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Essay on Emotionally Focused Therapy

Updated August 14, 2022
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Essay on Emotionally Focused Therapy essay

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Emotionally focused therapy (EFT) is a humanistic approach to therapy and it was created in the 1980’s. (ICEEFT, 2020) It was created with adult attachment in mind and the developmental theory of personality and intimate relationships. (ICEEFT, 2020) This therapy is used to mainly help couples work out their specific problems in a short amount of time, usually eight to twenty sessions worth. This therapy can also be used for other types of relationships as well. EFT looks at the ways to better understand a person’s emotional responses and how they work with or conflict with their partner’s emotional responses. EFT can be used for couples and the individual person.

EFT

Emotionally focused therapy can be a great therapy in helping the individual person in different types of relationships to see what their emotional responses are to different types of situations or different types of different people. EFT is a great treatment for relationships that are in distress, whether it is happening currently in their lives or it has happened over the course of the person’s lifetime. EFT was originally created to treat depression, but since then it has been effective at treating a wide variety mental illnesses and is used a lot to help children and adults with the effects of childhood abuse and neglect. The reason that Eft has been effective with depression and couples therapy has little to do with the depression by itself.

There are some studies out there that show that both people, male and female, have symptoms of depression that is caused by their relationship problems coming into emotionally focused therapy. Since depression is pretty much a symptom of their relationship problems, it would be useful at curing or at least helping the depression with the therapy that treats their relationship problems. While EFT is effective at treating distress in a relationship, especially a marital relationship, it also is pretty much an aid to reduce depression, since most of the symptoms of depression are treated while helping the relationship. So, EFT can help depression without even trying when it is used to treat problems in relationships. (Alder, Dyer, Sandberg, Davis, Holt-Lunstad, 2018).

EFT is also effective at treating abuse from relationships that may have just started or relationships that have caused problems for the person for many years because of childhood abuse, neglect, or both. EFT aims to see what happened in the relationship and how it has affected the person as far as emotionally and what needs have not been met from the opposite side of the relationship. Childhood abuse has an impact on, not only the person experiencing the abuse, but the other partner in the relationship. The person that has been abused will use things that they have learned through bad relationships and apply them to their existing relationship, and could possibly cause the other partner to have emotional abuse symptoms. (Dalton, Greenman, Classen, Johnson, 2013)

EFT is also effective at treating a person that has been effected by a traumatic event, since EFT is focused toward keeping the strong emotional bonds in a relationship intact. People who have had trauma because of childhood abuse have a hard time making strong emotional bonds, so it makes using EFT a little more difficult to apply. The person that has had childhood abuse might not have been able to make emotional bonds with a parent or other person who has cared for them, which in turn would make it hard to create emotional bonds with their partner. (Dalton, Greenman, Classen, Johnson, 2013)

So, overall emotionally focused therapy can be useful for a lot of different relationships from married couples to the relationship between a mother and her child. It is pretty varied and will accept a wide variety of people.

Attachment Theory

Attachment theory is an essential part of EFT. Attachment theory has everything to do with the relationships between humans. This theory says that people are healthier by the emotional contact that they make with one another and that they have a need to feel safe in the connections that they feel and make with other people. There are tenets in attachment theory and they sum up how it works. One very interesting tenet of attachment theory is that people are never independent from one another, in other words we all need someone whether we know it or not. Attachment starts at birth and continues through our whole lives. An example would be that when we are born we grow attached to our mothers or whomever is the person that meets our basic needs. As an infant, we also learn which of our behavior cause certain things as a result. Like if the infant cries then they will be held or comforted. (McLeod, 2017)

When we are dealing with the significance of attachment in treatment we cannot overlook the primary reasons for treatment or any of the other issues that we have recognized. (Zilberstein, 2014)

In conclusion, emotionally focused therapy is a great thing to use for reconnecting the emotional bond between partners in a relationship. It can also be used to treat mental illnesses such as depression and trauma. Although it is mostly used to mend broken relationships that need to be reconnected emotionally. Adults and children alike can benefit from EFT when they have been abused or neglected during childhood, although it will be very hard to restore an emotional bond that was never learned or was neglected for so many years. Attachment theory is also a great part of EFT that focuses on the attachments that are made during childhood and follow us throughout the rest of our lives. It literally has everything to do with the connection between humans.

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