Emotionally Focused Therapy privileges emotion and emotion regulation, shaping key emotional experiences in session, where the therapist guides clients into and through the emotional moments that define their sense of self and of others towards a new sense of balance, competence and connection. It is profoundly relational and offers attachment science, with its map to human longings, misery, and motives, as a way to focus each session and create on-target interventions. EFT is the gold standard of couple intervention, with a large body of research supporting its efficacy and long-term effects. Over the last few years, the use of EFT with individuals dealing with depression, anxiety, and PTSD have been further outlined and refined. This model is now set out in the new primer.
Attachment offers a map to blocked developmental pathways obscuring secure, coherent connection with a resilient sense of self and with others. As a developmental theory, it also offers a clear model of personality and relational health and what is needed to reach this goal. The attachment map guides the therapist in the attunement process and offers a compass in the growth process.
The therapist also creates a specific kind of alliance—a safe haven and a secure base for growth in every session and addresses “frightening, alien, and unacceptable” emotions and emotional dilemmas. From an attachment viewpoint, negative emotions and coping strategies keep clients stuck in recurring and negative self-perpetuating cycles of arousal and interactions with others.
Emotional isolation is seen as a core issue and risk factor for all mental health issues. Just as being able to be open, present, and responsive to inner cues and to others creates corrective encounters in couple therapy, so, in EFIT, do such encounters with the self and representations of key attachment figures or aspects of self. The attachment frame helps the therapist sing to the client’s amygdala in a way that shapes an organic, already wired-in growth process.
It is in our younger years that we learn how to approach and regulate our core emotions and that our sense of self and habitual ways of connecting with others take shape. First lessons are powerful and embodied in the nervous system, affecting how we navigate our world and continue to form our identity. But they are not cast in stone. Positive connections with supportive attachment figures can help us deal with trauma and deprivation and still find a way to be resilient. Our secure connection with our inner resourceful self and with others can change and grow throughout our adult life. Indeed, EFT research has shown that this therapy can create more secure attachment styles and more securely bonded relationships that reduce factors like depression and help build resilience and strength. A brain scan study found that EFT for couples and the bonding events that occur in that therapy change the way women’s brains respond to a physical threat (click here for a list of studies).
General EFT and EFIT are explicitly based on attachment science. EFT combines a focus on dancer and dance – how the individual shapes their own reality and their relationships with others. EFT has been rigorously tested empirically in terms of outcomes, follow-up effects, and exactly what creates a significant change in session.
It focuses on emotion and uses the power of restructured emotion to move clients into potent new experiences that expand the self and prime new cognitions and action tendencies. In general, EFT combines the clarity and focus typical of more behavioral interventions with the depth and relevance of more humanistic experiential therapies, allowing people to address deep existential fears and longings.
The theoretical frame and the core interventions are the same across modalities. However, the primary goal in EFIT is the expansion of the self rather than the shaping of more positive bonding connections with specific others in-session.
In thousands of studies, attachment science outlines how secure connection with others offers us the sense of safety we need to grow, risk, develop, and explore our world. Vigilance for danger, avoidance of risk, and a sense of helplessness are key risk factors for all mental health problems. The therapist offers the same kind of safety as a supportive attachment figure, and this naturally calms the nervous system and encourages openness to experience and the courage to fully encounter it. Safety does not mean mouthing nice supportive phrases. It means being fully present to the client and giving the message that this client is seen and accepted in all their frailty and that the therapist believes in their ability to grow and knows how to encourage that growth. People do not turn to and deal with their dragons alone or when they have no safe place to stand. We are not wired for that.
Magic in EFT is not the sleight of hand of the clever therapist—the insight offered or the clever advice given. Our need for others and the vulnerability of our young have structured our brain and our nervous system to give priority to and respond to certain cues—cues that are saturated in emotion. The magic of EFT is that we know how to go to the heart of the matter with clients, how to engage and enthrall them, and how to plug into, order, and reshape their pain, fear, and longings.
This refers to the focus of EFT therapists on process rather than content. We do not try to solve the client’s problems, to offer quick or immediate solutions. We explore the how, the process of how a symptom is primed, maintained, and perpetuated.
Copyright © 2024 Elements
(866) 542-2252