What is Emotionally Focused Therapy?

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is a research-based, humanistic approach to psychotherapy formulated in the 1980’s and developed in tandem with the science of adult attachment, a profound developmental theory of personality and intimate relationships.  This science has expanded our understanding of individual functioning and health as well as the nature of love relationships and family bonds.  Attachment views human beings as innately relational, social, and wired for intimate bonding and connection with others.  The EFT model prioritizes emotion and emotional regulation as the key organizing agents in individual experience and key relationship interactions.

Emotionally Focused Therapy Modalities

  • Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFCT)

    Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFCT) is a short-term structured approach, encompassing 8 to 20 sessions, established in the 1980s based on attachment science. It employs a humanistic, experiential approach to restructure emotional experience, alongside a systemic structural approach to amend interactions. Extensive research underpins EFCT’s effectiveness, showcasing substantial treatment effect sizes with enduring results. EFCT has been utilized successfully across diverse settings and with various couples facing challenges like depression, anxiety, or forgiveness dilemmas. It’s employed across North America, Europe, Australia, among others, with both traditional and non-traditional couples, demonstrating its wide applicability and effectiveness.

  • Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT)

    Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT) is a groundbreaking therapeutic model that  facilitates emotional processing and the creation of secure relationships with self and others. Originating from Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) for couples, EFIT adapts these principles for individual therapy, offering a structured approach to help individuals address various challenges including anxiety, depression, trauma and relationship problems. EFIT’s unique approach empowers mental health professionals to help their clients transform restrictive emotional patterns, foster internal coherence, and build deep resilience. In other words, EFIT allows them to be fit to flourish in life and in love.

  • Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT)

    Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) extends the principles of Emotionally Focused Therapy to mend and fortify familial bonds. The core objective is to cultivate secure family patterns, where attachment, caregiving responses, and emotional bonds are effective. EFFT centralizes on stabilizing negative interaction patterns, restructuring parent-child interactions, and consolidating the felt security through new connection patterns. Following attachment science, it guides families to experience swift progress as members become more responsive and engaged, uncovering and addressing previously unrecognized attachment-related emotions and needs, thus fostering individual growth and intergenerational relationship enhancement.

"Relationship distress is the single most common reason for seeking therapy. It undermines family functioning and is strongly associated with depression, anxiety disorders, and alcoholism.  EFT for couples offers a comprehensive theory of adult love and attachment, as well as a process for healing distressed relationships.  EFT recognizes that relationship distress results from a perceived threat to basic adult needs for safety, security, and closeness in intimate relationships.  This experiential/systemic therapy focuses on helping partners restructure the emotional responses that maintain their negative patterns of interaction.  Through a series of nine steps, the therapist leads the couple away from conflict deadlock into new bonding patterns. Over the past 30 years, Sue Johnson and her colleagues have developed and rigorously researched this short-term approach in couples therapy.  It is now one of the best delineated and empirically validated approaches in the field of couples therapy."

- Quoted from brochure produced by International Centre For Excellence In Emotionally Focused Therapy (ICEEFT).