Understanding EFT | Liliane Nahas, Psychotherapist, M.Ed., LPC, LMFT

Understanding Emotionally-Focused Therapy (EFT)

What do you do when you feel like you have tried to reach the one you love and still end up feeling stuck? EFT can help.

Of couples who use Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), research studies find that 70-75% of them move from distress to recovery, and approximately 90% show significant improvements.

What is EFT?

EFT (or Emotionally Focused Therapy) offers couples, families, and individuals a relatively short, structured path to solving their relationship problems. Dr. Sue Johnson and Dr. Les Greenberg launched EFT in the early 1980s to help partners find their way back to love and happiness. Since then, Dr. Johnson has continued to develop the model and has added the study of attachment theory to the mix, helping therapists and couples best understand what is happening in their relationships.

EFT is used in private practice, university training centers, hospital clinics, and other therapeutic settings worldwide. And, it works.

Research shows that more than 70% of couples who try EFT move from distress to recovery, and about 90% show significant improvement.

Problems distressed couples address in the sessions include depression, post-traumatic stress disorders, and chronic illness.

To be human is to need others, and this is no flaw or weakness.

— Dr. Sue Johnson

What my training in EFT means for you and your relationship.

Paraphrasing founder Sue Johnson: In EFT, we look at the negative dance you and your partner are caught in and how it leaves you both hurt and frustrated.

I can help you create a new dance with your partner that is safer, closer, and more satisfying. In EFT, we help you understand the signals you send that make it hard for your partner to come close, and we help you send new signals that pull your partner towards you. We help you dance together – in harmony.

Strengths of Emotionally Focused Therapy

EFT is based on clear, explicit conceptualizations of marital distress and adult love.

These conceptualizations are supported by empirical research on the nature of marital distress and adult attachment.

EFT is collaborative and respectful of clients.

It is a combination of experiential Rogerian techniques with structural systemic interventions.

Change strategies and interventions are specified.

The process is in steps.

Key moves and moments in the change process have been mapped into nine steps and three change events.

EFT has been validated by over 20 years of empirical research.

There is also research on the change processes and predictors of success.

EFT has been applied to many kinds of problems and populations.

Goals of Emotionally Focused Therapy

1 To expand and re-organize key emotional responses – the music of the attachment dance.
2 To create a shift in partners’ interactional positions and initiate new cycles of interaction.
3 To foster the creation of a secure bond between partners.

Learn about Emotionally Focused Couples and Family Therapy (EFT) from primary developer Dr. Sue Johnson

This leading edge, empirically validated form of therapy taught all over the world and is based on the last 50 years of scientific research on bonding: between mother and child, and the romantic bonds between partners. It provides a map to what matters in intimate relationships: how they work, how they go wrong, and what is needed to put them right.

A relationship is a dance — the rhythms and habitual steps of the dance have their own momentum, and they can unconsciously take over.

Liliane Nahas

If you would like to work with me, please get in touch.

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