Emotionally Focused Therapy for Individuals (EFIT)
Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT) is a groundbreaking therapeutic model that facilitates emotional processing and the creation of secure relationships with self and others. Originating from Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) for couples, EFIT adapts these principles for individual therapy, offering a structured approach to help individuals address various challenges including anxiety, depression, trauma and relationship problems. EFIT’s unique approach empowers mental health professionals to help their clients transform restrictive emotional patterns, foster internal coherence, and build deep resilience. In other words, EFIT allows them to be fit to flourish in life and in love.
EFIT Courses
Begin your EFT training journey by exploring our list of EFIT-related courses, tailored to equip you with the skills necessary for successful individuals therapy. The steps indicated below are guidelines for those wishing to become a Certified Emotionally Focused Individuals Therapist.
Fundamentals of Emotionally Focused Therapy | Recommended
Engage with the essence of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) in our one-day Fundamentals of EFT (FEFT) course. Grounded in attachment science, this 6.25-hour workshop provides practical tools to enhance your therapeutic practice across individual, couple, and family modalities. Through didactic presentations, recorded client sessions, and experiential exercises, you’ll explore key EFT concepts and interventions. This course is a stepping stone into the transformative world of EFT, aligning you with effective techniques to address anxiety, depression, and relationship issues. Take this leap to augment your professional skills and make a lasting impact in your therapeutic journey.
EFIT Essentials | Required for EFIT Certification
An ICEEFT-endorsed EFIT Essential training is the introductory 24+ hour training in Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT) and the first step towards certification. This workshop equips therapists with the competencies to tune into and harness the power of emotions, enabling the transformation of clients’ self-concept and relational bonds. Participants learn how to delve into the heart of attachment and humanistic experiential perspectives, explore the intricacies of affect regulation, and unveil the therapeutic dance of EFIT Tango to facilitate corrective emotional experiences. Completion of EFIT Essentials provides therapists with the tools to create lasting change in their clients’ lives.
EFIT Essentials is equivalent to EFIT Level 1 + EFIT Level 2.
Mastering Skills and Overcoming Challenges with EFIT: A Consultation Process | Required for EFIT Certification
Advance your practice and improve your client outcomes by taking your EFIT 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 in all cases! Next, join colleagues as they show their work and watch as expert trainers help guide the therapy process through feedback, consultation, and enactments specifically aimed at framing clients’ problems through the lens of attachment, mapping the process, maintaining momentum, unblocking barriers to growth, and more!
Take an Approved EFIT Short Course | Required for EFIT Certification
Deepen your EFIT learning with one or more of our ICEEFT-approved courses. These courses have no prerequisites and can be taken at any stage of your EFIT learning journey.
SKILLS GUIDELINE FOR CERTIFICATION OVERVIEW (Click to expand)
Learning and integrating the EFT model includes development of the following skills. This list can be used as a guideline to assist supervisors and applicants to assess for readiness for certification.
Additional specific details and information for each EFT modality (EFIT, EFCT & EFFT) are available on the ICEEFT members website whereas this document is offered as a generic overview.
Alliance Skills
Therapist readily demonstrates…
– Attunement and empathic tracking of client’s experience.
– A safe-haven alliance (A.R.E.) including assessing risk, context, and contraindications.
– Focus on reactive patterns and validate client’s attachment strategies.
– Effectively engage with clients in all their diversity, including the negative impact of
– discrimination along with clients’ strengths and resilience.
Micro Skills
Therapist shows ability to …
– Reflect and validate client’s experience and identifies emotions and relational patterns.
– Validates vulnerabilities and coping strategies normalizing blocks.
– Asks evocative questions that help identify patterns, and elicit deeper emotions, underlying
– attachment fears, and longings.
– Asks open-ended questions and encourages self-reflection.
– Makes appropriate empathic conjectures that validate and deepen experience (e.g. self/other)
– Uses all micro skills together with RISSSSC prosody – slow, specific, soft, etc.
– Heightens experience with images and client’s emotional handles, where appropriate.
– Reframes experience – mostly in terms of attachment-related emotions.
– Evokes emotional experience and choreographs engaged encounters/enactments.
– Paces risk-taking holding client within the leading edge (e.g. window of tolerance).
Tango Skills
Therapist shows ability to …
Move 1: Identify relational patterns and affect regulation processes leading to self-perpetuating cycles.
Move 2: Assemble Emotion – Pinpoints trigger, perception, body sensation, meaning and action by focusing on and processing core emotions.
Move 2: Distills emotion with RISSSSC and engages present experience in highly focused manner.
Move 3: Sets up encounters/enactments that prompt new awareness and /or bonding experience.
Move 4: Processes encounters (Move 3) with client(s).
Move 5: Summarizes progress in the session, validating growth, contrasting new interactions and previous patterns.
The Steps to Certification in EFIT
Certification as an Emotionally Focused Individuals Therapist will not only sharpen your therapeutic skills and better equip you to bring profound healing to your clients, it will also gain you professional standing within a global community committed to nurturing secure relationships and advancing emotional well-being.
There is fluidity in the sequence that you learn EFIT. “Fundamentals of EFT” is recommended to be taken first. “EFIT Essentials” is strongly recommended prior to “Mastering Skills and Overcoming Challenges with EFIT: A Consultation Process”. An approved EFIT short course can be taken first, last, or in the middle.
Additional Certification Steps
Supervision
Minimum of 8 hours of EFCT Supervision which can include up to 4 hours of group supervision.
Application Package to ICEEFT
Submit your application package to ICEEFT for review
Achievement: Certified EFCT Therapist!
Congratulations, you are a Certified EFCT Therapist! You have completed a major step on a lifelong learning journey.