Emotionally Focused Therapy
The only empirically validated model for couples therapy.
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is considered an experiential model of therapy. As an outgrowth of humanistic therapy, EFT views couples and families in both intrapsychic and interactional terms, helping them gain access to what is emotionally significant to each person. At the same time, it helps them examine what guides their experiences and actions. It assists in exploration though the ongoing transactions occurring in the close, personal therapist-client(s) relationship. EFT practitioners focus on the process between people, not what is inherent in each person. Each person learns to examine how his/her interaction(s) with others sets off cues that maintain distress and dysfunction in the relationship. The emphasis is on helping clients explore their moment-to-moment inner experiences and relationship events, especially the rigid patterns that block emotional engagement.
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This brief, integrative approach can be a short-term therapy (8 to 10 sessions). There are three stages in the EFT change process.
Stage I: De-escalation of negative cycles and stabilization
Focus: Assessing and creating an understanding of interpersonal patterns and foundational attachment-related affect
Stage II: Creation of new stances and patterns of interaction that foster open responsiveness and more secure bonding
Focus: Withdrawer re-engagement and blame softening, allowing attachment needs to surface and be met in a transforming emotional connection
Stage III: Consolidation/integration
Focus: Addressing issues in light of new patterns
EFT therapists believe that humans have an inherent tendency to maximize capabilities and self-actualize. Thus, therapists help clients explore experiences and act as facilitators rather than experts. Throughout these stages learn skills for enhancing empathetic exploration and understanding are taught.
Efficacy & Outcomes
As the only empirically validated model for couples therapy and the most well-known contemporary experiential model, EFT presents a model grounded in explicit theory and supported by effectiveness research. In fact, research reflects that 70-75% of couples move from distress to recovery and 90% show significant improvements. EFT exercises aid individuals in recognizing and identifying their own and others’ internal cognitive, emotional, and bodily processes as they work to restructure habitual negative interactive patterns (e.g., attack-withdrawing, pursuing-distancing) that have created emotional removal, remoteness, and/or attack-attack engagements that ultimately prevent the development of secure bonds. What some pioneers in psychology were able to achieve intuitively, EFT does systematically in a step-by-step series of therapeutic tasks, in manual form, to facilitate emotional change.
*While included here as a common modality for couples therapy, EFT it is also effective for individual therapy and in the treatment of PTSD, chronic illness, and anxiety.
