Learn EFFT: Emotionally Focused family Therapy

Why learn EFFT?

Why EFFT?

A practical approach to engaging families at an emotional level
EFFT is an attachment-based approach that combines both systemic and experiential interventions to mend broken bonds and heal fractured families. EFFT therapists focus on the emotional experience within a family and the problem patterns that block family members from accessing the resources they would otherwise share. A primary goal of EFFT is to reduce problematic behaviour by creating new patterns of emotional accessibility and responsiveness that offer a secure base for children to develop and families to thrive. EFFT provides a practical approach to engaging families at an emotional level. Accessing, processing, and connecting family members through the power of emotional experience promotes healing and fosters a family’s resilience to the everyday and unexpected challenges of life.

In EFFT you’ll learn a powerful transformative approach that is foundational in helping parents and children who are struggling with remaining securely attached.

EFFT follows the principles and practices of Emotionally Focused Therapy to restore connection and promote resilience in family relationships. The principle goal of EFFT is to re-establish more secure family patterns where attachment and caregiving responses are effective and emotional bonds are repaired. These resources inform a network of security that provides the flexibility and closeness necessary for families to promote individual growth and meaningful relationships across generations.

The EFFT Approach focuses on stabilizing a family’s negative interaction pattern, restructuring parent and child interactions, and consolidating the felt security gained through these new patterns of connection. Following principles of attachment science, the EFFT therapist guides the family to new patterns of parental availability, responsiveness and coherent attachment communications as they face developmental change and life challenges.

Course Features & Goals

These workshops demonstrates how the EFT model of working with couples is extended and modified to fit the family context. Attention is given to how EFT practice with families is different and what additional skills are needed. For example, how to process parental blocks to emotional accessibility and responsiveness while also keeping the child safe is a dynamic we’ll address.

Goals:
Accessing and expanding awareness of unacknowledged feelings associated with the family’s negative pattern.
Reframing family distress and child problems within relation blocks reinforcing this distress.
Promoting awareness and access to underlying caregiving intentions and disowned attachment related needs.
Facilitating the sharing of unmet attachment needs and effective caregiving responses.

CEs & Schedule

24 CE hours are available for EFFT Essentials.
10 CE hours are available for EFFT Consultation.
6 CE hours are available for EFFT short courses.

Live-online courses include 6 training hours + 40min lunch + two 10min breaks each day.

EFFT Certification

ICEEFT created a certification pathway for EFFT in 2024.

A certificate of completion is available for all our courses.

Recommended Sequence

Fundamentals of EFT
We recommend “Fundamentals of EFT” precede any other course. This is not a requirement. This course can also be taken after other courses, as it provides context for EFCT, EFIT, and EFFT.

EFFT Short Courses
These one day short courses may be taken at any time: as a first introduction to EFFT or as one of the Additional Steps required for EFFT certification.

1. EFFT Essentials (or Levels 1 and 2)
EFFT Essentials is a 4-day course, equivalent to taking both 2-day courses EFFT Level 1 and EFFT Level 2. Essentials is Levels 1 and 2 combined into a single course.
Pre-requisites: EFFT Level 1 is a pre-requisite for EFFT Level 2.

2. EFFT Consultation
EFFT Consultation (aka “Mastering Skills and Overcoming Challenges in EFFT: A Consultation Process”) is a 10-hour course.
Pre-requisites: EFFT Essentials (or Level 2) is a pre-requisite for EFFT Consultation.

Learn more about EFFT Certification on ICEEFT.com’s EFFT page.

Introducing our EFFT courses

EFFT short courses

Pre-requisite: none

EFFT short courses can be taken as a first taste of EFFT, or can be enjoyed after taking other EFFT training. Either way, approved EFFT short courses are part of the path to EFFT Certification.

Upcoming EFFT short courses offered by ICEEFT Courses

Live online on October 3, 2024 – registration closed.

Interested in a recorded version of “EFFT & Stepfamilies”?

