Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples (EFT) offers a comprehensive theory of adult love and attachment, as well as a process for healing distressed relationships. It 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 interaction patterns. Through a series of nine steps, the therapist leads the couple away from conflict deadlock into new bonding interactions.
Goals of EFT
EFT is now one of the best delineated and empirically-validated approaches in the field of couple therapy.
As an EFT therapist I am a process consultant. I am available to show a couple the choices they make implicitly. I help them see the binds they put their partner in which are the result of their perfectly understandable ways of dealing with their emotions.
As an experiential therapist, I show couples the process of choice. I help them uncover the choice they make and I help them open up, by creating more safety, to more choices.
I don’t save marriages, rather I try to show people how to process emotions and send signals in ways that open up their options and their moves in the dance. As an EFT therapist I am committed to what works for people and what leaves them whole. (adapted from Sue Johnson)
