Learning EFT Begins with the 4-Day EFT Externship

2025 Externship Dates: September 17-20, 2025, 9 am - 4:30 pm each day

CLICK HERE to register today.

Location: Humphrey Conference Center, University of Minnesota Minneapolis Campus, 301 19th Ave S, Minneapolis, MN 55455

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) was developed by Dr. Sue Johnson and Dr. Les Greenberg.  Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) provides a well-researched map for helping couples grow closer and deal with relationship conflicts.  The EFT model is based on Attachment Theory, the Science of Love and Emotions and Humanistic Psychology.  EFT helps couples move from relational distress and disconnection to safer, more connected relationships.

Relationships can be a cause of stress and pain or a source of comfort and joy. EFT therapists help partners understand more clearly each other’s deepest emotions and attachment longings and fears. However, feelings are often hidden, unexpressed or misunderstood. EFT therapists help partners access, deepen and communicate their feelings to each other in heart-felt moving ways.

In the EFT Externship, therapists will learn how to view relationship distress through an Attachment lens and to focus their attention on attachment needs and longings.  Therapists will learn how to pay attention more closely to the emotions of their clients and to explore, heighten and expand underlying emotions.  Therapists will also learn and practice how to facilitate new couples therapy conversations that increase their couples’ feelings of secure attachment, closeness, and connection.

When couples are in distress, some couples disagree, fight, and repeatedly engage in negative patterns of blaming, criticizing, defending, and withdrawing. In a patterned fashion, this often leads partners to fight, avoid, distance, emotionally or physically withdraw, or to become detached from each other. The focus of EFT is to understand the underlying, often unspoken reasons and attachment-related significance and impact of these patterns and to help partners to express their vulnerable emotions to each other.

Traditional types of couples therapy tend to be open-ended, focus on behavior change, teach negotiation and communication skills, or minimize the importance of interdependence. In contrast, the EFT approach hones in on increasing a couple’s attunement and empathy in order to build trust and create a safe haven and secure base.  In EFT, we focus on helping couples create and build more secure bonds with each other. We help partners turn to each other when they are most vulnerable, and we foster accessibility, responsiveness, and emotional engagement when partners take the risk of expressing their underlying feelings and needs.

In the EFT approach, couples learn to recognize the negative cycle that keeps them stuck where often one person pursues and criticizes and the other responds defensively or withdraws or both pursue or both withdraw. Couples learn to identify the needs and fears that keep them in that negative cycle and they learn to identify and express their underlying emotions in a way that transforms the repetitive negative cycle into a more positive and secure relationship that enables the couple to more easily resolve their problems on their own.

Partners learn to empathize with each other and become more supportive when they experience the other’s vulnerability expressed in clear and poignant ways. By learning how to be more accessible, responsive, and emotionally engaged (A.R.E.), partners create a more secure and loving bond.

In the EFT Externship, you will learn how to help your couples deal with their feelings together, reach towards each other, and be responsive in more loving and positive ways. You will learn by watching videotaped demonstrations of the approach and you will practice via experiential exercises and role plays.

The four-day EFT Externship is the first step towards developing an in-depth understanding of Emotionally Focused Therapy and learning this model of couples therapy.

The MNCEFT Externship is recognized by the International Center for Excellence in EFT (ICEEFT) and completion of the four training days can also be used for Continuing Education credit (24 CEU’s) and towards your Certification as an EFT therapist.

We recommend that you visit ICEEFT.com for more details.

Suggested Reading for the EFT Externship:

Johnson, S.M. (2019). Attachment Theory In Practice: Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) with Individuals, Couples and Families. Guilford Press – First Edition.

Johnson, S.M. (2004). The Practice of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy: Creating Connection. New York: Bruner / Routledge.-Second Edition.

Johnson, S.M. (2008). Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. New York: Little Brown.

General Objectives of the MNCEFT Externship:

Participants will:

  1. Obtain a clear understanding of the basic experiential and systemic concepts of an “Emotionally Focused” approach to couple therapy.

  2. Conceptualize couple distress and relationship repair based on theories of attachment and emotion.

  3. Develop skills in helping partners to change the emotional responses that lead to relational distress and that maintain a repetitive negative cycle of interaction.

  4. Help partners shape new interactional patterns and bonding events.

  5. Practice EFT interventions to overcome therapeutic impasses with couples and to treat attachment related injuries.

At an EFT Externship you can expect:

  1. Presentations of theory and clinical techniques that are clearly explained.

  2. Skills training and experiential / hands-on exercises.

  3. Observation of videotaped sessions and when possible, a live couple consultation.

After Completion of the 4-Day EFT Externship, you will receive a Certificate for 24 hours of Continuing Education, including 2 cultural CEUs.

