Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy

Emotionally focused couple therapy (EFT) is a brief, integrative approach that focuses on helping partners in close relationships creates secure attachment bonds. The EFT therapist is a process consultant, helping partners expand constricted and constricting inner emotional realities and interactional responses, thereby shifting rigid interactions into responses that foster resiliency and secure connection. Much has happened in the field of couples’ therapy since the early 1980s, when EFT was first formulated. The theoretical perspective of EFT combines the research on the nature of relationship distress with the research on the attachment perspective of adult love and relatedness. The EFT perspective focuses on the power of absorbing states of negative affect and negative interaction patterns, such as criticize/demand followed by defend/distance, and how they generate and maintain each other. The EFT interventions and steps of specific change events of EFT have been validated.