Emotion-Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) / Emotion-Focused Therapy-Family (EFT-F) and Emotion Coaching
Emotion-Focused Intervention
At Anchor Psychological Services, our Emotion-Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) approach empowers parents and caregivers to support their loved ones in understanding, expressing, and managing emotions while helping families navigate challenges like eating disorders, mood and anxiety disorders, behavioural issues, emotional dysregulation, and relationship difficulties with compassion and confidence.
What is Emotion-Focused Intervention?
Emotion-Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) / Emotion-Focused Therapy-Family (EFT-F) is a treatment model first developed for individuals struggling with an eating disorder and their families. It has since been adapted for a variety of emotional, academic, and mental health issues as well as parent-child relationship difficulties. Emotion-Focused Family Therapy is based on the principle that the avoidance of and the inability to regulate and cope with emotions are common to a number of mental health issues. An individual’s temperament or neurodivergence may make emotions painful and difficult to tolerate, and this combined with life events, can result in a reliance on strategies that focus on avoiding difficult emotions such as shame, anger, sadness and fear. When emotions are not acknowledged, felt, and processed individuals often need to engage in unhealthy coping such as self-harm, avoidance, substance use, and disordered eating.
Treatment Foundation
The foundation of this treatment is to acknowledge the significant role that families have in helping their loved ones overcome life challenges or mental health issues. Within this approach parents are taught to assist their child (regardless of age) to (1) interrupt their symptoms/maladaptive behaviour, (2) support their child to process and manage emotions through the key skill of emotion coaching, and (3) work through and resolve fears and obstacles that surface in the process of treatment. Parents can participate in this treatment even when their children are unable/unwilling to attend treatment.
Emotion-Focused Family Therapy: A Transdiagnostic Model for Caregiver-Focused Interventions
Our founders, Dr. Shari Mayman and Dr. Katherine Henderson, were early adopters of EFFT and were involved in the early development and research of the caregiver workshop intervention. Dr. Mayman and Dr. Henderson are certified supervisors and trainers in EFFT and co-authors on the clinician manual Emotion-Focused Family Therapy: A transdiagnostic model for caregiver-focused interventions (2019). When building Anchor, Drs. Henderson and Mayman were committed to empowering caregivers of loved ones of all ages with this important set of support skills. Team members are well-trained in emotion coaching and EFFT and offer a variety of EFFT-based services.