If you would be interested in purchasing access to a recorded version of this course in 2025, please submit your interest here:

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Live online on October 25, 2024 – register here.

Interested in a recorded version of “EFFT & Adult Children”?

If you would be interested in purchasing access to a recorded version of this course in 2025, please submit your interest here:

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EFFT Essentials

“EFFT Essentials” is, quite simply, our two-day Level 1 plus two-day Level 2 combined together into a four-day course.Learn the tools to navigate and mend familial emotional landscapes, fostering the restoration of family bonds. Participants will delve into attachment frameworks and experiential realms, explore emotion regulation, and learn practical EFFT steps to facilitate corrective emotional experiences. Completion of EFFT Essentials provides therapists with the tools to drive lasting positive change in the family dynamics of their clients.

Participants will learn to:

Understand the empirical support for EFFT.- Outline the phases of EFFT treatment and key change events.
Apply key interventions in EFFT through role-play.
Identify markers and interventions for processing both adaptive and maladaptive emotions within family dynamics.
Formulate cases using an attachment-based EFFT model.
Work with emotional regulation strategies within a family context.
Access and process emotional experience to facilitate transformative change within families.
Develop a working alliance based on an attachment bond with each family member.
Utilize the therapist’s relational presence within the family system.
Develop a treatment plan and guide interventions using EFFT, based on markers and clinically relevant assessment.
Access emotion to develop corrective emotional experiences that restructure maladaptive emotion schemes within family interactions.
Work with and resolve fears and blocks to emotional engagement and processing within family dynamics.

More about Levels 1 and 2

EFFT Level 1

Over two-days, you’ll learn EFT’s transformative approach to restore connection and strengthen resilience in families. Help clients to grow, deepen bonds, and improve relationships across generations with EFFT.

Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) is an attachment-based approach that combines both systemic and experiential interventions to mend broken bonds and heal fractured families. Building upon the empirically-based practices of Emotionally Focused Therapy, The EFT therapists focus on family member’s emotional experience and the problem patterns that block family members from accessing the resources they would otherwise share. A primary goal of EFFT is to reduce problematic behavior by creating new patterns of emotional accessibility and responsiveness that offer a secure base for children to develop and families to thrive. EFFT provides a practical approach to engaging families at an emotional level. Accessing, processing, and connecting family members through the power of emotional experience promotes healing and fosters a family’s resilience to the everyday and unexpected challenges of life.

This workshop provides a theoretical overview of the EFT approach applied to family therapy. This training demonstrates the practical steps the EFT therapist follows in working through relational distress in families using the EFT process of change. Specific interventions are demonstrated to promote a clinician’s ability to work through parent and child relational blocks using attachment-based and emotion focused techniques. Participants will learn a powerful transformative approach that is foundational in helping parents and children who are struggling with remaining securely attached.

This training provides three areas of advanced knowledge in family practice. The training will deepen participants conceptualization of emotional processing within family relationships. Sessions will highlight specific application of EFFT interventions necessary to transform reactive relationship patterns. Clinical demonstrations and discussions will illustrate key steps in the EFFT process of change.

Level 1 Course Objectives

EFFT Level 2

Building on the foundations of EFFT Level 1, Level 2 focuses on increasing your competence in EFFT assessment and treatment practices that guide families through resolving relationship blocks and developing more secure familial bonds. Level 2 concentrates on specific practices for working through negative patterns, accessing and deepening emotional experience to promote corrective emotional experiences in family relationships. Video examples and practice exercises provide opportunities for you to observe EFFT in action and deepen your understanding and skill in this innovative approach to transforming family distress.

Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) is an attachment-based approach that combines both systemic and experiential interventions to restore family relationships and strengthen their resilience. A primary goal of EFFT is to reduce problematic behavior by creating new patterns of emotional accessibility and responsiveness that offer a secure base for children to develop and families to thrive. EFFT provides a practical approach to engaging families at an emotional level. Accessing, processing, and connecting family members through the power of emotional experience promotes healing and fosters a family’s resilience to the everyday and unexpected challenges of life.

