Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT) Essentials

EFIT Essentials is an amalgamation of the previous Level 1 and Level 2 EFIT trainings, now offered as a seamless, intensive learning experience. The training is structured to provide a solid foundation and an advanced understanding of the EFIT model, embedded within an attachment science framework. Through a blend of theoretical instruction and experiential exercises, participants will be guided to apply the model with individuals in their practice, fostering their growth as adept, attuned, and responsive EFIT therapists.

This 4-day (24hr) training event is a didactic and experiential program where participants will be invited to apply the EFIT principles and interventions. The training will delve into the heart of the empirically-validated EFIT model, presenting a coherent framework for understanding individual emotional processing and change.

EFIT Essentials Learning Objectives

1. Describe an attachment, humanistic, systemic perspective of clients, their problems, and the therapeutic interventions for change.
2. Build a safe therapeutic alliance in accordance with principles of secure attachment and Rogerian ingredients of empathic responding, unconditional acceptance, and therapist genuineness.
3. 3. Outline the applicability of EFIT for clients with varying presenting problems.
4. 4. Delineate clients’ within and between patterns of affect regulation.
5. Identify how clients’ protective, self-defining, and interactional iatrogenic patterns create and maintain each other as the core components of emotional disorders, such as anxiety and depression.
6. Discover and distill core emotional experience and promote emotional balance.
7. Outline the EFIT process of change: From stabilizing and finding emotional balance, to restructuring inner experience and ways of engaging with others.
8. Implement the 5 moves of the EFT Tango to help clients recognize how they are shaping their world and to create corrective emotional experiences to restructure their world.
9. Demonstrate the micro-interventions used by the EFT therapist.
10. Demonstrate how to choreograph dramas that expand the self and open engagement with others.
11. Integrate corrective emotional experiences into secure working models of self and other.
12. Demonstrate how to move clients to become resilient, competent, fully alive selves who can deal with existential life issues within the context of meaningful connections with others.
13. Validate the client’s sense of competence and worth in every session.

Trainer

Lorrie Brubacher, M. Ed., LMFT, RMFT is the Founder of the Carolina Center for EFT and was the director from 2009-2024. She is certified with the International Centre for Excellence in EFT (ICEEFT) as a therapist, supervisor, and trainer. She is author of Stepping into Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy: Key Ingredients of Change (2018), now available in nine languages; Stepping into Emotionally Focused Therapy: Key Ingredients of Change, (2^nd ed.) (2025); and Workouts for Stepping into Emotionally Focused Therapy: Exercises to Strengthen Your Practice (2025). She has worked in private practice in couple and family therapy since 1989 and continues to have online private practices in NC and Manitoba, Canada, where she now resides. Lorrie holds an adjunct appointment at UNC Greensboro and has previously been an instructor at 3 Canadian universities. She publishes and presents internationally on the topic of EFT. Lorrie has co-authored six chapters on EFCT with Dr. Sue Johnson, the originator of EFT and has several EFT publications in the Encyclopedia of Couple and Family Therapy. She is published in the Journal of Marriage and Family Therapy, in Person Centered and Experiential Psychotherapies on EFIT, in the Journal of Family Psychotherapy on EFT process research and has a chapter with Dr. Ting Liu on online EFT, which also has a section on EFIT. She is on the editorial board for the ICEEFT EFT Community News.

She has been teaching Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFCT) and Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT) since 2009, across the US, in Canada, Egypt, Ukraine, Greece, Iran, Romania, and the United Kingdom. She also provides consultation in EFCT and EFIT internationally. With Dr. Lillian Buchanan, she co-created, in 2014, the first EFT interactive video training program on EFT’s Attachment injury Resolution Program, accessible at www.attachmentinjuryrepair.com. Numerous EFCT and EFIT training videos of hers are available at https://steppingintoeft.com/

The co-host of a biweekly EFIT webinar series, EFT and Me, together with EFT Supervisor Caroline Gasparetto, Lorrie loves sharing the powerful model of EFIT with eager EFIT-explorers. Clients have much to teach us, as is illustrated by this careful moment-by-moment processing of clinical videos of clients who have courageously consented for their work to be used to help us all grow in the model.

Lorrie is very enthused about Johnson's clear model attachment-based model of EFT across three modalities of couples, families, and individuals. She works in all three modalities and is consistently appreciated for her very precise, clear, easy-to-follow style of teaching and writing which makes the rather complex model of EFT accessible and transferable to practice. In her EFIT trainings, participants frequently comment on how the training strengthens their clinical competence and confidence while at the same time deepening their sense of safety and security with self and other. Her hope for every participant in her training events is that the EFT experience adds joy and life to their "way of being” both personally and professionally.