Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) is a short term psychotherapy approach to working with individuals, couples and more recently with families. It is substantially based on the principles of 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 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.

Sue Johnson states in her book 'EFT with Trauma Survivors'[1] that:

[A]ttachment theory...predicts that when attachment security is uncertain, a partner will pursue, fight, and even bully a spouse into responding to attachment cues, even if this has a negative general impact on the relationship (p. 179).

Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) is an empirically supported humanistic treatment that arose out of attachment theory. It views emotions as centrally important in the experience of self, in both adaptive and maladaptive functioning, and in therapeutic change. From the EFT perspective change occurs by means of awareness, regulation, reflection, and transformation of emotion taking place within the context of an empathetically attuned relationship. EFT works on the basic principle that people must first arrive at a place before they can leave it. Therefore, in EFT an important goal is to arrive at the live experience of a maladaptive emotion (e.g., fear and shame) in order to transform it. The transformation comes from the client accessing a new primary adaptive emotional state in the session.

Core emotions of attachment and fears of loss of attachment arise deep in the brain. The deeper in to the brain one goes the less it is available to fast pace of everyday awareness. Emotions are physiological neuroendocrine responses to which we react, when they come into awareness, with thoughts and feelings about those feelings. In EFT the aim is to create a new relationship event to act as a kind of transformer and thereby change reactive emotion with positive emotions of attachment.

Emotion-focused Couple Therapy (EFT-C) is a short-term (8-20 sessions) structured approach to couples therapy developed in the 1980s by Les Greenberg and Sue Johnson. Now EFT is also used with families. There is significant research on this approach and it has been found that 70-75% of couples move from distress to recovery and that the gains are sustained for months to years following the end of treatment. As such, EFT-C is an evidence based treatment protocol.

Source: Wikipedia