0510 - Moving from Self Criticism to Self-Acceptance with Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT)
Course Description
This Professional Development course introduces EFIT, Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy, the individual therapy version of the well-established EFT couple model. This attachment based, experiential model allows the therapist to confidently restructure the client’s habitual way of constructing moment-to-moment experience and regulating their most difficult emotions. EFIT focuses on helping clients shape a coherent, resilient, secure sense of self, able to explore and resolve the deeper emotional pain underlying depression, anxiety and the echoes of traumas. As in EFT for couples, attachment science offers the EFIT therapist a map that clarifies the nature of client problems and symptoms, specifying the steps in the journey towards emotional balance and the corrective emotional epiphanies that are the essence of significant and lasting change in psychotherapy.
EFIT offers the therapist an empirically-based, on target, deeply meaningful pathway to growth and the development of aliveness, showing the therapist how to systematically attune to, and move the client into, new models of self and other – into a sense of belonging and becoming.
Participants will:
- Discover the key elements of the attachment perspective on the development of a resilient self, and its significance for clinical intervention.
- Identify the five macro-intervention moves of the EFIT Tango and experiential micro-interventions.
- Describe an on-target map for the creation of transformative moments where vulnerabilities can be faced with balance and competence.
- Outline the path to shaping corrective emotional experiences which restructure negative ways of defining the self, organizing inner experience and engaging with others.
- Outline how to apply EFIT to clients suffering from a range of symptoms and post- traumatic issues.
- Adopt an attachment humanistic perspective on clients, problems and interventions.
- Discover and distil core emotional experiences and promote emotional balance.
- Outline protective, self-defining and interactional iatrogenic patterns.
- Implement the five moves of the EFT Tango to shape corrective emotional experience and EFT micro-interventions.
- Choreograph dramas that expand the self and open engagement with others.
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
This course has already taken place for the current academic year (July 1, 2024 to June 30, 2025).
The 2025/2026 Faculty of Social Work Professional Development course dates will be posted on this website on July 3, 2025.