0139 - Creating Secure Relationships: An Introduction to Emotionally Focused Therapy

Course Description

Hours: 12

Couples therapy is most effective when it focuses on the healing power of emotional connection. Emotionally focused couples therapy (EFCT) aligns perfectly with attachment theory, as it provides proven techniques for treating couple and family distress as well as anxiety, depression and other emotional difficulties in individuals.
In this Professional Development course, an overview of emotionally focused couple therapy will be presented. This two-day course will include didactic presentations accompanied by record client sessions and experiential exercises to demonstrate how the EFT approach explores both the intrapsychic and the interpersonal worlds of the couple in distress.

EFCT integrates experiential and systemic theories and offers a unique combination of empirically supported change processes and techniques informed by an explicit theory of adult love.

As partners engage in typical, reactive ways (the negative cycle) we look to slow down and deepen emotional experience and begin to frame these reactions as understandable, predictable responses to attachment related fears and needs. The aim of this workshop is to offer an overview of the interventions used by EFCT therapists that deepen the exploration of underlying, previously unexpressed attachment-related emotions, in order to help couples to develop more secure and deeply satisfying connections.

Emotionally focused individual therapy (EFIT) and emotionally focused family therapy (EFFT) models will also be touched upon. In her new book, Attachment Theory in Practice, Sue Johnson states the EFT tango is the basic intervention that the therapist employs again and again in all stages and forms (individual, couple, family) of EFT (Johnson – 2019).

Learning Objectives

This course is designed to help you:

• Explain the emotionally focused couples therapy model, including the basic assumptions and theoretical foundations.
• View relational distress from an attachment perspective.
• Assess clients appropriate for EFT.
• Identify the clinical techniques and skills used in EFT.
• Recognize how the EFT therapist elicits and deepens client’s attachment longings and fears to create change.
• Identify how EFT shapes new interactions and key bonding events.
• Learn the key intervention in all modalities of EFT: the Tango.

Learner Outcomes

This workshop is designed to help you:

•    Explain the emotionally focused couples therapy model, including the basic assumptions and theoretical foundations.
•    View relational distress from an attachment perspective.
•    Assess clients appropriate for EFT.
•    Identify the clinical techniques and skills used in EFT.
•    Recognize how the EFT therapist elicits and deepens client’s attachment longings and fears to create change.
•    Identify how EFT shapes new interactions and key bonding events.
•    Learn the key intervention in all modalities of EFT: the Tango.

Notes

For more information contact the Faculty of Social Work Professional Development office:

Email: fswprofessionaldevelopment@wlu.ca
Phone: 548-889-4967

Cancellations and Transfers
Be sure to carefully review our cancellation and transfer information before registering.

Website: wlu.ca/fswpd

Applies Towards the Following Certificates

• Counselling Techniques Certificate : Counselling Techniques
• Family and Couples Counselling : Family and Couples Counselling