Emotionally focused therapy

Emotionally focused therapy and emotion-focused therapy (both EFT) are two related but distinct approaches to psychotherapy with individuals, couples, or families. Both EFT approaches include elements of experiential therapy (such as person-centered therapy and Gestalt therapy), systemic therapy, and attachment theory. EFT is usually a short-term treatment (8–20 sessions). Both EFT approaches are based on the premise that human emotions are connected to human needs, and therefore emotions have an innately adaptive potential that, if activated and worked through, can help people change problematic emotional states and interpersonal relationships. The approach now called emotion-focused therapy was originally known as process-experiential therapy, and it is still sometimes called by that name.

EFT should not be confused with emotion-focused coping, a category of coping proposed by some psychologists, although clinicians have used EFT to help improve clients' emotion-focused coping.

In spite of the divergent paths that emotionally focused therapy and emotion-focused therapy have taken (see § Divergence of the two EFT approaches below), EFT began in the mid-1980s as one approach for helping couples. EFT was originally formulated and tested by Sue Johnson and Les Greenberg in 1985, and the first manual for emotionally focused couples therapy was published in 1988.

To develop the approach, Johnson and Greenberg began reviewing videos of sessions of couples therapy to identify, through observation and task analysis, the elements that lead to positive change. They were influenced in their observations by the humanistic experiential psychotherapies of Carl Rogers and Fritz Perls, both of whom valued (in different ways) present-moment emotional experience for its power to create meaning and guide behavior. Johnson and Greenberg saw the need to combine experiential therapy with the systems theoretical view that meaning-making and behavior cannot be considered outside of the whole situation in which they occur. In this combined experiential–systemic approach to couples therapy, as in other approaches to systemic therapy, the problem is viewed as belonging not to one partner, but rather to the cyclical reinforcing patterns of interactions between partners. Emotion is viewed not only as a within-individual phenomena, but also as part of the whole system that organizes the interactions between partners.

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