Emotionally Focused Therapy
Emotionally focused therapy (EFT) is a short-term (8-20 sessions) structured psychotherapy approach to working with individuals, couples and families. It includes elements of experiential, person-centered, constructivist, and systems theory, but is firmly established in attachment theory.
Emotionally focused therapy proposes that emotions themselves have an innately adaptive potential that, if activated, can help clients change problematic emotional states or unwanted self-experiences. Emotions themselves do not inhibit the therapeutic process, but people’s incapability to manage emotions and use them well is seen as the problem. Emotions are connected to our most essential needs. They rapidly alert us to situations important to our advancement. They also prepare and guide us in these important situations to take action towards meeting our needs. Clients undergoing EFT are helped to better identify, experience, explore, make sense of, transform and flexibly manage their emotional experiences.
Read more about Emotionally Focused Therapy: Overview, Basic Principles, Strengths of EFT, Stages and Steps in The EFT Process, Styles of Attachment
Famous quotes containing the words emotionally, focused and/or therapy:
“If we confine ourselves to one life role, no matter how pleasant it seems at first, we starve emotionally and psychologically. We need a change and balance in our daily lives. We need sometimes to dress up and sometimes to lie around in torn jeans. . . . Even a grimy factory can afford some relief from a grimy kitchen and vice versa.”
—Faye J. Crosby (20th century)
“It was your severed image that grew sweeter,
That floated, wing-stiff, focused in the sun
Along uncertainty and gales of shame
Blown out before I slept. Now you are one
I dare not think alive: only a name
That chimes occasionally, as a belief
Long since embedded in the static past.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“Show business is the best possible therapy for remorse.”
—Anita Loos (1888–1981)