Emotionally Focused Therapy

Originally developed for couples, EFT has found effectiveness between family members as well as romantic couples. As its name implies, emotionally focused therapy is based on emotions. It helps in treating depression, distressed relationships, and much more. It is currently used in private practices, hospital clinics, and training centers throughout the world.

Goals of Emotionally Focused Therapy

EFT’s main goals are to expand and reorganize important emotional responses, implement and foster the creation of a secure bond between partners, and help shift each partner’s position of interaction while initiating new cycles of interaction that are more beneficial for the relationship. Emotionally focused therapy helps create secure and lasting bonds between partners and family members and strives to reinforce the positive bonds that already exist.

EFT is a practical technique that has enormous success with couples, and can facilitate change in marriages and relationships that exhibit a wide range of challenges. EFT works to intervene where needed and create change to help relationships work more effectively through a spirit of harmony and respect.

This is how Sue Johnson, the developer of EFT, describes the counseling process:

Emotionally Focused Couple and Family Therapy is a treatment methodology that shows the best outcomes of any intervention for troubled relationships. And these outcomes appear to last! You can look on the EFT website, www.iceeft.com, for a summary of the many research studies and articles showing the eﬃcacy of this approach.

EFT does not teach communication skills or give advice. It basically sets out clearly how partners trigger each other, lose their emotional balance, and pull each other into an escalating dance of emotional disconnection. EFT therapists understand the dynamics of distress and, because we have learned how to work with emotional signals, we know how to help troubled couples change their emotions – the music of their dance. When the emotional music changes, they can move together in new ways.

EFT is also the only approach to couple and family therapy based on a clear and scientiﬁc understanding of adult love – why it matters so much, and what is needed to make it work and last. EFT understands that love is not just about sentiment and sex. It is an ancient, wired-in survival code designed to keep a few people you can really count on close so they are there when you are vulnerable and need support. This longing for connection is wired into our nervous system, and when partners can be attuned and emotionally responsive to each other in what we call “Hold Me Tight conversations,” they can deal with almost any personal diﬀerences and stressors. This scientiﬁc approach to love allows us to be on target and to help people actively shape their love relationships.

Download the EFT Conversation One Synopsis

Goals of Emotionally Focused Therapy

Don Sizemore & Associates is dedicated to helping individuals, couples, and families restore, renew, and transform broken and disconnected relationships and overcome mental, emotional and physical struggles.