Working with LGBTQ+ Folx and Emotionally Focused Therapy:
Couples, Relationships, and Individuals

This two-day workshop will enhance your self-awareness, knowledge, and skills in using EFT effectively with LGBTQ+ clients. The knowledge, skills, and awareness needed for an EFT practice with LGBTQ+ folx builds on the strengths of EFT across modalities and integrates an exploration of how minority stress may impact and activate attachment systems, emotional expression/ suppression, and the relationships that matter most to our clients. The workshop will include how some of these systems impact the way we understand and explore sexuality and gender in our work as well as in our lives, including our relationships with ourselves and others.

It is aimed at therapists who have completed a minimum of an EFT Externship and are affirming of LGBTQ+ relationships.

By the end of the workshop participants will be able to:

• explore aspects of their own sex, gender, sexual orientation and their responses to others;
• practise EFT focused on LGBTQ+ examples;
• identify three impacts of minority stress on LGBTQ+ relationships;
• name two ways minority stress impacts attachment strategies;
• understand the role of EFT as a resource for coping with sexual orientation and gender-related discrimination through emotion assembly, deepening, and sharing;
• integrate four (or more) questions into their assessments that explore identity(ies);
• identify three LGBTQ+ affirming strategies within EFT.

This is the workshop for you if you are fairly new to working with clients who identify as lesbian, gay, transgender, or queer, or another related identity or you want to expand your LGBTQ+ affirmative EFT. We invite people of all identities, cisheterosexual and LGBTQ+, and look forward to co-creating safety for all in the workshop.

The workshop will incorporate self-reflection, presentations, video clips, discussion, exercises, and we will provide a handout including resources to continue your learning.

Note: the broad umbrella of LGBTQ+ includes a huge diversity of identities with core unifying similarities and a lot of differences. We address some of the core factors that trigger the attachment system, e.g. experience of marginalisation, and the role of individual and relational well-bring as a source of resilience and joy.

This workshop will be in English.

Workshop Presenters

Robert Allan (he/him/his), PhD, is a systemic psychotherapist based in London and an ICEECT trainer. He is a Senior Lecturer and program lead for the child, adolescent, and family MA program at University of Roehampton in London. Among other identities, Robert is a gay, cis-gender male, and worked for 20 years in community-based HIV, queer, and harm reduction work from the mid-1980s. Robert’s interest in EFT extends to his research work where he has explored cultural adaptations of EFT including with LGBTQ+ relationships. He is also the co-Principal Investigator for the clinical trial of Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy.

Sandra Taylor, PhD, is a Certified EFT trainer and together with Robert Allan runs LGBTQ+ centred EFT trainings internationally. She lives in the North West of England and has an online private practice. She is co-director of the British EFT Centre (BEFT) and a member of ICEEFT – and on their Education Committee and Professional Standards Committee. Amongst her previous roles she has been: a director of relationship counselling in a national charity, senior lecturer at the University of Cumbria, and an Occupational Therapist in mental health settings. She is on the Pink Therapy Advanced Specialist Diploma in GSRD Psychotherapy.