Emotionally Focused Therapy with African American Couples

Emotionally Focused Therapy with African American Couples: Love Heals is an essential guide that integrates emotionally focused therapy (EFT) with cultural humility. It provides a pathbreaking, evidence-based model of couples work that reinforces the bond between partners in the face of race-based distress. Guillory explores and brings a deep understanding of the legacy of racial trauma, and the cultural strengths of African American couples by using real-life case studies. The chapters in the book focus on several key clinical issues in the field, such as communication problems, anxiety, infidelity, depression, and porn. Each case study is enhanced by a consultation with EFT master therapist Sue Johnson. The book is an essential text for students and mental health professionals looking to provide culturally competent therapeutic interventions. It will also appeal to psychologists, mental health workers, social workers, marriage and family therapists, and religious leaders.

"This outstanding book provides therapists practicing EFT with African American couples with a deeper understanding of the cultural strengths as well as the legacy of racial trauma these couples may bring to therapy. Both experienced and new clinicians, searching for ways to increase their cultural competency, will be inspired by the vivid case examples as well as the discussions with Dr. Sue Johnson. This text will make a wonderful contribution to courses addressing couple and family therapy as well as diversity training in all mental health disciplines. It is a trailblazing book and it will have a major impact on our field." - Nancy Boyd-Franklin, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor, Rutgers University; author of Black Families in Therapy: Understanding the African American Experience"The challenges of clinicians providing culturally informed therapeutic interventions to their clients has been made a little easier today by Paul Guillory’s text. A blending of the theoretical with the pragmatic, a meshing of the thinking with the authenticity of African-centered emotional connectedness and interdependence, and a synthesizing of the historical intergenerational trauma with the contemporary challenges of Black life in America into this EFT model make this volume a must have resource for mental health providers treating couples and individual clients alike." - Thomas A. Parham, Ph.D, Distinguished Psychologist, Association of Black Psychologists (ABPsi); Fellow, American Psychological Association (APA) "This unique clinical volume is a must-read for therapists seeking to provide effective couple therapy to African American clients! Guillory offers a compelling challenge and illustrates a powerful path forward. The challenge is to become culturally humble by learning about the bonds of African American love in hostile environments. The path forward is to integrate a cultural lens into the empirically validated Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) model. Gripping stories of African American love and vivid case illustrations bring alive EFT’s use of attachment theory to depathologize relational distress and to effectively reshape secure attachment bonds." - Lorrie Brubacher, M.Ed., EFT therapist, supervisor and trainer of Emotionally Focused Therapy; author of Stepping into Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy: Key Ingredients of Change (2018, Routledge), Adjunct, UNC, Greensboro, NC

Paul T. Guillory, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Psychology Department at the University of California, Berkeley, USA. He is a certified supervisor and therapist of emotionally focused therapy. He is also a former chairperson of the Northern California Community of Emotionally Focused Therapy.