Are you hard on yourself and always beating yourself up?
Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT)
Do you experience uncontrollable emotional outbursts?
Or are you maybe prone to numbness and dissociation?
Do fulfilling and meaningful relationships feel out of reach?
All of the above experiences are linked to how you process your emotions.
Emotion Focused Therapy
Many of us face challenges in our relationships, but Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT therapy) offers a path to deeper connections, better communication, and lasting change.
What is Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT Therapy)?
At its core, EFT is about understanding and transforming the emotional patterns that shape our interactions with others and ourselves.
Developed in the 1980s by Dr. Sue Johnson and her colleagues, EFT has grown from a couples therapy technique to a widely respected approach for individuals, families, and groups. It's rooted in the belief that our emotions are not problems to be solved, but valuable signals that guide us towards our needs and desires.
EFT has shown remarkable effectiveness across a wide range of relationship issues. Whether you're dealing with communication breakdowns, trust issues, or simply feeling disconnected, EFT can help.
It's particularly powerful for couples on the brink of separation, helping many find their way back to a loving, secure bond.
The Science Behind the Emotion
The broadly accepted theory is that emotions have evolved because they help us to survive. Your emotion system can process huge amounts of information in a matter of milliseconds and trigger actions and decisions aimed at keeping you safe.
The way you jump and are on high alert after a loud sound or that feeling in your gut telling you something bad is going to happen are examples of your emotion system quickly interpreting and giving you signals about the situation. Your emotions are also an important part of making daily decisions, like “Which shirt should I wear today” and provide direction for bigger decisions, like “Should I stay at my current job?”.
Your brain uses a complex network of millions of neurons to work. The more a neuron is used, or is “firing”, the more connections it will make with other neurons. This is the basis for understanding how Emotion-Focused Therapy can facilitate change. You can feel stuck in old patterns of feeling, thinking, and behaving.
In EFT, we can help you to activate these neurons and open the opportunity for new, more adaptive and helpful connections to be made. The more these new connections are activated, the easier it becomes to break the old pattern. Neurons that fire together, wire together.
Key Principles of EFT
To truly understand EFT therapy, it's helpful to explore its core principles. These foundational concepts guide the therapy process and set EFT apart from other approaches.
Attachment Theory
At the heart of EFT is attachment theory, which suggests that humans have a fundamental need for secure emotional bonds. This need doesn't disappear when we grow up — it continues to shape our relationships throughout our lives.
In EFT, we explore how your attachment experiences influence your current relationships. Do you tend to cling tightly when you feel insecure, or do you push others away? Understanding these patterns is the first step towards changing them.
When we feel securely attached, we're better able to manage stress, explore the world with confidence, and maintain healthy relationships. EFT couples therapy helps you build this secure base, whether with a partner, family member or within yourself.
Emotions as Central to Human Experiences
In EFT, we see emotions not as problems to be solved, but as valuable guides to our needs and experiences. Your anger might be signalling a need for respect, your sadness a need for comfort, your fear a need for security.
By helping you access and understand your emotions, EFT allows you to communicate your needs more effectively. Instead of saying "You never listen to me!" you might learn to say "I feel lonely and unimportant when we don't connect, and I need to feel valued by you."
This focus on emotions helps create deeper, more authentic connections. As you learn to recognize and express your emotions in healthy ways, you'll likely find your relationships become more satisfying and your sense of self growing stronger.
Identifying and Changing Negative Interaction Cycles
Many of us find ourselves stuck in repetitive patterns of conflict or disconnection. Maybe you criticize, your partner withdraws, you criticize more, they withdraw further — and suddenly you're caught in a painful cycle that seems impossible to break.
EFT therapy helps you recognize these cycles and understand the emotions driving them. Often, what looks like anger on the surface is actually fear or hurt underneath. By accessing these deeper emotions, you can begin to change the cycle.
The goal isn't to stop fighting (because fighting will always happen) — it's to replace negative cycles with positive ones. Instead of criticism and withdrawal, you might learn to reach for each other in times of need, creating a cycle of support and connection. This shift can transform your relationship, creating a secure bond that weathers life's challenges.
The Transformative Power of EFT Therapy Techniques
Emotionally Focused Therapy has the potential to create profound, lasting changes in your relationships and personal well-being. EFT can help you build stronger, more fulfilling relationships and a deeper sense of emotional balance.
This transformative power extends to various aspects of your life, from breaking negative patterns to fostering secure attachments and healing emotional wounds.
Breaking Negative Relationship Patterns
We all have patterns in our relationships, some helpful and some harmful. Common negative patterns include…
The pursue-withdraw cycle, where one partner constantly seeks connection while the other pulls away, and the blame-defend cycle, where partners get stuck in a loop of criticism and defensiveness.
