From Power, M. (2010) [Emotion-Focused Cognitive Therapy, Wiley-Blackwell]:
“It is hard to know from the relevant literature how often cognitive therapists have patients […] whose emotions and moods do not appear to be triggered by reportable [Negative Automatic Thoughts (NATs)]. […] But whether the answer is that there are many or very few such NAT-free cases, the fact that a proportion of any cognitive therapist’s caseload must consist of such cases raises the question of what therapists do when this happens. Perhaps the comment about Freudian patients that they always came to have Freudian dreams and Jungian patients came to have Jungian dreams might be applicable; perhaps, clients may be suggestible enough to begin to have NATs if you persist long enough pursuing them as a therapist – if the clients can stand such therapy for that long. Of course, we know from the work on false memories that the therapeutic encounter is an extremely powerful one and that some clients may even falsely recollect memories of abuse, alien abduction or such, if that is the line being pushed by the therapist (Power, 2002). So having a few negative thoughts is small fry compared to alien abduction or imagined abuse…
“The point that we wish to make is that there are many strengths to the cognition focused approach, but there may be many limitations because of the failure to give emotion its rightful place…”
“We believe (Power & Dalgleish, 1997, 2008) that the problem is that the basic theory is wrong and that it is too simple. The cognitive therapies over-emphasize the role of thought in emotional disorders, and they lack an adequate theory of emotion:…”