EFIT Level 1 | EFIT Level 2

EFIT Level 2

Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT) Level 2

In-person, hosted by Carolina Center for EFT
Durham, NC

Trainer: Lorrie Brubacher
When: June 23, 24, 2023
Time: 9:00am – 4:30pm ET
Location: 2933 S Miami Blvd, Durham, NC 27703

Contact with questions: Dr. Mary Hinson, registration coordinator.

Cancellations

Subject to a $75 administration fee and must be made in writing at least 14 days prior to the first session to qualify for a refund of the balance paid. If you cancel with less than 14 days notice, but before the course begins you will be refunded 50%. If you cancel after a course has begun, there will be no refund. In the event a course is cancelled due to low registration, a refund will be issued in the full amount paid.

Extend your abilities to practice Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT).

Promote Emotional Fitness: Robust, Resourceful & Prepared to Face Existential Dilemma.

Preparation for training:

This training is the final requirement for ICEEFT recognition of special training in EFIT.

Prerequisite:

Level 1 EFIT

12 NBCC approved CE hours

Carolina Center for EFT has been approved by NBCC as an Approved Continuing Education Provider, ACEP No. 6488. Programs that do not qualify for NBCC credit are clearly identified. Carolina Center for EFT is solely responsible for all aspects of the training programs.

Equity Rate

Diversity/Inclusion scholarships are being offered as a statement that BLACK LIVES MATTER! We want to address the unconscious, systemic racism that has resulted in a lack of diversity in EFT training. The equity rate is designed to encourage participation from people from underrepresented groups, whose presence will enrich the training experience for everyone. If you can benefit from the equity rate pricing and identify with one of the following categories, please come and participate in the upcoming EFT training course. The categories are: 1) Those who identify with an underrepresented group such as, but not excluded to, Black Therapists and 2) those who work with historically marginalized communities.

The equity pricing is available based on your need, and an application is not required. You are invited to choose the rate that best meets your need. Please indicate what you can pay. If you have any questions, please contact Steve Wampler.

EFIT Level 1

Date/Time

Tentatively scheduled for February 2024, in-person in the Carolinas. Specific date and location TBA.

To be notified when the date for this event is set, please enter your name and email address below.

Questions?

Contact Mary Hinson, Registration Coordinator.

Workshop Description

Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT) is an attachment-based approach that extends Dr. Sue Johnson’s model of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFCT) to work with individuals. EFIT offers an integration of humanistic experiential interventions focused on reshaping intrapsychic experience and systemic interventions focused on reshaping patterns of engagement with significant others. Emotion is given precedence because of its powerful role in structuring both inner experience and motivation and in shaping key patterns in relationships. Emotion links and organizes core experience and interaction. EFIT helps you to create corrective emotional experiences in individual therapy to shape safety and security with others and within self.

Dr. Sue Johnson argues that psychotherapy is most effective when it focuses on the healing power of emotional connection. Attachment theory provides proven techniques for treating the two common presenting problems in individual therapy: anxiety and depression. It provides a practical map for shaping love or secure attachment that positively impacts emotion regulation, social adjustment and mental health (Johnson, 2019). “But love is not only an end for therapy; it is also the means by which every end is reached” (Lewis, Amini, & Lannon, 2002).

In EFIT, the therapeutic alliance is the heart from which emotion regulation and secure bonds with others and within self are shaped. Core attachment emotions are reprocessed to fuel corrective emotional experiences of love, between and within. Clients are helped to discover and validate inner emotional experience that can then be used as a guide for living. Confidence flows from secure connection with others, creating a safe haven and a secure base in the dynamic flow between interpersonal and internal worlds.

EFCT is best known as a potent couple intervention but has always, from its inception, been used in clinical practice with individuals, especially with clients dealing with depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder. The most obvious way that EFIT differs from EFCT is that emotionally transformative dialogues focus on a client’s interaction with the therapist, with representations of attachment figures, or between aspects of self. It is important to note that, from an attachment perspective and an experiential perspective, the self is a process of constant construction which takes place in and is shaped by interactions with others. In all modalities EFT addresses self and relational system.

