I'm not sure what you mean by "testing" here. Other coaches and therapists have reported similar things, though.

My own interpretation is that excitement about the idea of a change or the epiphany involved in it, is an indicator that it has only been processed intellectually, not viscerally. (And thus represents a change in thinking/talking about the problem, rather than a change in values, feelings, or behavior.)

The other emotions are hard-to-fake signals of actual change or learning, in that 1) surprise equals learning something you didn't realize before (usually a realization that one could in fact do some simpler better thing than one is doing, without negative consequence), 2) the grief/loss stuff is a natural response to recognizing some pursuit as futile, and 3) the relief or release is a natural response to realizing one no longer has to engage with a painful pursuit of some kind.

So which one you experience is very situationally dependent on what kind of change is actually being made, but them arising spontaneously is a good short-term sign that some kind of change has taken place. Longer-term signs are spontaneously behaving differently in a situation to how you did before (i.e. finding yourself acting differently without conscious intent to do so), or forgetting you had a problem to begin with. (Or in the case where you're both acting differently and forgot the way you acted before, having other people comment on your changed behavior!)

The forgetfulness thing is perhaps one of the most widely-reported phenomena, perhaps because it just seems so weird. Lots of therapists also talk about the importance of grief in working through various things, but they're usually not as systematic or aggressive about inducing it as I am, I don't think. I find a strong correlation between successfully inducing a grief response regarding experiences of personal rejection, and an immediate reduction in the perfectionistic or self-critical impulses that were linked to that class of rejection. (Which is why I consider it a positive sign.)

Your examples seem pretty modern and not that similar to what the emotion evolved for, which is likely more about things like injury, illness, loss of allies, failed hunts, etc., where compensatory action by allies to literally care for you (in the sense of "taking care of") is quite immediately survival-relevant.

In this context, alerting your allies that you need extra help and/or backup to deal with your setback or loss of capacity seems quite valuable. Your examples don't really require material support from friends to help you survive, but in the ancestral environment, having people able to provide assistance could easily be a life or death difference even in the very short term, depending on the loss.

the title of this article is not “Emotions are always good.”

Good, because a lot of them are very much not. Even if in some sense they "make sense", this doesn't even mean they're useful. Many emotions exist to perform social signaling that won't actually do anything useful for you as an adult. And most negative-valence emotions are unnecessary except for very niche, specialized social signaling uses (such as dealing with being in captivity or under the control of an abuser or oppressive society).

On top of that, emotions are quite often learned behavior and subject to incentives, and may themselves be conditioned on the triggering of other emotions. It's not uncommon for people to be taught to feel e.g. ashamed of being happy! Our brains trigger emotions on the basis of its predictions of what it believes will be beneficial to us on the whole, often making the decision that feeling bad is better than risking disconnection with caregivers or getting punished for noncompliance with their emotional directives. These decisions can then sit around basically forever making us feel bad for really stupid reasons. (Like needing to be stressed or anxious to show that one is working hard, doing somehting important, or "taking things seriously".)

So even though emotions may have evolved for what might be sensible purposes before humans were able to "think things through", they usually aren't required for that purpose. For example, one can rationally decide on a policy of deterrence through "irrational" levels of revenge without needing to actually experience anger. Or decide that some behavior isn't producing good results and decide to do somethig different, without needing to feel guilt or shame.

Like, there are situations where "something is wrong, and I'm sad about it, and with help the wrong thing can be fixed and then I won't be sad".... And then there are situations where "something is wrong, and I'm sad about it, and it can't be fixed".... If we're saying the value of sadness is "it signals people to come help us", then it doesn't make so much sense in the second case, right?

The functional purpose of sadness is to summon allies who show they care about you. That's not the same thing as solving/fixing the problem, but ensuring that you aren't as harmed by your loss, and confirming you still have a place in/support from your community despite the loss.

IOW, sadness is like filing a claim on your social insurance policy to get recompense for the loss, not to have the insurance company un-burn-down your house.

