Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is a treatment approach with the goal of reconnection between partners. Research has shown that EFT creates improvements for 90% of couples coming in for EFT. EFT has been used with many different types of couples in private practice, university training centers and hospital clinics. These distressed couples also include partners suffering from disorders such as depression, post-traumatic stress, and chronic illness.
EFT Therapy, developed by Sue Johnson, is based on John Bowlby, a British psychologist, psychiatrist, and psychoanalyst’s research that humans have an innate need to feel attached and comforted by significant others. As an infant and child, one’s attachments are based primarily on one’s parents. Once an adult, the person’s primary attachment bonds are transferred over to his/her partner.
Adult attachment relationships have the same survival function as the mother child bond, since ideally these attachments will provide love, comfort, support, and protection throughout a person’s life. However, due to our relationship histories and negative interactions that we experience with our partners, many of us have difficulty having trust and expressing emotion to those who mean the most to us.
When couples argue, the origins of these arguments are some form of protest from one partner to another about not feeling connected, not trusting or not feeling safe or secure with the other. When those whom we are attached to are not available or are not responding to our needs to feel close or supported, we feel distressed. As a result, we often become anxious, fearful,
numb or distant.
These behaviors can become habitual and rigid modes of reacting to our partners. Furthermore, these toxic behavior patterns of conflict seem to take on a life of their own into repetitive interactions between couples that cause much pain, injury and despair. In EFT we focus on these patterns and work on changing these negative interaction cycles from the core, in a non-judgmental environment.
Through EFT, couples begin to recognize and eventually express their needs for love, support, protection and comfort. These needs are often hidden or disguised by the harsh or angry words used in repetitive self-defeating patterns of conflict or arguments. One of the cornerstones of EFT is for the partners to understand these cycles and their meanings. This understanding results in the partner’s ability to not only listen to the partner’s literal words, but rather, for the primary feelings that lie beneath. With this understanding comes the partner’s ability to respond to the other partner’s emotions, thoughts, and feelings that are accompanying the dialogue. This is the emotional focus of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy.
We view building a “safe haven” in relationships as a primary task. That can be formed by focusing on the individual’s primary needs – to feel close, secure and tended to. These needs are likely to be the underlying reason of a couple’s conflict. Once this safe haven and connectedness are established, couples are better equipped to manage conflict and the painful feelings that inevitably arise from time to time in a close relationship. Furthermore, once each partner’s defensive guard is let down, the couple will then be able to send and receive clearer messages from one another. As a result, couples are better able to collaborate, problem solve and compromise. In short – become more of a team – which is the secret of a long-lived, successful marriage!