Emotionally Focused Therapy is a brief, humanistic psychotherapy based on science of emotions and of adult attachment developed by Dr Sue Johnson and her colleagues over the past 30 years. 

Attachment theory helps us understand personality, the nature of intimate relationships and love as well as individual dysfunction and health. Attachment views people as innately wired for connection with others. According to this perspective, our attachment relationships over time have a dominant impact on how our personalities, emotional experience and ways of being in the world evolve. EFT therapy prioritizes emotions and emotional regulation as primary organizing forces in in relationships and individual experience.

EFT is best known as a revolutionary and empirically validated couple therapy (EFCT – Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy), but it is also used to address individual depression, anxiety and post traumatic stress (EFIT – Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy) and to repair family bonds (EFFT – Emotionally Focused Family Therapy). 

Most EFT research to date has focused on efficacy and the process of change in EFCT, and EFT for couples is the gold standard for empirically validated couple therapy.  Future research will focus on EFIT and EFFT.  EFT has also generated many relationship education programs, for example Hold Me Tight:  Conversations for Connection and its online version www.holdmetightonline.com, and Healing Hearts Together for couples dealing with cardiac dysfunction.

For more information about EFT, visit the International Centre for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy here: ICEEFT