Cognitive behavioural Therapy............Something missing?!

The difficulty is that CBT was designed before LeDoux finally established that emotion comes before thought! So of course, cognitive behavioural therapy focussed on managing the thoughts which lead to the behaviour, rather than the emotions that lead to the thoughts that lead to the behaviour.

So if you ask somebody who has followed an anger management course if it works, they will tell you that sometimes it does, and sometimes it doesn't. Of course everybody is pleased with the "sometimes it does", and disappointed with "sometimes it doesn't". The likely reason that it doesn't is that  most work seeks to address the behaviour of anger, not the emotion of anger. The emotion anger comes before the thoughts and the behaviour. So they have to learn to regulate their emotions, not necessarily "simply" manage the anger! And the regulation of their emotion requires a much deeper understanding of all their emotions.

The next difficulty is that the primary basic emotion is missing from virtually everybody else's list. Which is it? Well that is obvious, so obvious that it is missing from everybody's list. But when recognised it helps create a "pretty picture", and an entirely plausible and really quite easy way of understanding the workings of our emotions. Trust developed through Attachment is what connects our basic emotions.......simple?!