Emotion Focused Skills Training for Youth (EFST-Y) is an experiential, trauma-informed, and skills-based model designed to help children, adolescents, and young adults better understand, regulate, and work with their emotions.
Rooted in Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) and Emotion Focused Skills Training for Parents (EFST-P), EFST-Y was developed to address a critical gap in youth mental health care: the need to move beyond symptom management and instead build emotional agency, insight, and self-efficacy directly within youth.
EFST-Y positions young people as active agents in their own growth and recovery. Using a non-hierarchical, collaborative stance, clinicians work alongside youth to help them make sense of their emotional world, rather than managing or correcting behaviour. Emotional distress, resistance, and avoidance are reframed as meaningful attempts to meet underlying needs.
Through concrete metaphors, experiential exercises, and structured reflective practice, youth learn to:
EFST-Y is a transdiagnostic model with applications across a range of concerns including anxiety, depression, trauma, suicidality, eating disorders, emotional dysregulation, and relational difficulties.
Many clinicians working in child and adolescent mental health encounter systems and models that can feel overly prescriptive, pathologizing, or limited in their ability to reach complex youth.
EFST-Y offers an alternative. Rather than focusing solely on symptom reduction, EFST-Y:
The model supports clinicians in moving out of “stuckness” and into a position of clarity, confidence, and effectiveness while helping youth develop the internal tools needed for long-term recovery and resilience.
For clinicians trained in Emotion-Focused Therapy, EFST-Y offers a natural extension of EFT principles into direct work with youth. EFST-Y translates core EFT concepts, such as emotional awareness, motivational splits, and relational responsibility, into developmentally accessible language, metaphors, and experiential interventions that youth can use in their everyday lives.
Rather than replacing EFT, EFST-Y:
Clinicians who complete this training will leave with the skills and tools needed to begin applying EFST-Y immediately. This model is designed not only to guide clinical understanding and intervention, but also to become a meaningful, lasting framework that youth themselves can use for ongoing regulation, reflection, and growth beyond therapy.
This page is the “why.” When you’re ready for the “how,” our EFST-Y clinician training teaches you to use the model with youth, step by step.
