Finding Support for Your Adolescent with Anxiety

If your teen is struggling with anxiety, Emotion Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) helps parents and adolescents work through it together, using the parent–child bond to calm anxiety and build emotional resilience. Below, Registered Psychologist Bruce Murray explains how EFFT works and where families in Calgary can find support.

Emotion Focused Family Therapy (EFFT)

EFFT is an empirically supported approach that uses the natural bonds between parents and adolescents to re-calibrate attachment and successfully regulate anxiety.

An EFFT therapist will:

• Activate and support parents and adolescents in addressing and regulating anxiety and emotions.
• Normalize the challenges of parenting, acknowledging it is learned "on the go" (Johnson, 2019).

The EFT Tango for Anxiety Healing

EFFT utilizes the EFT Tango to calm the storm of anxiety by strengthening family attachment bonds:

1. Mirroring the present process (Tango Move 1)
2. Deepening and assembling affect (Tango Move 2)
3. Staging an encounter (sharing emotional experiences) with your child (Tango Move 3)
4. Processing the encounter to ensure it "lands well" and promotes family growth (Tango Move 4)
5. Integrating and validating the process (Tango Move 5)

Calming the Storm: Finding Wisdom Within Anxiety

With individual EFT, adolescents can learn to harness anxiety and find wisdom within. Anxiety serves as a warning system (Yates, 2013):

• It signals that something in our emotional self needs attention, much like a storm.
• It arises from unconscious fears or judgments that appear as threats to emotional security.
• Without conscious management, anxiety can lead to unhealthy defense mechanisms, like overanalyzing instead of experiencing.

By consciously reflecting and addressing emotions with bond support, anxiety can become a tool for personal growth.

Six Ways EFFT Supports Family Growth (Johnson, 2019)

1. Focus on the active regulation of emotion.
2. Create emotional safety during sessions for exploring new and difficult emotions.
3. Integrate self and system to understand how each constructs the other in real-time.
4. Promote healthy recovery and emotional balance to constructively deal with vulnerability.
5. Address learned habits from past sensitivity to threats and defenses against vulnerability.
6. Leverage a research-informed approach and practice.

Where to Reach Out for Support

My Wellness Wave offers child and adolescent therapy and family therapy in Calgary and online across Alberta and Ontario.

• Alberta Counselling Centre: Contact Info
• Calgary Counselling Centre: Website
• Distress Centre (24-Hour Help): 403-266-4357

References

• Johnson, S. M. (2019). Attachment Theory in Practice: Emotionally Focused Therapy with Individuals, Couples, and Families. New York: The Guilford Press.
• Yates, T. (2014). Making Use of Anxiety. ISTDP Western Canada. Retrieved from ISTDP Western Canada.