Emotionally Focused Therapy: Strengthening Bonds in Individuals, Couples & Families
November 5 – 8, 2026
Riviera Maya, Mexico
Emotionally Focused Therapy isn’t just for couples. Rooted in attachment science, EFT is a powerful, evidence-based model for working with individuals, couples, and families. Whether your clients are navigating relational distress, attachment wounds, or internal emotional conflict, EFT offers a clear path toward healing through connection. This training includes applications for:
- Individual Therapy (EFIT)
- Couples Therapy (EFCT)
- Family Therapy (EFFT)
Use emotion as a catalyst for deep, lasting change. This training will help you identify reactive cycles, access vulnerable emotions, and guide clients toward secure attachment and emotional responsiveness. With a focus on experiential process and therapeutic attunement, you’ll learn how to apply EFT principles flexibly across a wide range of clinical situations.
Build stronger relationships—within and between your clients. From intimate partnerships to parent-child dynamics to self-connection, EFT helps clients transform patterns of disconnection into new cycles of safety, openness, and trust. This training offers hands-on tools, demonstrations, and clinical guidance to bring those shifts to life in your sessions.
Whether you work with individuals, couples, or families, you’ll walk away with a deeper understanding of attachment, greater confidence in working with intense emotion, and practical strategies for fostering meaningful change in your clients’ most important relationships.
This workshop is a comprehensive introduction to EFT. It offers a foundation for advanced training and a place to deepen existing knowledge of the model. Designed for therapists of all experience levels, it provides practical skills to enhance emotional safety and therapeutic connection while offering an opportunity to learn collectively with colleagues.
Presenter Bio:
James Hawkins, PhD, LPC, brings a wealth of experience and passion as a clinician, counseling educator, and communicator. Dr. Hawkins is a part of Sue Johnson’s EFT trainer team and trains internationally in helping clinicians learn Emotionally Focused Therapy. He is also the co-host of “The Leading Edge in Emotionally Focused Therapy” podcast and a part of the “Success in Vulnerability” online training program, a program aimed at helping clinicians get more focus on working with clinical and relational distress.
Timeline:
Day 1
9 am -10:30 am – Intro and EFT Foundations
10:30 am – 10:45 am – Break
10:45 am – 12:15 – The EFT Map & Tango
Day 2
9 am -10:30 am – EFCT: De-Escalation
10:30 am – 10:45 am – Break
10:45 am – 12:15 pm – EFCT: Restructuring the Bond & Termination
Day 3
9 am-10:30 am – EFFT: Working Through Parental Blocks
10:30 am – 10:45 am – Break
10:45 am – 12:15 pm – EFFT: Restructuring Family Interactions & Termination
Day 4
9 am -10:30 am – EFIT: Tracking and Taming the Cycle Within
10:30 am -10:45 am – Break
10:45 am – 12:15 pm – EFIT: Restructuring Key Emotional Patterns & Termination
Learning Objectives
Upon completion of this course participants will be able to:
- Discuss the foundations of attachment theory and attachment style
- Describe the goals and stages of EFT across modalities with couples, individuals, and families.
- Summarize core EFT interventions, including focused reflection, validation, evocative questioning, and the use of the therapist across different therapeutic contexts
- Demonstrate how to apply EFT interventions to individuals suffering from depression, anxiety, and PTSD
- Summarize EFT strategies, including focused reflection, validation, evocative questioning, pacing, and the use of the therapist to help maintain focus during reactive or stuck clinical processes
- Name the strengths of attachment theory and science as a map to clearly understand client problems and strengths, guiding every session with individuals, couples, and families
- Describe how to expand and re-organize key emotional responses and, in the process, the organization of self
- Demonstrate how to utilize attachment science as a moment-to-moment guide to shape potent systematic change in psychotherapy sessions with individuals, couples, and families.
- Summarize the macro-intervention five-stage sequence of the EFT Tango and how the synchronized response differs across modalities
This course content is based on a publication that has been peer-reviewed, the scientific standard for evaluating academic work. All studies and scientifically derived evidence have limitations that should be considered. If you have any questions about the accuracy or limitations of the content, please contact us at
support@ce-classes.com and we will get back to you.