Which are these workshop recordings you're talking about?

The ones in my membership site. There's rather a lot of them.

Eh, I wouldn't say you're necessarily not a coach, in the same way that an emu or ostrich isn't not a bird, it's just that I don't think your approach is a central example of the genre. Short-term coaches do exist, after all, just like flightless birds.

If you're asking from a marketing perspective, I wouldn't use consultant or practitioner, I'd either say "specialist" or "coach", i.e. secure attachment specialist or secure attachment coach. If you hardly ever work with anyone for very long or only work with people to solve a specific problem, I'd lean towards specialist. (Then again, I'm not sure I'd say "secure attachment" unless the people you work with already know that term and are looking for that. But I'm not the best person to ask marketing questions, anyway.)

I mean, technically I have some clients who only stick around for a few months, but they're sorta not clients - they're the people who basically binge-watch my workshop recordings and figure stuff out for themselves, then say okthanxbye. There's not very many of them and they always seem really happy and seem to have only had one or two things they needed to figure out, and maybe only needed 1-2 calls with me to get clear on how to do something from the materials. I suppose it might be interesting to do a long-term followup with some of them, but I can only think of 2-3 people who ever did it that way.

It's the idea that a coach is someone that resolves one specific issue that's actually weird here, no offense intended. ;-) If all one does is address one specific issue, they fall more under the umbrella of either "consultants" or therapeutic "practitioners" (such as hypnotherapists, NLP practitioners and so on).

While coaches often practice some of these modalities or methods as part of coaching, it's not at all the same thing. (But of course a practitioner can still call themselves a coach, and there's probably been a lot more bleedover in recent years.)

But in the broadest sense, the idea of a coach is to provide you with an outside view combined with specialized knowledge or skills, to help you be more successful through advice and feedback (possibly including accountability), often combined with inspiration, encouragement, or some other parasocial relationship aspects (such as being an example to aspire to or look up to, someone whose approval you want to earn, etc.). This definition encompasses sports/athletic coaches, executive coaches, life coaches, health coaches, etc., which is the approximate historical evolution of the field I believe.

(Notice, btw, that nearly all of these names imply you keep the coach for as long as you want to do well in sports, be an executive, have a great life or good health, etc. That's the job!)

It's true nowadays that there are many coaches with narrower or more problem-oriented foci, like e.g. different health coaches may work on either specific goals vs. specific health problems. In general coaches who help with goals work with people longer than ones who help with problems, unless of course the problem is chronic or difficult to solve.

Things are made more complicated by the fact that you can pretty much do or call yourself whatever you want, assuming it works! I used to call myself a "mindhacking instructor" because I wanted to avoid certain aspects of the coach concept, and then basically realized at some point 1) nobody knows WTF a mindhacking instructor is, and 2) it was just ego on my part anyway. (While it's true I do more instruction than anything else, that's still part of coaching, so I was just being a semantic nitpicker not wanting to be in the same category as certain people calling themselves coaches or claiming to sell coaching.)

Anyway. It's certainly the case that there exist coaches who specialize in short term actions and one-offs, but in general I'd say if there's no relationship aspect to what you're doing, you're probably not a coach, but a consultant or practitioner of some kind, more akin to a hypnotherapist or a specialist in NLP, EFT, or some other change modality. Such people don't really have relationships with their clients, as they're more problem-solvers rather than people-helpers.

Yeah - that's maybe a better way to put it. Coaches are people-helpers who can also solve problems or practice some particular Art. Practitioners just practice their Art. I used to try to define myself in the latter category, then ultimately realized that a lot of what goes into long-term change and personal growth is actually social in an incredibly fundamental and inherent way.

For some kinds of change, for example, the experience of having "someone on my side in this" or "someone who believes I can do this" is absolutely critical, and a coach may literally be the only person in your life who can give that to you, especially with problems you're experiencing shame or feelings of inadequacy about. In that context, trying to cut the process as short as possible is about the worst possible thing one can do, if it implies that the person is not worth the effort (e.g. if their experience of life has been that nobody gives a crap about them, everybody leaves/gives up on them, etc.).