This workshop will outline the theory and practice of EFIT, focusing on the primacy of emotion and the creation of a safe haven and a secure base alliance, core models of health and dysfunction from an attachment perspective including how within and between cycles interact and block growth and adaptation, a systematic sequence of interventions -the EFT Tango, as well as more micro-interventions, and how to stay with present processes in session to shape key change events. Didactic presentations will be accompanied by the viewing of EFIT sessions and experiential exercises.

Program Objectives

After this workshop, participants will be able to:

1. Describe the key elements of the attachment, humanistic perspective and its significance for clinical intervention.
2. Delineate clients’ within and between patterns of affect regulation.
3. Identify how repetitive patterns create and maintain each other, block growth, and generate presenting problems that manifest as emotional disorders.
4. Describe the core components of emotional disorders – depression and anxiety.
5. Discover and distill core emotional experience and promote emotional balance.
6. Outline the EFIT process of change.
7. Implement the 5 moves of the EFT Tango to shape corrective emotional experiences.
8. Describe the micro-interventions used by the EFT therapist.
9. Validate the client’s sense of competence and worth in every session.

Target Audience

Mental Health Professionals, Social Workers, Psychologists, Students in these professions

Level

Beginning, Intermediate

Prerequisite

The required reading for this course is A Primer for Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT).

Suggested readings are:

Chapters 1 – 5 in (Johnson, 2019) Attachment Theory in Practice: Emotionally Focused Therapy with Individuals, Couples and Families

Chapter 12 on EFIT in (Brubacher, 2018) Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy: Key ingredients of change

Schedule

Day 1

9:30 AM – 10:45 AM ET – Individual Therapy in the EFT Model 
9:30 Opening & review of learning objectives
9:50 Introduction – The basics of EFT Model – Attachment-based, experiential, systemic
The attachment perspective and map –  EFIT is relational
Central tasks across modalities of EFT
The goals of EFIT/ View of “health”

Break 10:45 – 11:00 

11:00 – 12:30
Attachment Strategies for Engagement / Emotion Regulation – The Problem as the Pattern
Empathic Attuning and Reflecting Present Process Role-play

Lunch 12:30 – 1:30

1:30 PM – 3:00
The EFT Tango – how EFIT is done 
Clinical example video with exercises in breakout rooms

Break 3:00 – 3:15

3:15 – 5:00
Review of Tasks, Factors Central to Success: Task alliance, Emotional depth, Affiliative encounters
EFT Interventions
Personal Exercise on Stage 1 in dyads
The EFT Model of Change – EFT Stages – Stabilization – Restructuring – Consolidation
Summary of the Day / Discussion  – Q & A – Closure by 5:00

Day 2

9:30 AM – 10:45 AM ET
Stages and Interventions in more depth with Clinical Examples and Exercises
Stage 1 Stabilization: 
EFT Tango Moves in Stage 1 video and exercises
Process of Emotion – Video of Travis – Emotion Hand-Dance
Assessment – Alliance – Things to watch for in early sessions (Tango 1)
Emotion Assembly and Deepening  (Tango 2)
Shaping and Processing Encounters (Tango 3 and 4)
Integrating (Tango 5)

Break 10:45 – 11:00 

11:00 – 12:30
Stage 2 Restructuring:
Change Events – Deepening Emotion – Reshaping Defining Inner Dramas – video

Lunch 12:30 – 1:30

1:30 – 3:00 
Overview of Stages of Change, Impasses, Next steps
Stabilization – end of Stage 1, Stage 2 distinguished from Stage 1, Markers end of Stage 2, Stage 3 Consolidation

Break 3:00 – 3:15

3:15 – 5:00 
Impasses
Therapist Strategies for Learning EFIT – Personal Goals – Level 2 EFIT training
Closure

Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT) extends Dr. Sue Johnson’s model of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy to work with individuals. EFIT helps you to create corrective emotional experiences in individual therapy to shape safety and security with others and within self.

