Attachment-Based Suicide Assessment in EFT
Join Us for a Virtual One-Day Workshop
Friday, August 28th, 2026 from 9am to 4pm CT
Why Sign Up for This Workshop?
Suicidality is one of the most challenging and emotionally demanding experiences clinicians encounter. Today, more people across all stages of life—including adolescents, young adults, parents, and older adults—are experiencing suicidal thoughts and feelings of hopelessness.
As therapists, we are being asked to sit with increasing levels of pain, uncertainty, and risk while helping clients reconnect with hope and connection.
Knowing how to assess suicide risk is essential. But understanding the attachment wounds, relational patterns, and emotional experiences beneath the risk can change the way we approach assessment and intervention.
An attachment-informed approach helps clinicians move beyond simply identifying risk factors and allows us to better understand the deeper questions behind suicidality:
What happens when a person feels profoundly disconnected from others?
How do attachment injuries contribute to shame, hopelessness, and emotional overwhelm?
How can we create the kind of therapeutic connection that helps clients experience safety, regulation, and hope?
This workshop is designed for social workers, professional counselors, marriage and family therapists, and psychologists who want to deepen their understanding of suicide risk through an attachment lens and develop practical skills for working with suicidal clients.
Participants will learn how attachment styles influence suicidal thoughts and behaviors, how to recognize attachment-related vulnerabilities during assessment, and how to integrate Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)-informed interventions with clients experiencing suicidality. The workshop will also address the impact of culture, race, gender identity, and sexual orientation on the meaning and expression of suicidal thoughts, while exploring how clinicians’ own attachment patterns may influence assessment and treatment.
You will leave this training with a more comprehensive framework for understanding suicidality, greater confidence in your clinical decision-making, and practical tools to help clients move from isolation and despair toward connection and emotional safety.
Join us for this important conversation and expand your ability to assess, understand, and support clients experiencing suicidal thoughts through an attachment-informed lens.
What Is Emotionally Focused Therapy?
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is an evidence-based approach to psychotherapy that is grounded in attachment theory and the science of human connection. Developed by Sue Johnson, EFT helps therapists understand how attachment needs, emotional responses, and relationship patterns shape the way people experience themselves and others.
At its core, EFT is based on the understanding that humans are wired for connection. When individuals experience attachment injuries, chronic disconnection, rejection, trauma, or overwhelming emotional pain, they may develop protective patterns that leave them feeling isolated, hopeless, and emotionally overwhelmed. For some clients, these experiences can contribute to suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
EFT provides a framework for helping clients identify and transform the painful emotional cycles that maintain distress. Rather than focusing only on symptoms or behaviors, EFT helps clients access and process underlying emotions, strengthen emotional regulation, develop a more secure sense of self, and create experiences of safety and connection.
In the context of suicide assessment and intervention, an EFT-informed approach allows clinicians to look beneath suicidal thoughts and behaviors to better understand the attachment-related pain, unmet needs, and relational experiences that may contribute to a client’s suffering. By recognizing these deeper emotional processes, therapists can respond with greater empathy, attunement, and clinical effectiveness.
This workshop applies EFT principles beyond couples therapy, highlighting how attachment science and emotion-focused interventions can inform suicide risk assessment and treatment across clinical settings.
Attachment and Suicide Risk in Kansas and Missouri
Suicidal thoughts and behaviors rarely exist in isolation. Behind the experience of suicidality there is often profound emotional pain, a sense of disconnection, difficulty regulating overwhelming emotions, and a belief that one’s circumstances cannot change. An attachment lens helps clinicians understand the relational and emotional experiences that may contribute to this suffering.
Attachment theory provides a framework for understanding how early and ongoing experiences of connection, safety, and responsiveness shape the way individuals view themselves, others, and their ability to seek support during times of distress. When attachment needs are consistently unmet or disrupted, individuals may develop patterns of relating that increase vulnerability to hopelessness, shame, emotional dysregulation, and interpersonal distress—all factors that can contribute to suicide risk.
