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Lara Kennerly, PsyD
When the same emotional patterns keep repeating, understanding them is only part of the answer. EFIT helps create new emotional experiences that make lasting change possible.
Dr. Lara Kennerly provides EFIT for adults experiencing anxiety, depression, trauma, relationship difficulties, and other concerns throughout California.
Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT) in Sacramento & Across California
What Is Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT)?
Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT) was developed by Dr. Sue Johnson, the psychologist who created Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). Built on decades of attachment research, EFIT brings the same evidence-based model into individual therapy. It is based on the understanding that emotions organize how you experience yourself and the people you care about.
In EFIT, emotions are treated as information about what you need and what you long for. Anxiety, depression, emotional numbness, self-criticism, and relationship difficulties often become easier to understand through this lens. Depression can turn out to be heartbreak that was never grieved. Constant vigilance can turn out to be an old fear that never got answered. The ways you learned to protect yourself emotionally usually developed for good reasons. They helped you survive difficult situations, even though they may continue long after those situations have passed.
Sessions slow the experience down so there is enough space to notice what emotions are communicating instead of reacting automatically. As these patterns become clearer, people often discover new ways of responding to themselves and the people around them. This is where lasting emotional change comes from.
The relationship between you and your therapist is a central part of EFIT. A secure and emotionally responsive therapeutic relationship allows difficult emotions to be explored without becoming overwhelming. As emotional experiences change, people often notice the difference in their relationships and in how they meet life's challenges.
How Does Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT) Work?
EFIT is an experiential therapy. That means sessions focus on what you are feeling while you are feeling it, instead of only talking about your week or analyzing your past. Maybe you have done therapy before and came out understanding your problems better but still feeling stuck. That happens because insight alone doesn't change your nervous system and the many automatic and subconscious ways you react to situations before your logical mind even clocks what happened. You can very specifically know exactly why you have anxiety, what it feels like, and deeply understand many situations or things like are likely to bring it on, but just knowledge and increased ability to identify triggers doesn't address rewiring how your body responds.
EFIT works with the emotion directly, with a therapist who makes that feel safe, and it moves through three specific intervention stages at whatever pace fits you.
Stage 1: Stabilization
The first stage focuses on establishing enough emotional balance and stability to make the deeper work possible. Together, you and your therapist begin mapping out the emotional pattern that keeps repeating itself in your life: the situations that set it off, the sensations that show up in your body, the things you tell yourself in those moments, and what you find yourself doing next. Your therapist is also paying attention to what happens for you during sessions themselves and noticing important verbal and non-verbal changes that you typically can't observe for yourself (e.g. widened eyes, speech getting quieter, speaking faster, slumping in your chair, pulling at your hair, crossing and uncrossing legs quickly).
Maybe the more obvious sign you hav learned to notice- like moments when you find yourself going quiet when something painful comes up, or changing the subject, or suddenly feeling "checked out" and far away. These are actually protective responses ("survival strategies") that you developed long ago, much earlier in life, and which you began using for good reasons, often during periods of your life when having strong feelings simply wasn't safe, or resulted in uncertain unpredictable outcomes and responses from others. Over time you learned strategies that would elicit safer, more predictable reactions from others, which tended to be met with respect and curiosity instead of judgment. Understanding your uniqued protective responses, how and when they developed, and to identify how they helped you to survive and thrive into adulthood, is what makes the next stage possible.
Stage 2: Restructuring
The second stage is where the deeper change in EFIT happens. With enough stability in place, therapy begins moving toward the emotions underneath the patterns- the fear, sadness, or shame that has been kept out of view often even from yourself, in some cases carried alone for years. Your therapist begins to help you explore the feelings underneath the patterns by slowing these moments down, helping you to stay with them and find the words and images to describe what you are experiencing, connect them to what you feel in your body as you experience them, all in small measured steps to insure you don't become overwhelmed or stay in the moment past your ability to tolerate the experience.
