Emotionally Focused Therapy
Emotionally focused therapy explores attachment relationships and emotional experiences to facilitate the creation of healthy and secure connections with self and others.
What is Emotionally Focused Therapy?
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is a evidence-based approach to therapy designed to help individuals, couples, and families build stronger emotional connections. Developed by Canadian researcher and therapist, Dr. Sue Johnson, EFT recognizes the profound impact of our attachment relationships on our sense of wellbeing and quality of life. EFT focuses on understanding and transforming emotional patterns that cause distress and disconnection, fostering greater emotional awareness and deeper intimacy and trust in relationships.
Key Features of EFT:
- Emotion-Centered: EFT helps individuals and couples identify, understand, and express emotions to create meaningful change and connection.
- Attachment-Based: Grounded in attachment theory, EFT addresses unmet emotional needs and strengthens the bonds between partners or family members.
- Transformative Process: EFT supports clients to shift negative processing and interaction patterns into positive, secure patterns of connection.
- Collaborative and Safe: EFT therapists provide a non-judgmental space for exploring vulnerabilities, increasing emotional awareness, and building emotional intimacy.
- Research-Supported: EFT has been extensively validated as effective for improving relationship satisfaction and reducing distress.
Is EFT Right for Me?
How EFT Works:
- Stabilization: Therapists help clients identify negative emotional cycles and patterns that threaten well-being and undermine connection. As greater emotional balance emerges, clients are better able to tolerate difficult emotions and begin to change the patterns they are stuck in.
- Restructuring: Through guided emotional engagement, clients learn to identify, understand and express their needs and vulnerabilities in a way that fosters closeness and understanding of self and others.
- Consolidating Changes: Therapists support clients in reinforcing new interaction patterns, ensuring lasting improvements in their relationships and sense of well-being.
Why Choose EFT?
When we experience challenges in our most important relationships, we often become emotionally distressed. Whether conflict or distance in our present relationship, or abuse or neglect in the past, relationship insecurity can lead us to use strategies that undermine happiness and connection. Emotionally Focused Therapy helps people move past fear and disconnection to build secure, loving relationships and healthy ways of coping. By addressing emotional needs and creating lasting change, EFT empowers couples, families and individuals to experience deeper intimacy, trust, and resilience.
Emotionally Focused Therapy has been demonstrated effective for treating a variety of concerns:
Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFCT) recognizes that emotional connection is foundational to relationship satisfaction. EFCT has a wide research base that demonstrates it effective for supporting both traditional and non-traditional couples though
- conflict
- communication challenges
- emotional disconnection
- infidelity/betrayal
- sexual concerns
- lack of intimacy
- navigating transitions
Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) applies the principles of attachment and emotional bonding to the experiences of families. From this perspective, distress in families is best treated by supporting families to create safety, security, stability and connection. EFFT can be applied to families of any composition (including families with adult children) and can support with
- parenting challenges
- child behaviour concerns
- family transitions
- family discord or conflict
- sibling rivalry
- step-family dynamics
Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT) supports personality growth, trauma processing, symptoms reduction and greater connection with self and others. EFIT is an effective treatment for:
- attachment trauma including childhood abuse or neglect
- depression
- anxiety
- relationship struggles
- emotional regulation
- coping