Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) was formulated in the early 1980s by Sue Johnson as a response to the lack of clearly delineated and validated couple interventions, particularly more humanistic and less behavioral interventions. It was called Emotionally focused Therapy to draw attention to the crucial significance of emotion and emotional communication in the organization of patterns of interaction and key defining experiences in close relationships. It also focused on emotion as a powerful and necessary catalyst of change, rather than as simply part of the problem of marital distress. This focus on the need to address emotion and its power to create change in marital therapy was new. Emotion had often been viewed as a secondary complication and a dangerously disruptive force in therapy rather than an essential part of relationship repair.

As the emotional nature of human attachments has become better known, the necessity of addressing emotion in the process of relationship repair has been clarified and specific methods and interventions to address it effectively are available. EFT is the byproduct of analyzing how couples respond to one another and the process they use to repair their relationship. Positive results have proven to last because the couple restructures their emotional responses to one another. Their understanding of their attachment needs and their joint pattern give them the knowledge and power to change and engage one another in supportive ways.

EFT is grounded in a clear theoretical base. This base consists of a theory of change arising from a synthesis of humanist experiential therapy and systems theory and a second theory of adult love, or attachment process. The assumptions, strategies, and interventions are clearly specified and delineated. It is brief, replicable, and there is substantial empirical support for its effectiveness. The process of the couples journey through therapy is clearly outlined in three stages and nine steps.

The EFT Approach

EFT is based on understanding how we learned to love and be loved as a child and it helps couples change and create a relationship that is safe, secure, nurturing, where we can get our needs met and expand our sense of self.

EFT is integrative: it looks within and between. It integrates an intrapsychic focus on how individuals process their experience, particularly their key attachment-oriented emotional responses, with an interpersonal focus on how partners organize their interactions into patterns and cycles. It considers how systemic patters and inner experience and sense of self evoke and create each other.

The process of experiencing and the process of interaction are key for the therapist as they attempt to guide the couple away from negative and rigidly structured internal and external responses, toward the flexibility and sensitive responsiveness that are the bases of a secure bond between partners. The interact ional positions adopted by the partners are assumed to be maintained by both the individual emotional experience of the partners and the way interactions re organized-by intrapsychic realities and the couples habitual moves in their interact ional pattern. These realities and moves are reciprocally determining and constantly recreate one another. Both have to be reprocessed and reorganized for the couple to attain a positive emotional bond. The creation of this secure bond is the ultimate goal of EFT.

The first step in therapy is to access and reprocess the emotional responses underlying each partners often narrow and rigidly held interactional position to facilitate a shift in these positions toward accessibility and responsiveness-the building blocks of secure bonds.

The next step is to create new interactional events that redefine the relationship as a source of security and comfort for both partners. In turn, the structuring of new interactional events expands and redefines each partners inner experience.

EFT creates a journey :

• From alienation to emotional engagement
• From vigilant defense and self-protection to openness and risk-taking
• From passive helplessness to a sense of powerfulness
• From desperate blaming to a sense of how each partner makes it difficult for them to be responsive and caring
• From a focus on the partners faults to discovering ones fears and longings
• From isolation to connectedness.

As each spouse expands and reorganizes their inner experience, the expression of the experience involves a new presentation of self, a new way of relating to the partner, which in turn evokes new responses from the partner. They create new interactional events which create new patterns in the relationship.

Chava Levy, LCSW has twenty-five years experience as a therapist with an interest in couple and family therapy. She is becoming certified in EFT and needs to work with couples for 8-20 sessions. This work will be supervised and sessions will be at a greatly reduced rate. Please contact Chava at 347-743-5997 or [email protected]