This stage often includes what are known as "structured encounters," and this is the part of EFIT that tends to feel most different from traditional talk therapy. Your therapist selects and designs these encounters uniquely for each person, keeping in mind where the root of your protective patterns began, people who were specific to it's development, painful past experiences that might have been pivotal moments in your life that warrant focus, individual regrets, and aspects of how you viewed and now view yourself that are maintaining your protective patterns, and help you move through "structured" encounters" based on these specifics. You might be asked to close your eyes and speak to a younger version of yourself. You might be encouraged to finally say what you needed to say to someone from your past, in a moment in time that reverberated through the rest of your life, creating an experience in this current time to revisit. past experiences you've tried to avoid going to, from a place of steadiness you didn't have back then, even with the full knowledge that this person was never able to respond the way you needed them to.
Although you are reliving a moment and changing the outcome, having conversations you never had in your imagination, reliving a memory and taking control of it in a way where you use your voice and provide yourself the safety and support you didn't get back then, changes the memory on a subtle deep level, which your nervous system experiences as real. This is exactly why they work: a new "corrective" emotional experience has the power to change an old one in a way that simply talking about it cannot. Afterward, you and your therapist walk back through what happened together, so the new experience settles in and stays with you. It allows the memory itself, and the crystalized effect it has held on you for all these years, to become less rigid, bend, change, and end up not having the same strangle-hold on you that has kept you reverting to your protective patterns when encountering situations that bring up similar emotions.
Stage 3: Consolidation
The final stage focuses on making these changes last. You and your therapist look at subsequent specific moments and situations where you responded differently than you would have before this therapy, so the contrast with the old pattern becomes clear and easier to recognize on your own.
You also look ahead, at the situations most likely to be difficult after therapy ends, so that you leave with a real sense of how to meet them when they come. By this point, most people find the changes showing up on their own in daily life, in the way they handle stress and in their relationships with the people who matter most to them.
What Can Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT) Help With?
EFIT was developed primarily for depression, anxiety, and the lasting effects of trauma, and these remain the areas where it is most often used. It can also help with a wider range of emotional and relational difficulties, because it works with the patterns that often lie underneath them. People may come to therapy for different reasons, then discover that the same emotional responses keep appearing across different parts of their lives.
People often seek EFIT when they are experiencing:
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Anxiety that feels difficult to settle, even when there is no immediate danger
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Depression, low mood, or emotional numbness
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Trauma or painful experiences that continue to affect daily life
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Grief and significant loss
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Strong self-criticism or persistent feelings of shame
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Difficulty trusting others or maintaining close relationships
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Fear of rejection or abandonment
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Feeling stuck in the same relationship patterns despite wanting something different
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Difficulty identifying or making sense of your emotions
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Feeling disconnected from yourself or uncertain about what you need
These experiences tend to share a common thread. Each reflects an emotional pattern that developed in response to earlier relationships and circumstances, often as a way of coping that made sense at the time. Those patterns can keep shaping your reactions long after the original circumstances have passed. EFIT brings them into focus so they can change at the level where they live, in the emotions themselves.
Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy With Dr. Lara Kennerly
I work with individuals who are struggling in life and relationships in ways that are hard to explain, especially when it feels like the same challenges keep showing up over time. Some people I see are in a relationship that feels difficult or unstable. Others are not in a relationship at all, but find it hard to begin one or to stay connected once things start to matter. They often notice patterns of how they show up in emotionally charge situations that don't seem particularly well-suited for maintaining healthy and fulfilling interpersonal relationships and sense of sense, but recognize these patterns seem to have "always been there" and feel a sense of hopelessness that they will be able to change these patterns, often quickly defaulting to thinking "well I guess that's just me, that's just my personality."
That's usually where we start. We start by reorienting hope, by understanding that a "personality" is a mixture of beliefs and patterns that all began somewhere, and with the right combination of trust, courage, insight, and interventions, change is absolutely possible. We then start the work of exploring current patterns and the emotions underlying them that are no longer serving you and would benefit from adjustment, then begin the work of seeking their origin, when they developed to help you protect yourself much earlier in life.
Over time, at a pace that feels safe and comfortable to you, we then work with the emotion directly, and I help guide my clients through the EFIT stages and the long-term meaningful change that results.
Frequently asked questions
