Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy

Being and becoming an effective relationship therapist for me in part is a matter of ethics. I want to swim upstream and lean into support healthy relating in relationships whether it couples, family, friends or co-workers.  Because if I can support this in families with children especially, then I create the possibility of parents raising secure and healthy children that can become healthy adults whom have less chance of needing psychotherapy for childhood trauma and attachment wounds. This is were this work becomes ethical for and why I choose to work with the complexities of two people in the room, because I don’t want to wait for hurt people to arrive at my door, I want to create the possibility of reducing that need.

I have chosen the modality of Emotionally Focussed Therapy (EFT) because it aligns with me as a Gestalt therapist with its body informed approach and the non-blaming and pathologizing with people.

What is EFT?

Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT) is a short-term treatment approach that has at its core the goal of creating (or re-establishing) close, secure connections between partners. EFT, developed by Drs. Susan Johnson and Les Greenberg, is based on John Bowlby’s Attachment Theory research in England during and following WW II. Bowlby recognized that humans have an innate need to feel securely attached to and comforted by our significant others. We’ve long known that adult attachment relationships serve the same survival function as parent-child attachments. Throughout our lifetime, our adult attachments ideally provide us with love, comfort, support, and protection and an environment in which both of us can develop and unfold to our full potential. Unfortunately, due to our relationship histories and our negative interaction cycles, many of us experience difficulties creating true intimacy with, expressing vulnerable emotions to, and trusting the very people who are the most important to us — our romantic life partner.

When couples argue about issues such as jealousy, sex, household chores, the children, or money, the underlying conflict patterns are usually predictable and understandable. One partner might criticize or protest when they don’t feel connected, are afraid they can’t rely on or trust their partner, or don’t feel secure, accepted, or understood. One partner might be more likely to withdraw, to push their partner away, or to shut down emotionally. It’s natural to feel distressed when the person with whom we yearn to feel closely connected is critical, emotionally unavailable, or not meeting our valid needs to feel safe, understood, and accepted. Our distress might take the form of feeling angry, anxious, fearful, sad, confused, or numb and then acting accordingly.  Our reactive behaviours as well as our surface and underlying feelings, perceptions, and needs form habitual predictable cycles of conflict which can escalate, often very quickly, leading to disappointment, hurts, and sometimes even despair.

In EFT, we focus on understanding and then changing these negative patterns or cycles of conflict in a way that doesn’t assign blame to either partner, but rather looks at each partner’s responsibility and makes sense of their reactions. One of the most important tasks in EFT is learning to be compassionate toward yourself and your partner as you both learn how your vulnerable feelings and unmet needs are leading to protective reactive behaviours that are unfortunately hurting your partner and damaging your relationship.

In a relatively short time, couples begin to recognize and then express their need for love, support, and comfort that previously were hidden by stonewalling or harsh and angry words. Partners begin to “listen with their heart,” one of the cornerstones of EFT, which involves being able to listen not only to the literal meaning of a partner’s words, but to the vulnerable ‘soft’ feelings that lie beneath the surface. This is the emotional focus of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy.

We view helping you to build “a safe haven” in your relationship as our most important task. We will help you focus on your primary needs (e.g., feeling close, understood, accepted, secure, and responded to) which underlie most of your conflict and help you and your partner become more accessible, responsive, and emotionally engaged.

Once this safe haven and connection have been (re-)established, you’ll be better able to manage conflict and the hurt feelings or difficult disagreements that inevitably arise from time to time in any close relationship. Furthermore, each of you will be able to send clearer messages and will be better able to hear the other’s perspective without hurtful, protective, defensive behaviours getting in the way so quickly. You’ll be better able to collaborate, solve problems, make decisions, and more rapidly repair any moments of discord. Intensive codependancy workshops can often help grow this even faster! In other words, you’ll continue to practice the secrets of a strong, satisfying, successful relationship!

In addition to Attachment Theory, EFT integrates various theoretical streams of psychology theory and treatment, for instance the humanistic experiential perspectives of Rogers and Perls, systems theory (e.g., Minuchin & Fishman), and Gottman’s empirical research on healthy vs. unhealthy relationships.  According to research, EFT moves couples from distress to improvement in 10-12 sessions in about 70-75% of cases; typically it takes about 20-25 sessions to finish the EFT process. Research has shown that approximately 90% of couples who have completed Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy report long-lasting improvements years after therapy has ended.  EFT is rapidly growing worldwide and has been used with many different types of couples in private practice, university training centres, pastoral counselling centres, and hospital clinics.