Emotionally Focused Family Therapy Level 2
24 – 25 June 2024
Location: Online
Jim Furrow and Gail Palmer will lead this EFFT Level 2 training online in June 2024.
James L Furrow, Ph.D., is a recognized leader and contributor to the practice of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) with couples and families. He is contributing author and editor to five EFT texts including Emotionally Focus Family Therapy: Restoring Connection and Promoting Resilience and Becoming an Emotionally Focused Therapist: The Workbook. His research on couple therapy, positive youth 
development and spirituality are featured in leading professional journals. He is a clinical fellow and an approved supervisor with the American Association for Marriage and Family Therapy and a Certified Family Life Educator. Jim is an ICEEFT certified EFT therapist, supervisor, and trainer. He resides in Seattle Washington.
Gail Palmer, RMFT, MSW is one of the founding members of the Ottawa Couple and Family Institute and Vice President of the International Centre of Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy. She holds a Masters degree in Social Work and is a Registered Marriage and Family Therapist in Canada. For over 30 years, Gail has worked closely with Dr. Sue Johnson, creator of Emotionally Focused Therapy, and is an experienced trainer and supervisor in EFT. She currently offers workshops, externships and core skills trainings to mental health professionals in a variety of different settings across the world.
Gail has a particular interest in applying the model with work with families. She has co-authored the seminal EFFT text Emotionally Focused Therapy, Restoring Connection and Promoting Resilience, 2019. Her work has included EFFT trainings across North America, Europe and Australia/New Zealand, presentations at EFT summits, international conferences, publications in the EFFT workbook and casebook, articles in professional journals and the ICEEFT newsletter. Professionally, Gail’s primary passion is to help therapists who are both new to EFT and trained in EFT, to bring the powerful interventions and skills of this model to the family therapy room.
What you can expect in EFFT Level 2
Building on the foundations of EFFT Level 1, Level 2 focuses on increasing your competence in EFFT assessment and treatment practices that guide families through resolving relationship blocks and developing more secure familial bonds. Level 2 concentrates on specific practices for working through negative patterns, accessing and deepening emotional experience to promote corrective emotional experiences in family relationships. Video examples and practice exercises provide opportunities for you to observe EFFT in action and deepen your understanding and skill in this innovative approach to transforming family distress.
Emotionally Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) is an attachment-based approach that combines both systemic and experiential interventions to restore family relationships and strengthen their resilience. A primary goal of EFFT is to reduce problematic behavior by creating new patterns of emotional accessibility and responsiveness that offer a secure base for children to develop and families to thrive. EFFT provides a practical approach to engaging families at an emotional level. Accessing, processing, and connecting family members through the power of emotional experience promotes healing and fosters a family’s resilience to the everyday and unexpected challenges of life.
This advanced training builds on previous EFFT training providing further training on the six core competencies of EFFT practice. Participants focus on key change events in EFFT and therapist practices used to promote parental openness and child vulnerability. The training provides direction in transforming parental intention into more effective engagement of caregiving and engaging attachment responses within the family system. Specific strategies are reviewed for working through relational blocks and re-engaging attachment related-needs across the family. This training follows an intensive focus on key elements in the EFT process applied to family relationships. Demonstration and practice exercises provide participants opportunities to deepen their EFT skills in intervening with family relationships broadening their understanding of emotion and attachment in family life and strengthening the bonds they share.These workshops combine didactic instruction, experiential exercises, and case examples to demonstrate the practice of EFFT. Participants are encouraged to bring examples from their casework to explore the application of EFFT to their own practice. When possible, live demonstration sessions are included.
EFFT Level 2 Objectives :
Building on the foundations of EFFT Level 1, Level 2 focuses on increasing your competence in EFFT assessment and treatment practices that guide families through resolving relationship blocks and developing more secure familial bonds. Level 2 concentrates on specific practices for working through negative patterns, accessing and deepening emotional experience to promote corrective emotional experiences in family relationships. Video examples and practice exercises provide opportunities for you to observe EFFT in action and deepen your understanding and skill in this innovative approach to transforming family distress.
Participation in EFFT Level 2 will enable you to:
- Conceptualize family distress and formulate a treatment plan guided by EFFT goals.
- Explore alliance practices that promote family engagement in treatment.
- Assess safety and contraindications for EFFT practice and conjoint practice.
- Identify EFFT change events and related therapist interventions.
- Practice interventions skills that promote parental buy-in to systemic intervention.
- Order family patterns and reframe family patterns using an attachment frame.
- Engage practices to process relational blocks to parental openness and child vulnerability.
- Gain skill in accessing and assembling emotion associated with family distress.
- Increase effectiveness in use of enactments to engage and process attachment related emotions and needs.
- Facilitate impact of corrective experiences throughout family relationships.
- Identify treatment practices guiding use of EFFT with divorced and remarried families.