Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) is an empirically-supported therapy that views emotions as central to human functioning and therapeutic change. This understanding of emotion is based on the view that emotion, at its core, is an innate and adaptive system that has evolved to help us survive and thrive.
Emotions are connected to our most essential needs. They rapidly alert us to situations important to our well-being. They also prepare and guide us to take action towards meeting our needs. Individuals and couples benefit from EFT with the help of an empathically attuned therapist, who seeks to help them to better identify, experience, explore, make sense of, transform, and more flexibly manage their emotions. As a result, persons receiving EFT treatment, become stronger and are more skillful in accessing the important information and meanings about themselves and their world that emotions contain. They also become more skillful in using that information to live vitally and adaptively. (reference: http://www.iseft.org)