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   About the Washington Baltimore Center for EFT

The Maryland Center for EFT, LLC has a new name: the Washington Baltimore Center for EFT to reflect our expanded mission and activities.  The Center provides training to mental health professionals in Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples in the greater Washington and Baltimore area and the surrounding states.  This website features both the activities of the Washington Baltimore Center for EFT and information about local EFT therapists and events.  

Douglas Tilley, LCSW-C is the founder of the Maryland Center for EFT, LLC and the director of the Washington-Baltimore Center for EFT.  He is an EFT trainer, an EFT Supervisor and Certified EFT Therapist and an Approved Supervisor for the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy. 

This year we have exciting news with the addition to the Center of an associate director, Kathryn Rheem, LCMFT. Kathryn is a talented EFT therapist and supervisor whose contributions to the field of EFT have been numerous. Kathryn and Sue Johnson have been developing a program called Strong Bonds Strong Couples for post-deployment returning soldiers and their spouses to help them make the transition to family and couple life together. Kathryn will be joining the Center’s training staff and working to expand the mission of the Center to include and increasing its outreach to local therapists.

The training offered by this Center is recognized by the International Centre for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy, directed by Susan Johnson, Ed.D. and can be applied toward becoming a Registered EFT Therapist.  For more information about Susan Johnson and the International Centre for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy, see www.eft.ca.

Also Center is approved by the American Psychological Association to sponsor continuing education for psychologists. The Maryland Center for EFT maintains responsibility for this program and its content.

About EFT

Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples was developed about 20 years ago by Sue Johnson, Ed.D and Leslie Greenberg, PhD. This short term (8-20 sessions) experiential and systemic couples therapy is now one of the most researched, delineated and empirically-validated approaches in the field of couples therapy. It has demonstrated powerful clinically significant effects with various populations (Johnson, 2003, JMFT 29, 365-385 and see: empirical support for EFT).

EFT presents a comprehensive theory of adult love and attachment and a process for healing distressed relationships. It recognizes that relationship distress results from a perceived threat to basic adult needs for safety, security and closeness in intimate relationships. This experiential/systemic therapy focuses on helping each partner reprocess the emotional experience underlying the rigid negative interactional patterns that keep them stuck. Through a series of well-defined stages the therapist takes the couple from conflict deadlock to creating new bonding interactions. To learn more about this approach you are encouraged to read The Practice of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy: Creating Connection, Second Edition 2004, Becoming an Emotionally Focused Therapist: The Workbook, by Johnson, Tilley, et al., 2006, and/or to visit the EFT web site: www.eft.ca. To see a list of resources and references on EFT click here.