Attack-attack cycle, where both partners lash out, escalating conflicts rapidly.
EFT helps you recognize these patterns and understand the emotions driving them. For instance, pursuit often stems from a fear of abandonment, while withdrawal might be driven by a fear of inadequacy.
Fostering Secure Attachments
At its core, EFT is about creating secure emotional bonds. This means developing relationships where both partners feel safe, valued, and able to express their needs. EFT promotes emotional accessibility by helping you recognize and express your own emotions more clearly, tune into your partner's emotional cues, and respond to emotional bids for connection in positive ways.
When you feel securely attached, you're better able to handle stress and life challenges, maintain a positive self-image, explore the world with confidence, and trust and be vulnerable with others.
Remember, it's never too late to develop a secure attachment. Even if you've struggled with insecure attachment patterns in the past, EFT can help you build the secure, loving relationships you deserve.
Healing Emotional Wounds
Many of us carry emotional wounds from past experiences. These might stem from childhood experiences, previous relationships, or traumatic events.
In EFT, healing emotional wounds involves safely accessing painful emotions and memories, processing these experiences with compassion and understanding, creating new, positive emotional experiences to counteract the old, painful ones, and integrating these new experiences into your sense of self and your relationships.
This process can be challenging, but it's also incredibly rewarding. Many people find that healing old wounds not only improves their current relationships but also leads to a greater sense of personal peace and well-being.
Who Can Benefit from Emotionally Focused Therapy?
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EFT therapy for couples is particularly effective for couples facing challenges in their relationship. Common issues addressed in couples EFT include:
Communication breakdowns
Trust issues
Infidelity
Lack of intimacy or connection
Conflict over parenting or finances
Recovering from traumatic experiences
Through EFT, couples learn to communicate their needs and emotions more effectively, respond to each other's emotional cues with empathy and support, create deeper intimacy and connection, and build resilience to face life's challenges together.
Note: Even couples who aren't in crisis can benefit from exploring therapy, using it to deepen their connection and build a more satisfying relationship.
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EFT is particularly helpful for individuals dealing with anxiety and depression, low self-esteem or self-worth issues, difficulty forming or maintaining relationships, unresolved trauma or grief, and anger management issues.
In individual EFT, you'll learn to understand and manage your emotions more effectively, identify and change negative patterns in your relationships, build a stronger, more compassionate relationship with yourself, and develop skills for creating and maintaining healthy relationships.
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Family dynamics can be complex, but EFT family therapy offers a path to better understanding and connection. It can help families dealing with issues like parent-child conflict, sibling rivalry, blended family challenges, family transitions like divorce or moves, and coping with a family member's illness or addiction.
Family EFT can improve communication between family members, build stronger emotional bonds, resolve conflicts more effectively, and create a more supportive family environment.
The EFT Process: What to Expect
Assessment and Goal Setting
The initial stages of EFT therapy involve a thorough assessment of your current situation, relationship dynamics, and emotional patterns. Your therapist will work collaboratively with you to understand your challenges and set clear, achievable goals for therapy.
This stage is important in establishing a strong therapeutic alliance and creating a roadmap for your EFT journey.
Identifying Negative Interaction Cycles
A key part of EFT involves recognizing and understanding the harmful patterns in your relationships or emotional responses. Your therapist will help you identify these cycles, exploring the underlying emotions and unmet needs that drive them.
This awareness is a crucial first step towards change, as it allows you to step back from the cycle and see it as something separate from yourself that you can work together to change.
Restructuring Emotional Responses
Once negative cycles are identified, EFT focuses on creating new, positive emotional experiences. This involves accessing and expressing deeper, often vulnerable emotions in a safe, supportive environment. Your therapist will guide you in expressing these emotions to each other (in couples or family therapy) or exploring them deeply (in individual therapy).
This process helps change perceptions and behaviours, creating new patterns of interaction based on emotional openness and responsiveness.
Consolidating Changes
As you progress through EFT, you'll begin to see positive changes in your relationships and emotional responses. The final stages of therapy focus on consolidating these changes, making them a lasting part of your life. You'll learn strategies to maintain your progress, handle future challenges, and continue growing emotionally.
This stage ensures that the positive changes you've made in therapy become a natural part of your daily life and relationships.
Start Your EFT Journey with Access Therapy Today!
Our team of experienced therapists with EFT therapy training is dedicated to guiding you through this powerful healing process. We understand that seeking therapy can feel daunting, but we're here to support you every step of the way. Book a free consultation today to explore our online and in-person therapy options to accommodate your schedule and preferences.
