This webinar demonstrates how to use in-vivo systemic and attachment-based interventions in session to not only heal the deep wounds that drive addictive processes but simultaneously create a substitute-replacement for self-medicating with substances: secure attachment. Through using the clinical skills and interventions of attachment theory from Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), participants will learn how to access systemic doorways into the neural networks that hold traumatic distress beneath addictive processes and utilize relationships as a curative factor. Participants will learn didactic information as well as explore this approach to addiction treatment by viewing an actual therapy session demonstrating working with addiction using EFT. The webinar will demonstrate clear, basic EFT interventions that can be immediately applied to a clinician's practices that elicit therapeutic opportunities for healing emotional distress within the context of their client's relationships.

Presenter:

Michael Barnett, MA, EdS, Certified Emotionally Focused Therapy Trainer, is a licensed clinical psychotherapist in both California and Georgia with over 30 years of clinical experience, as well as a certified supervisor and trainer in Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples (EFT). Barnett founded the Atlanta Center for Emotionally Focused Therapy in 2008 and directed it for over 15 years before moving to Southern California in 2020. He currently co-directs the EFT Center of Los Angeles. Barnett is the author of the Emotionally Focused Therapy Workbook for Addiction: Healing the Shame and Loneliness that Triggers Addiction.

Learning Objectives:

• Participants will be able to define addiction through the lease of attachment theory.
• Participants will be able to describe the systemic-relational processes that maintain addictive processes.
• Participants will be able to describe EFT's approach to working psychotherapeutically with addictive processes.