What Is Emotionally Focused Therapy?

Our most basic need as humans is connection. Dr. Sue Johnson writes, “No other experience will have more impact on our lives—our happiness and health—than our success at loving and being loved.” Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) helps us strengthen and repair our emotional bonds with our loved ones, so our relationships are richer, deeper, and more fulfilling. 

Founded in the 1980’s by Dr. Sue Johnson, a clinical psychologist and research professor, EFT for couples is the gold standard for evidence-based couples therapy. Research shows that when we bring awareness to our emotional state, allowing ourselves to experience and process our feelings, we tap into the most powerful means of promoting change and emotional maturity. 

Who Can Benefit From EFT Therapy?

Although EFT is best known as a therapy for couples, it has expanded to working with individuals and families. Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT) was developed for treating individuals suffering from apathy, low motivations, depression, anxiety, hopelessness, trauma, and healing from past negative experiences  Using EFIT, I help clients recognize and feel a full range of emotions, identify impulses to act in certain ways in response to emotions, and increase tolerance for experiencing emotions and sharing them with a trusted other. Additionally, Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) is utilized to help repair relationships between family members that can transform each member individually as well as the family as a whole. 

As Sue Johnson writes, “In effective EFT therapy, clients discover in an immediate, alive and explicit way how their manner of engaging with their emotions shapes their suffering.” Good EFT therapy, whether with individuals, couples or families, helps clients discover, articulate and process emotion in ways that lead to behavioral changes, helps them become more flexible and connected and allows them to engage more fully with others and life.

Emotionally Focused family therapy (EFFT) which focuses on healing relationship strains has demonstrated significant results, reducing variables, such as depression, anxiety and family conflict. Studies of Emotionally Focused Couples therapy show that EFT Couples therapy can significantly shift both anxious and avoidant partners in the direction of security and reduce symptoms such as relationship distress and depression.   

My Background In EFT 

I have been helping couples, individuals, teens, and families for over 10 years and am a certified EFT therapist in all three modalities—individuals, couples, and families. Since becoming trained in Emotionally Focused Couples therapy (EFT), Emotionally Focused Individual therapy (EFIT), and Emotionally Focused Family therapy (EFFT), I find it to be the most effective and efficient way to heal and repair relationships and to create a healthy sense of self and a deeper bond with others. After my initial training with Sue Johnson in 2017, I have continued to take advanced EFT trainings to stay up on the latest research and advancements in techniques.  

As a certified Emotionally Focused-trained therapist, I provide a safe and secure place for clients to explore their pain, helping them make sense of and validate current strategies they use to contain their emotion. I aim to create transformative moments for my clients where emotions that are frightening, alien, or unacceptable to them are looked at with less fear and more openness. 

During our sessions, I seek to help clients understand any misperceptions in view of self, other or the world that keeps them stuck in painful cycles. We create more emotional balance that helps clients either be less reactive or more present with their feelings. I help clients become more aware of their fears, vulnerabilities and longings and listen from the heart for understanding. I challenge strategies that “protect but imprison” the client. We make contact with one’s younger self that was shut down or shut off as a means of surviving in their family of origin and deepen one’s self compassion with this younger vulnerable self. As awareness increases and the clients feels more resourced, there is a decrease of the symptoms that brought them into therapy and they can experience a new sense of hope, direction and connection.

During therapy sessions, we reflect on how past experiences may constrain how clients think, feel, and act presently and help them discover better ways to communicate that can lead to a healthier connection with self and others. The goal in EFT therapy is for clients to foster a coherent sense of self-worth and create a felt sense of connections within relationships. EFT fosters emotional balance, a positive sense of self and other and full, open and flexible engagement with those we care about. 

Emotionally Focused Therapy is a good fit with my personal approach to therapy. Instead of just offering tips or strategies, with EFT therapy, I aim to help clients understand any misperceptions they may carry of themselves, others, or the world that keeps them stuck in painful cycles, and replace those old views with a healthier, more open, loving stance toward self and others. 

Find Out How Emotionally Focused Therapy Can Help You

I offer a free 15-minute phone consultation and can be reached through my contact page or at (561) 866-6607.

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