What is Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT)?

Updated on 4/13/2022

What is Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT)?

Emotion focused therapy can help.Looking for healthy ways to understand and manage your emotions.Learn more

Emotion focused therapy can help.Looking for healthy ways to understand and manage your emotions.

Emotion focused therapy can help.

Looking for healthy ways to understand and manage your emotions.

Learn more

“Our emotions and our reactions to them drive so much of our interactions with others — especially those we love. Learning how to better identify, own, and transform your emotions is an excellent step towards better overall health!”

Talkspace therapist Ashley Ertel, LCSW, BCD, C-DBT

Therapists qualified in EFT therapy can help individuals learn to become more aware of their emotional experiences and patterns. They can help a person better adapt their emotions to new and evolving situations and, ultimately, develop better coping mechanisms while decreasing the impact of negative emotional experiences. For couples, the goal of emotion-focused therapy is to work toward establishing a ‘secure attachment,’ the idea that each partner provides a sense of security, protection, and comfort to the other. This also means that partners in couples therapy  work to support one another in creating their own positive experiences.

When is EFT Therapy Used?

Whether for couples, families, or individuals,EFT therapycan help address the following mental health issues:

What Philosophies Inform EFT Therapy

Developed in the 1980s,EFT therapyis a humanistic approach to therapy designed to help people better accept, regulate, understand, and express their emotions. It was developed in response to more traditional psychotherapy treatments that overemphasized cognition and behavior as opposed to the foundational role of emotional change.

Structural theories of Salvador Minuchin

Structural theory focuses on how our behavior interacts with, impacts, and elicits responses from those with whom we have relationships. Essentially this means that our behavior does not live in a vacuum — especially in relationships where our behavior has a direct impact on another person. EFT therapy uses these relational system techniques to help focus on, and change, factors in both personal and interpersonal realms.

Humanistic and experiential theory of Carl Rogers

Humanism, in this case, is the idea that humans have a deep capacity for growing and adapting their emotional responses and needs. EFT therapy operationalizes the principles of attachment sciences while attributing less consideration to what is “wrong” with a person and more emphasis on their personal growth (non-pathologizing).

“Learning how to form secure attachments in your adult, interpersonal relationships can be really hard if you were not able to do so throughout childhood. Therapy is an excellent step in helping you to lean into vulnerability and trust.”

Goals of EFT Therapy

A person in EFT Therapy can expect to better identify, experience, accept, explore, make sense of, transform, and bettermanage their emotions. It allows them to become more skillful in accessing and understanding what personal insights their emotions provide, and use that information to become more emotionally adaptive in uncomfortable moments.

During an EFT therapy session, a person is encouraged to face dreaded emotions in order to better process and change them, a step that requires one to fully accept these emotions as they are lived.

EFT therapy helps couples and families undergo three primary stages of treatment:

Finding an Emotion-Focused Therapist

An EFT therapist is a licensed mental health professional with additional training and experience in emotion-focused therapy. They can get certified from theInternational Centre for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy, so make sure to look for designation when identifying a mental health professional to work with. Beyond credentials, it is important to find an EFT therapist with whom you feel comfortable sharing and working on your emotions.

Creating a solid relationship with a therapist becomes the first step in your journey. If you feel that you could benefit from ETF therapy, consideronline therapy— it’s safe, secure, convenient, and fits a busy lifestyle.

Our goal at Talkspace is to provide the most up-to-date, valuable, and objective information on mental health-related topics in order to help readers make informed decisions.

Articles contain trusted third-party sources that are either directly linked to in the text or listed at the bottom to take readers directly to the source.

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