This advanced training builds on previous EFFT training providing further training on the six core competencies of EFFT practice. Participants focus on key change events in EFFT and therapist practices used to promote parental openness and child vulnerability. The training provides direction in transforming parental intention into more effective engagement of caregiving and engaging attachment responses within the family system. Specific strategies are reviewed for working through relational blocks and re-engaging attachment related-needs across the family. This training follows an intensive focus on key elements in the EFT process applied to family relationships. Demonstration and practice exercises provide participants opportunities to deepen their EFT skills in intervening with family relationships broadening their understanding of emotion and attachment in family life and strengthening the bonds they share.

Level 2 Course Objectives

EFFT Course Objectives
These workshops combine didactic instruction, experiential exercises, and case examples to demonstrate the practice of EFFT.
Participants are encouraged to bring examples from their casework to explore the application of EFFT to their own practice.
When possible, live demonstration sessions are included.

EFFT Level 2 Objectives
Building on the foundations of EFFT Level 1, Level 2 focuses on increasing your competence in EFFT assessment and treatment practices that guide families through resolving relationship blocks and developing more secure familial bonds. Level 2 concentrates on specific practices for working through negative patterns, accessing and deepening emotional experience to promote corrective emotional experiences in family relationships. Video examples and practice exercises provide opportunities for you to observe EFFT in action and deepen your understanding and skill in this innovative approach to transforming family distress.

Participation in EFFT Level 2 will enable you to:
Conceptualize family distress and formulate a treatment plan guided by EFFT goals.
Explore alliance practices that promote family engagement in treatment.
Assess safety and contraindications for EFFT practice and conjoint practice.
Identify EFFT change events and related therapist interventions.
Practice interventions skills that promote parental buy-in to systemic intervention.
Order family patterns and reframe family patterns using an attachment frame.
Engage practices to process relational blocks to parental openness and child vulnerability.
Gain skill in accessing and assembling emotion associated with family distress.
Increase effectiveness in use of enactments to engage and process attachment related emotions and needs.
Facilitate impact of corrective experiences throughout family relationships.
Identify treatment practices guiding use of EFFT with divorced and remarried families.

EFFT Consultation
(aka “Mastering Skills and Overcoming Challenges in EFFT: A Consultation Process”)

Pre-requisite: EFFT Essentials -or- Levels 1 & 2

Advance your practice and improve your client outcomes by taking your EFFT skills to the next level! In this two-part course, you will learn from expert trainers as they show and talk about their therapy sessions – where they get stuck, how they get unstuck, and how the attachment map and EFT Tango provide a beacon for the family therapist.

Next, join as colleagues show their work. Watch expert trainers help guide the therapy process through feedback, consultation, and role plays specifically aimed at framing clients’ problems through the lens of attachment, mapping the process, maintaining momentum, unblocking barriers to caregiving, and more!

Participants will discover:

How to create safety and structure in the EFFT process through conceptualization and organizing ongoing treatment.
Ways of creating and maintaining a robust therapeutic alliance.
Methods for tracking and identifying key inner and family patterns that block caregiving, connection, and progress in therapy.
How the EFFT therapist uses key interventions to first validate and then dissolve relational blocks.
How to focus therapist presence to promote parental and child engagement in the EFFT process.
A proven set of interventions that you can rely on to shift family behaviours towards greater emotional balance in support of parental responsiveness and child vulnerability.
Greater mastery of core EFFT interventions and how to use EFT skills to overcome in session challenges and gain therapists’ confidence in guiding families to greater resilience.
A more nuanced understanding of the EFT Tango through stages of change in EFFT.
Key methods and interventions that will lead your clients into secure attachment, resourcing families towards ongoing growth and meeting challenges over the life span.
Increasing the greater confidence and competence of the therapist to lead the EFFT process of change.

