Caregivers’ perception of emotion-focused family therapy for adolescent and young adult females with anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa

Emotion-Focused Family Therapy (EFFT) is an emerging therapeutic intervention in treating female adolescent and young adults with eating disorders. EFFT integrates the principles of family-based therapy and emotion-focused therapy. The main goal of the intervention is to empower parents to become their child’s recovery and emotion coach. This study gathered parent’s perceived obstacles and benefits of EFFT. The findings were that all eight parents had a positive experience of the workshop and cited multiple benefits to the workshop. The most notable identified benefit by parents was that they had noticed an improvement in the parent-child relationship. Further, parents stated that they felt empowered and hopeful after attending the workshop. The findings are relevant to eating disorder clinicians for two reasons. Firstly, the findings suggest that the EFFT model has the potential to improve the relationship between the parent and child. Secondly, parents perceived this intervention as beneficial.