Healing through emotional connection.
NCCEFT brings together therapists dedicated to Emotionally Focused Therapy — the attachment-based model developed by Dr. Sue Johnson and colleagues.
What is Emotionally Focused Therapy?
EFT is a structured, empirically validated approach to therapy that helps people create secure, resilient emotional bonds. Developed by Dr. Sue Johnson, it draws on attachment science to understand the negative cycles that keep people stuck — and to transform them into patterns of trust and connection.
Our North Carolina community gathers to learn, consult, and grow together in this single model. We focus solely on the Emotionally Focused approach, honoring the vision, mission, and core principles of ICEEFT.
The Three Modalities of EFT
Emotionally Focused Therapy offers targeted approaches tailored to different relationship structures and personal goals.
Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFCT)
EFCT focuses on helping couples understand and reframe their negative interactional patterns. Partners learn to express their underlying emotional needs, fostering deeper attachment, secure bonds, and long-lasting connection. Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFCT) is a short-term structured approach, encompassing 8 to 20 sessions, established in the 1980s based on attachment science. It employs a humanistic, experiential approach to restructure emotional experience, alongside a systemic structural approach to amend interactions. Extensive research underpins EFCT’s effectiveness, showcasing substantial treatment effect sizes with enduring results. EFCT has been utilized successfully across diverse settings and with various couples facing challenges like depression, anxiety, or forgiveness dilemmas. It’s employed across North America, Europe, Australia, among others, with both traditional and non-traditional couples, demonstrating its wide applicability and effectiveness.
Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT)
EFIT adapts the principles of EFT to individual therapy, helping clients process difficult emotions, transform negative self-talk, and create a safer, more compassionate connection with themselves and others. 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.
Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT)
EFFT helps families repair strained relationships and promote emotional safety across generations. It guides family members to transform disruptive interaction cycles into supportive, caring connections. Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) extends the principles of Emotionally Focused Therapy to mend and fortify familial bonds. The core objective is to cultivate secure family patterns, where attachment, caregiving responses, and emotional bonds are effective. EFFT centralizes on stabilizing negative interaction patterns, restructuring parent-child interactions, and consolidating the felt security through new connection patterns. Following attachment science, it guides families to experience swift progress as members become more responsive and engaged, uncovering and addressing previously unrecognized attachment-related emotions and needs, thus fostering individual growth and intergenerational relationship enhancement.
Gather, Consult, and Practice Together
Our community meets regularly across North Carolina for case consultation, skill-building, and connection. All meetings are grounded in the EFT model.
ICEEFT-member clinicians in North Carolina
- Our directory includes hundreds of ICEEFT members practicing across the state. Search the full list to find someone near you.
“Being the “best you can be” is really only possible when you are deeply connected to another. Splendid isolation is for planets, not people.”
Sue Johnson