Johnson argues that psychotherapy is most effective when it focuses on the healing power of emotional connection. Attachment theory provides proven techniques for treating the two common presenting problems in individual therapy: anxiety and depression. It provides a practical map for shaping love or secure attachment that positively impacts emotion regulation, social adjustment and mental health (Johnson, 2019).

“But love is not only an end for therapy; it is also the means by which every end is reached” (Lewis, Amini, & Lannon, 2002). In EFIT, the therapeutic alliance is the heart from which emotion regulation and secure bonds with others and within self are shaped. Core attachment emotions are reprocessed to fuel corrective emotional experiences of love, between and within. Clients are helped to discover and validate inner emotional experience that can then be used as a guide for living. Confidence flows from secure connection with others, creating a safe haven and a secure base in the dynamic flow between interpersonal and internal worlds.

Learning Objectives:

Following the training participants will be able to: 

• Adopt an attachment humanistic perspective on clients, problems, and the interventions that create change.
• Outline protective, self-defining and interactional iatrogenic patterns. 
• Discover and distill core emotional experiences, promoting balance while exploring previously frightening, foreign, and unacceptable emotions. 
• Implement the 5 moves of the EFT Tango to shape corrective emotional experiences that positively impact models of self and other and shape stable, lasting change.
• Demonstrate how to integrate corrective emotional experiences into the accessibility/openness, responsiveness and full engagement that characterizes secure attachment with others.
• Validate the client’s sense of competence and worth in every session.

Lorrie Brubacher is the Founding Director of the Carolina Center for EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy). A certified trainer with the International Centre for Excellence in EFT (ICEEFT), she has been an individual, couple and family therapist since 1989. She is an adjunct faculty at University of North Carolina, Greensboro. She trains internationally and publishes frequently on the topic of EFT, often with its originator, Dr. Sue Johnson. She co-developed EFT’s first interactive video training program, has several training videos, available at https://steppingintoeft.com and published Stepping into Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy: Key Ingredients of Change (2018).

What Past Participants Have Said About This Workshop….

“The community from Romania is grateful for the opportunity that Lorrie gave us. We all feel enriched by the information and experiences. Lorrie impressed all the therapists by her warmth, genuine attitude and openness. By varying live demonstration with role plays and videotaped sessions, the course has a highly practical style, that has helps trainees to know how to use the attachment lens… to determine emotional regulations patterns… to track negative cycles that maintain the client’s presenting problem, and use the incredible power of emotion to revise the internal working models of self and other and choreograph corrective emotional experiences that can in turn transform the negative models into safe internal and interpersonal bonds.” – from Romania, 2017

“Lorrie is an incredible gift to the EFT Community. This training greatly increased my confidence and decreased my anxiety. Very enjoyable mix of didactic and experiential. Very genuine and positively vulnerable instructor.” – from Phoenix, AZ, 2017

“Excellent training. The live session/debrief was especially helpful. Good blend of theory and application.”

“So grateful for this training. I learned so much about the process of EFIT experientially from Lorrie and with my fellow participants. I loved how the training, organization, live session, videos and role plays helped me learn the materials. I love Lorrie’s kind, caring way of interacting with participants.” – from Greensboro, NC, 2017

Sue Johnson after Lorrie’s Live Session in Ottawa, November 2017:

“I’ll tell you what you just saw! You just saw perfect, constant, relentless attunement. And you saw it keep going. The central difference with EFT is that you stay in the emotion channel. You follow. You follow. And then you have to know where to go and Lorrie showed that beautifully. Beautifully. What you just saw was amazing attunement and a lot of what happened there was that Lorrie stayed with her. Lorrie stayed with her and validated and ordered her experience. As she stayed in the experience she directed her back. She ordered it. She kept the emotion going. … And because Lorrie was safe – holding her hand – focused the reflections – kept keeping her attuned – it’s like you pick up on the momentum of the emotion and the emotion keeps going. So you just saw a brilliant session!”