Emotionally Focused Therapy is a highly effective therapy model that provides a roadmap to navigating our own experience and meaningfully sharing it with others – creating strong supportive bonds as a result. This is how EFT guides us to get there:

EFT is an attachment-oriented, experiential model. As such, it understands that as humans, we all have the need to be connected to the important people in our lives, and feel safe in these connections. We do this so we can survive. In a safe and connected relationship, we can be creative and flexible, we can explore and thrive.

Throughout our experience in life, we all learn strategies on how to best achieve bonds with others. Sometimes, these strategies work well, they become positive patterns, and we can use them to give and get the loving connection we crave. Other times, strategies that were necessary and useful at one point can turn into rigid protections that no longer serve us. In these situations, we still show up with our best attempts to do things well, but we get stuck in negative patterns. On occasion, this can end up causing precisely the thing we feared and tried to prevent in the first place.

This is all understandable. As EFT points out, all behaviour makes sense in the context of our lives. We’ve all learned differently how to best deal with the situations life has given us. EFT helps people clarify their current patterns of interactions, and the good reasons they keep happening. Being human, we all have fears and longings related to ourselves and the important people in our lives. EFT shows us how our unmet needs and unprocessed longings tweak our behaviour and affect us. The model also provides a pathway towards a space where we can better understand our experience, share it with our people and have them meet us there.