Thank you for your interest in the Minnesota Center for EFT Externship. For other worldwide EFT trainings, events, workshops, books, articles, training tapes, and information about becoming certified in EFT, please visit ICEEFT.com.

If you have any questions, please contact us at info@mnceft.org.

2025 dates: September 17-20, 2025

Continuing Education Credits: We will apply for 24 CEU’s from the MN Board of Marriage and Family Therapy. This includes 2 cultural CEUs. If you have a different board, please inquire with your board to see if you can get CEUs. Psychologists see below.

Co-sponsorship for APA approved continuing education credits:

MNCEFT co-sponsors continuing education courses with Haugen Performance Consulting, PLLC, and Assessment and Therapy Associates of Grand Forks, PLLC.

Assessment and Therapy Associates of Grand Forks, PLLC is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. Assessment and Therapy Associates of Grand Forks, PLLC maintains responsibility for this program and its content.

Please note that per APA sponsorship requirements, attendees must attend 90% of the continuing education event to receive CE credit, and attendance is monitored. Credit will not be given for partial attendance.

To purchase APA approved continuing education credits for MNCEFT courses, visit this link: https://form.jotform.com/ATAGF/mnceft. This link can also be used if you need to purchase a duplicate CE certificate from HPC/ATAGF. 

If you need to cancel your APA CE purchase, we will provide a full refund if requested 2 weeks before the course via the HPC website minus a 5% administrative fee. No refunds will be issued less than 2 weeks before the course.

Who should attend: The Externship is limited to all licensed professionals (and license eligible interns or pre-licensed clinicians) who counsel couples, including psychiatrists, psychologists, psychotherapists, licensed pastoral counselors, family physicians, social workers, psychiatric nurses, counselors and students training in these professions.

Diversity: We aim to cultivate a climate of inclusion, an environment where all can feel safe, valued, cared for, and given an opportunity to form meaningful connections with each other.  In all facets of our work we strive to embody what we hope to see in the world – a just, loving humanity and community in which people are free to be themselves fully – where people can embrace their most basic universal human attachment needs without fear of persecution or marginalization as a result of religion, race, ethnic or national origin, sexual/affectional orientation and preferences, gender expression, family structure, age, class, mental health, physical character or disability.  These values are inherent in the attachment science and humanistic approach to intervention that all our work is based on.

Cancellation Policy: If you need to cancel. please email Anne Ferguson at anne@evolvetherapymn.com. If you cancel before September 3rd, 2025, you will receive a full refund, minus a 5% administrative fee. If you cancel on or after September 3rd, 2025, no refund will be issued.

2025 Prices:

Fully licensed Therapists - $1,075

Pre-licensed - $775

Students/Interns - $575

The last day to register will be September 10th, 2025.

Scholarship Opportunities:

MNCEFT’s equity work in the EFT community includes centralizing and prioritizing voices within the BIPOC community, LGBTQ2AI+ community, and other marginalized identities. One way we act on this commitment is by offering scholarships. We want to address the systemic and institutional racism and discrimination that has resulted in a lack of diversity in EFT training and the mental health field as a whole.

To qualify for a scholarship, you must meet the following criteria:
1. Live and see clients in Minnesota or neighboring cities/areas.
2. Be a licensed Mental Health Professional or working towards licensure and actively providing psychotherapy to couples.
3. Have a desire to expand their understanding of EFT to improve their work with couples, individuals and families.
4. Have an interest in being an active member of the local Minnesota Center of EFT.

5. Meet at least one of the four following criteria:
    a. Identify as BIPOC/global majority, or
    b. LGBTQ2IA+, or
    c. From diverse and marginalized identities (such as those who are uniquely abled), or
    d. Work primarily with marginalized communities (majority of your caseload).

6. Have a financial need for a scholarship

If you can benefit from the equity rate pricing and identify with one of the above categories, you are invited to choose the rate that best meets your need. Please utilize the scholarship codes below when checking out.

25% scholarship- 25SCHOLARSHIP

50% scholarship- 50SCHOLARSHIP

We also have a 75% scholarship option for clinicians who need a larger discount who meet the above criteria. Please fill out this form to be considered for the 75% discount.

If you have any questions, please contact us at info@mnceft.org