I've been a bit confused by this post, but it's probably because I've never really done such short-term work with people; mostly I work with people on things that require one or more years of sustained effort across dozens of individual "breakthroughs" to reshape their life or personality the way they want (though of course they are getting incremental improvements all along the way).

So the idea of asking somebody a year after they're done seems weird to me, as why would the year after their last year be different than the year after their first? (And when I do hear from people a year or more later, it's nearly always to refer a friend or to work on something that's come up in the context of a new job, project, business, etc., usually with little relation to past work.)

Still, when someone gets excited about a breakthrough, I usually caution them that we won't know for a couple months whether it sticks (IME most fallbacks happen within 6-8 weeks). OTOH, when someone is skeptical about a breakthrough that's only a slight change to their automatic feeling response, I usually remind them that progress is progress, and that less dramatic changes are less likely to revert.

IOW, assuming a slight regression to the mean + cautious optimism is the best frame. (Two steps up and one step back is a meme for a reason!)

Also, in my experience, the "real" (i.e. most sticky) breakthroughs feel more like grief and regrets and loss than they do "exciting new breakthrough". The feeling is more like, "oh f*** I could have been doing things differently all this time, I didn't need to do XYZ or avoid ABC, crap!" (Or sometimes, it's just realizing how messed up some of the things that happened to you actually are.)

I think these types of changes stick better because the feelings are more reflective of "shift in values / perspective / actually seeing things in a new light" than "excitement about an idea in the present moment." This applies to me too, because I tend to get very excited when I spot where some of my behavior or feelings are coming from, and then forget to do the painful part that results in the actual perspective shift!

In such cases the problem comes "back" (not that it ever really left) within days, rather than weeks. Luckily I don't usually make that mistake with clients, as I have notes that keep me on track so I don't forget to pop the stack in session (and because any excitement is an obvious reminder we're probably not finished). But when i do stuff on myself I'm often just walking or standing around with no tracking of any sort.

tl;dr: being excited about a change is overall a bad sign for its longevity. The most positive signs are surprise (or sudden inspiration to actualy do something), grief/loss/sadness, or relief/release. (Not necessarily in that order)

afterthought: one of the reasons insight breakthroughs are more likely to fail is that more often than not, they represent an intellectual understanding that must be realized in action in order to benefit from, but most of the people i work with are working with me precisely because "intentions into actions" is the thing they have problems with. It's like, now you have even more ideas you have difficulty implementing, great. ;-) So it sticks for as long as they can maintain enthusiasm (2-3 weeks) then forget about it for another few weeks before something reminds them of the problem again (around 6-8 weeks).

But you can also have genuine breakthroughs (automatic feeling/behavior shifts, not intellectual ones) that revert around that time, but in that case it's usually a reinforcement/equilibrium of forces/"ecology" issue. For example, I once had a client who had made many improvements to his workflow to reduce stress... only to abandon those changes after a couple months. Turns out his family believed that if you're not stressed, you must not be doing anything very important/high status. So his new stress-reducing -- aka status-lowering -- workflow changes always felt subliminally wrong and uncomfortable until he shrugged them off again.

Anyway, I'm mighty curious about how these indicators and timeframes mesh (or don't) with others' experiences and practices. (And now that I've thought about detailed instances of specific personal and client cases, I'm realizing my 6-8 weeks is an outside limit, like 90-95th percentile? I think the median for things coming back is a lot lower, and my measurement might be skewed upward by how many weeks usually occur between sessions. IOW, probably half of everything that's going to come back does so within 3 weeks. So I say a couple months to be on the safe side, because the reinforce-extinguish patterns can take that long sometimes, even if it's not that often they actually do. (And partly because I now have tricks I use to try to identify them ahead of time.)