What is Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT)?
Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy is a humanistic, experiential, and attachment-based model of therapy that privileges emotion and emotion regulation. EFIT explores dominant emotions and patterns in your life to uncover attachment needs, desires, and suppressed feelings.
What can I expect from you in Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT)?
You can expect me to be a secure base of emotional empathy, availability, presence, responsiveness, and engagement when exploring, processing, and identifying key emotional experiences that affect your daily life.
I value authenticity. In session when I say “I understand” or “Wow, this is really tough”, I am not simply saying those things because it is my job as a therapist or because I want to make you feel good, I say these things from an authentic and genuine place. I take on and feel your emotional experience in my own body.
I will feel what you feel and validate what you feel. I believe that emotional experiences are subjective, meaning, each person’s reported emotional experience is real and valid.
I take a holistic approach and will consider every aspect of your life (relationships from childhood to present day, gender, race, ethnicity, culture, work, school, diet, physical health, lifestyle, hobbies, and more). I will help make the frightening, unfamiliar, and unacceptable emotions make sense, more tolerable, and have little to no impact on your daily life.
What does Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy treat?
This therapy has been used to treat the following:
- Anxiety
- Depression
- Emotional disorders
- Trauma
- Stress
- Relationship problems
- Life transition
- Anger
- Grief/Loss
- Personality disorders
- Eating disorders
How does Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy and Attachment Theory view mental and emotional problems?
EFIT views symptoms in terms of problems of affect regulation and problematic ways of dealing with feelings and then connecting with other people on an emotional level. From an emotionally focused and attachment perspective, emotional isolation is a core factor in most mental and emotional disorders.
Attachment science tells us that most of our traumatic or challenging experiences is caused by the feeling of being emotionally isolated or alone. We are not wired for it, our nervous system cannot deal with it, it puts us into our primal panic (freeze, flight, or fight) and causes us to feel many other negative emotions. Which in turn, affects our daily functioning, successes, and all our relationships in our lives. We may even try to cope by turning to drugs or unhealthy habits.
How does Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy deal with these mental and emotional problems?
“I enjoy finding the order in experience.” – Carl Rogers
Emotionally Focused Individual therapy digs through the content of people’s presenting problems to focus on the deeper processes involved with their mental and emotional issues. Finding the processes and dominant patterns underlying the presenting problems will help clients find organization, order, and peace. It will give them a better sense of what they are experiencing, their view of themselves and their view of how others may see them.
This therapy does not focus on diagnosing or giving labels, it focuses on deep emotional realities and how people engage with others.