Emotionally Focused Therapy

Emotionally Focused Counselling and Therapy helps clients to understand and express their emotional experience; including their feelings, thoughts, and behaviours.

Emotionally Focused practitioners work with clients in a caring, respectful, collaborative and real way. We help clients explore their emotional patterns; how they relate to themselves and others. We find ways to help clients deal with and process their emotional experiences.

As clients deal with their emotional experiences they learn about the relationship between their internal world (their feelings, attitudes, thoughts and understandings) and how they experience other people and situations. As they grow in their understanding of their internal world clients begin to notice how this world influences how they are with others. This awareness leads to feeling more comfortable, having greater insight into oneself, an increase in emotional intelligence, more self-compassion, greater self-esteem, greater responsiveness, and ultimately healing and personal growth.

Emotionally Focused Counselling and Therapy is a humanistic, client-centred, process-oriented form of therapy. It incorporates ideas from experiential theories of therapy, emotion and cognition theory, affective neuroscience, dynamic and family systems theory and developmental theory.

Prepared by Dr. Michelle Webster
Director, Institute for Emotionally Focused Therapy Sydney