First four hours

Participants will learn from expert trainers as they share and discuss their work. Key points considered include:
– Maintaining a robust alliance
– Finding and keeping focus in session
– Identifying relational patterns that block family distress
– Deepening engagement in the face of relational blocks to caregiving and care seeking
– Working with blocks at leading edge of experience
– Assembling, befriending, and ordering emotion
– Maintaining focus, depth, and momentum with complex family presentations
– Shaping corrective experiences around attachment related needs

Next six hours

Six cases are presented. Expert trainers provide feedback and consultation, and engage in role plays with each other and/or consultees for the purposes of demonstrating the EFFT model as specifically applied to the case discussed and presenting issue(s).

Ready to start learning EFFT?

These live-online “EFFT” training events are coming up next. Click through to register today!

02 December - 02 February

Prerecorded EFFT Consultation: access now until Apr1

05 - 13 February

Live-Online

2025 Feb. | EFFT Essentials Sale has ended

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03 - 11 April

Live-Online

2025 Apr. | EFFT Essentials

22 - 23 May

Live-Online

2025 May | EFFT Consultation

10 - 13 June

Live-Online

2025 June | EFFT Essentials

No event found!

Membership Discount

ICEEFT Courses offers a discounted rate for the first year of ICEEFT Membership to eligible EFFT Essentials (or Level 2) graduates. You may learn about the benefits of membership on the ICEEFT Members site.

Instructions

How to get your discounted first year of ICEEFT Membership:
1. If you do not already have a members site login, please do not create one yet.
2. Register for an EFFT Essentials with ICEEFT Courses.
3. Once you complete the course, please submit your Exit Survey as soon as possible. This can be found within the Courses Portal under the “Post Event” section.
4. Please allow a couple days after the event ends for the courses team to verify everyone’s attendance and receipt of exit survey.
5. Look out from an email from ICEEFT Courses with special instructions, then sign up to the ICEEFT Members Site within 30 days of receipt.

“Membership in ICEEFT offers a supportive platform to learn, improve my skills using EFT, connect with different EFT communities around the world, and allows potential clients to find me.”

Aaron Oog, MCounsPrac., MFT

Joining ICEEFT has helped me personally and professionally. I have benefitted from growing my practice, learning more about stuck spots, and even improved my marriage. What a gift.

Dr. Dianna Troutt, LMFT, LPCC

Readings

Required & Recommended

Discounts
Each publisher offers Courses attendees a discount of 15-25% off the following texts. Once you have registered for a course, you may access the relevant discount codes via the Courses Portal.

Required for EFFT Essentials
Recommended for all other EFFT courses

“Emotionally Focused Family Therapy: Restoring Connection and Promoting Resilience” by James L. Furrow, Gail Palmer, Susan M. Johnson, George Faller, Lisa Palmer-Olsen, 2019.

Routledge offers this publication in paperback, hardcover or eBook.

Keep Me Informed

Learn EFFT: Emotionally Focused family Therapy

Why learn EFFT?

Why EFFT?

Course Features & Goals

CEs & Schedule

EFFT Certification

Recommended Sequence

Introducing our EFFT courses

EFFT short courses

Upcoming EFFT short courses offered by ICEEFT Courses

Interested in a recorded version of “EFFT & Stepfamilies”?

Interested in a recorded version of “EFFT & Adult Children”?

EFFT Essentials

More about Levels 1 and 2

EFFT Level 1

Level 1 Course Objectives

EFFT Level 2

Level 2 Course Objectives

EFFT Consultation(aka “Mastering Skills and Overcoming Challenges in EFFT: A Consultation Process”)

First four hours

Next six hours

Ready to start learning EFFT?

Prerecorded EFFT Consultation: access now until Apr1

2025 Feb. | EFFT Essentials Sale has ended

2025 Apr. | EFFT Essentials

2025 May | EFFT Consultation

2025 June | EFFT Essentials

Membership Discount

Instructions

Readings

Required & Recommended

Required for EFFT EssentialsRecommended for all other EFFT courses

Recommended

Recommended

EFFT Consultation
(aka “Mastering Skills and Overcoming Challenges in EFFT: A Consultation Process”)

Required for EFFT Essentials
Recommended for all other EFFT courses