proposes a table, called the “matrix of emotions”, which illustrates the functional process of emotion processing and allows us to easily identify the various blocks that a person may experience during this process, which lead to the development of parasitic emotions. The matrix can be useful in all fields of TA application, as it provides a simple and clear map that bridges theory and practice. In clinical terms, it can serve as a frame of reference both in the alliance phase, with a psychoeducational function, as it facilitates emotional literacy, and in the decontamination phase, as it allows the rackets that keep the person in the script to be identified. It can also guide the work in the deconfusion phase and guide and support the relearning phase.
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