Susan Johnson – PESI – Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT): Attachment-based Interventions to Treat Trauma, Anxiety and Depression

1. Build core emotional experiences to promote emotional balance in your traumatized, anxious, and depressed clients.
2. Evaluate the EFT model as a secure base for effective therapy with individual clients.
3. Analyze the three stages of the EFT model as an approach that offers clients a way out of destructive patterns.
4. Implement evidence-based stages to increase closeness, safe attachment, and connection.
5. Investigate how EFT explores and deepens emotions with clients in a way that maintains safety.
6. Construct corrective emotional experiences for the individual client that create real forward movement in a single session.
7. Develop client interactions that expand the client’s sense of self and open engagement with others.
8. Validate the client’s sense of competence and worth in every session.

Attachment Science in Individual Psychotherapy 

• Seeing the self from a developmental attachment viewpoint
• The 10 principles of attachment science
• The attachment view of emotional disorders
• What attachment tells us about the essence of in-session change that lasts

Emotionally Focused Therapy for Emotional Disorders – EFIT

• Foundational Stages of EFT
  • Stabilization
  • Restructuring
  • Consolidation
• The organic model of change and change events – working with vulnerability

The EFIT Process-Oriented Assessment

• A non-pathologizing attachment perspective on emotional disorders
• Using EFIT to work with core features of anxiety and depression
• The process of first sessions – building a safe-haven alliance

The Core EFT Macro Interventions – the EFT “Tango”

• Mirroring/reflecting present process
  • Negative Cycles of Coping
• Affect assembly and deepening
• Choreographing engaged encounters with self and others
• Processing these choreographed dramas to create emotional balance
• Integrating and validating new experience
• The Tango across stages of change

Summary of Micro Interventions – Experiential and Systemic

• In-session video and discussion of sessions
• Play and Practice – the elements of the Tango

Attachment Science and the Practice of Psychotherapy – Across Modalities

• Growing into and applying the EFIT model in your practice
• Limitations, risks, and areas for further research

Dr. Sue Johnson was an author, clinical psychologist, researcher, professor, popular presenter and speaker and a leading innovator in the field of couple therapy and adult attachment. Sue was the primary developer of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), which has demonstrated its effectiveness in over 30 years of peer-reviewed clinical research. 

The founding director of the International Centre for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy (ICEEFT), Dr. Johnson authored numerous books and articles including Attachment Theory in Practice: EFT with Individuals, Couples and Families (2019), The Practice of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy: Creating Connection (3rd edition, 2019), and A Primer for Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT) (2021).

Sue trained behavioral health providers in EFT worldwide and consulted to the over 75 international institutes and affiliated centers who practice EFT, including Veterans Affairs and the US and Canadian militaries. She was a Distinguished Research Professor at Alliant University in San Diego, a Professor, Clinical Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia, Canada, and a Professor Emeritus, Clinical Psychology, at the University of Ottawa, Canada.

Speaker Disclosures:
Financial: Dr. Sue Johnson has employment relationships with University of British Columbia, Campbell & Fairweather Psychology Group, Alliant International, University Ottawa, Couple and Family Institute, and the International Center for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy. She receives royalties as a published author. Dr. Johnson receives a speaking honorarium, recording royalties, and book royalties from PESI, Inc. She has no relevant financial relationships with ineligible organizations.
Non-financial: Dr. Sue Johnson serves on the editorial board for the American Journal of Family Therapy (AJFT) and the journal Couple and Family Psychology: Research & Practice.