Understanding attachment patterns can enhance the suicide assessment process by helping clinicians explore important questions:
How does this client experience closeness, support, and connection with others?
What happens internally when they feel rejected, abandoned, criticized, or alone?
How do they communicate distress and seek comfort when overwhelmed?
What attachment-related fears or beliefs may be contributing to hopelessness or feeling like a burden?
This workshop explores how different attachment styles—including secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized attachment patterns—may influence the experience and expression of suicidality. Participants will learn how insecure attachment can contribute to difficulties with emotional regulation, interpersonal relationships, and accessing support during times of crisis.
By integrating attachment theory into suicide risk assessment, clinicians can move beyond identifying risk factors alone and develop a more compassionate, nuanced understanding of the client’s internal world. An attachment-informed approach helps therapists create stronger therapeutic connections and develop interventions that support safety, emotional regulation, and pathways toward hope and healing.
Learning Objectives for Attachment-Based Suicide Assessment:
Understand the Role of Attachment in Suicide Risk
Define attachment theory and its relevance to suicide assessment.
Identify different attachment styles (secure, anxious, avoidant, and disorganized) and their impact on suicidal ideation and behaviors.
Assess the Client’s Attachment Style in Suicide Risk Evaluation
Utilize evidence-based tools and strategies to assess attachment-related vulnerabilities in suicidal individuals.
Recognize how insecure attachment may contribute to hopelessness, emotional dysregulation, and interpersonal difficulties associated with suicidality.
Describe how suicidality is influenced by diversity factors, including race, culture, gender identity, and sexual orientation and identify how different cultural frameworks shape the expression, meaning, and stigma of suicidal thoughts and behaviors.
Examine the Therapist’s Attachment Style and Its Impact on Assessment
Identify personal attachment styles and their influence on therapeutic interactions.
Explore how clinician experiencing clients in high risk suicidality and attachment-based biases may shape the suicide assessment process.
Implement EFT-Informed Interventions for Suicidal Clients
Apply current ethical guidelines and professional standards to clinical decision-making with suicidal clients, including issues of risk assessment, documentation, confidentiality, and the use of attachment-based interventions.
Meet Rachel Thomas, MA, LMFT, EFT Certified Trainer, Supervisor, and Therapist
Rachel Thomas, LMFT, has been a licensed therapist since 1997 and is a Certified Emotionally Focused Therapist, Certified EFT Supervisor, and Arizona's Emotionally Focused Therapy Trainer. She is passionate about helping couples, individuals, and adult family members create stronger, more secure relationships through Emotionally Focused Therapy. In addition to her therapy practice, Rachel leads Hold Me Tight® Couples Workshops and offers two-day EFT Intensives for couples and families seeking meaningful, lasting change.
An AAMFT Approved Supervisor since 2005, Rachel has helped many therapists successfully navigate the path to licensure. She continues to provide clinical supervision and consultation for the Therapy With Heart team as well as Emotionally Focused Therapy clinicians around the world who are expanding their skills and deepening their practice. Her commitment to the EFT community has included years of leadership within Arizona Emotionally Focused Therapy (AzEFT), including four years as President before stepping into her current role as Arizona EFT Trainer.
Beyond her work as a therapist, supervisor, and trainer, Rachel is deeply committed to supporting individuals and families experiencing grief and infertility. She has volunteered with New Song Center for Grieving Children through Hospice of the Valley and has been involved with RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association. These experiences continue to shape her clinical work, with grief and infertility remaining important areas of specialization.
Rachel believes healing happens in environments where people feel emotionally safe, genuinely accepted, and deeply understood. Whether working with clients or mentoring fellow therapists, she strives to create spaces that encourage authenticity, connection, and growth. As an educator, she has presented trainings on a variety of specialized topics, including EFT and Affairs, EFT Across Systems, Attachment-Based Suicide Prevention, and EFT Supervision Reboot. She also serves as a facilitator for EFT Externships and Core Skills training, where she is passionate about developing therapists and strengthening the Emotionally Focused Therapy community both within Therapy With Heart and throughout Arizona.
