Leaving the Ranch… Or Bringing It Home?
Fidelity Without Rigidity in Emotionally Focused Therapy
I recently began writing a blog about a question I occasionally receive from therapists in EFT supervision and consultation:
“Is it ever okay to leave the EFT model?”
My initial answer was yes.
I described it as “leaving the ranch.”
For me, EFT is home. It is where I live as a therapist. Like leaving your home to run errands or go out to dinner, I suggested there are times we briefly step outside the model, to provide psychoeducation, offer context, or clarify the process. The important thing, I argued, was to know how to come back home.
As I repeatedly reviewed what I wrote, however, something happened.
The metaphor itself began to change.
The more I reflected on my own clinical work, the more I wondered if I had been asking the wrong question all along.
Do we really leave the ranch?
Or do we bring things home?
Think about your own home.
Very little inside your home actually originated there. The furniture came from somewhere else. So did the refrigerator, the lamps, the artwork, the books, the dishes, the tools, and the food in the pantry. None of these things originally belonged to your home. You found them elsewhere, recognized their value, and brought them home.
Once they were there, they became part of the way you live.
Perhaps that is a better metaphor for good therapy.
One of the great gifts that Dr. Sue Johnson gave us was not simply a model of therapy, but an integrative way of understanding people. EFT has always welcomed wisdom from many places. Attachment theory, experiential therapy, systems theory, neuroscience, and humanistic thought all found a home within EFT because they served the same overarching purpose: helping people discover themselves and one another through new emotional experience.
That is how I think about integration today.
When I appreciate Internal Family Systems, I am not leaving EFT. I am bringing another helpful perspective into my home. Parts language often helps clients make sense of the internal
conversations they have with themselves. Narrative therapy helps illuminate the stories people tell about themselves and their relationships. Cognitive behavioral therapy helps us understand the beliefs that shape emotional experience. And, Behavioral models help us appreciate the coping strategies people develop in response to pain.
Each offers something valuable.
But once those ideas enter my home, they begin to serve the EFT process rather than compete with it.
Take behavioral models as one example. They often help us understand what people do after they are triggered. Yet EFT asks an additional question:
What is happening inside the person between the trigger and the behavior?
It is in that space that we discover emotion, meaning, attachment fears, longings, and the protective strategies that eventually become behavior. That is the space where transformation occurs.
Likewise, a cognitive therapist may help us understand beliefs. A narrative therapist may help us understand stories. An IFS therapist may help us understand parts. Each can highlight the meaning a person gives to a trigger and their underlying vulnerable emotions.
EFT asks how each of these is organized around attachment, how emotion gives rise to meaning, how meaning shapes protection, and how protection either strengthens or weakens
connection.
In other words, EFT gives these perspectives a home.
Therapy, then, is about more than getting people to change. It is about creating a presence and a process in which people discover themselves, discover one another, and discover what has been happening between them all along. When that discovery occurs, change often follows, because it was found.
Perhaps I still leave the ranch from time to time.
But more often than not, I find myself bringing good ideas home.
And once they are home, they no longer feel like visitors.
They become part of the way I live.
— Keith Bjorge, PsyD
Psychologist
Clinical Director, Cherry Hill
EFCT Therapist and Supervisor
