Online Marriage Counseling in Washington, Oregon and California
Emotionally Focused Couples Counseling
Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFT) made love less mystifying
For centuries love, mysterious and puzzling in its nature,
had been the exclusive domain of poets and songwriters.
A 19th-century poet described the connection to a loved one as a safe haven: “Beside him I fear or dread none.”
Love has been described as a source of joy and happiness as well as a source of misery and pain.
Not until a few decades ago has romantic love been demystified by psychologists and scientists.
Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFT), described by Johnson as an empirically validated theory of adult love relationships, made love less mystifying.
Based on Bowlby’s attachment theory, Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy conceptualizes love as an attachment process. The attachment perspective on adult love suggests that secure bonds are built on interactions in which partners, who are perceived as attachment figures, are accessible and responsive to each other’s attachment needs.
The availability of an attachment figure, especially in times of stress and hardships, provides partners with safe haven for expressing their deepest emotions as well as providing and receiving comfort from each other.
Dr. Sue Johnson, the founder of Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy, in her article “What You Need to Know about Love,” explains “what love is about and how it works.” She wrote that “the need we have as children to be able to call to a special one and know that this person will respond with reassurance and comfort never goes away.
To know that we are loved is the safe haven we all long for.
The longing for this is wired into our brains from the cradle to the grave.”
Need for emotional connection – knowing that your loved one will be here for you in times of hardships – is the most basic longing.
It is difficult to express our heartfelt feelings when we feel vulnerable, especially when our vulnerabilities trigger fear of rejection, mistrust or fears that we are unlovable. These fears prevent partners from getting in touch with their soft feelings of hurt and sadness. Instead, they revert to anger and lash out or shut down and come across as emotionally unavailable to another partner. Couples become stuck in a negative cycle of miscommunication. As a result, partners may feel disconnected, alone, unappreciated and unloved.
What couples want is closeness, but their communication gets distorted, and they do not hear each other. They want to say to their partner – I am longing for you. I miss you. Please reassure me you want to be with me too. Instead, they get caught up in a negative cycle of blaming and withdrawing, and they are both hurting.
With the help of an EFT marriage counselor, couples are able to identify and prevent the negative cycle of miscommunication that leads to disconnection, express their heartfelt feelings and needs in a way that allows both partners to feel heard and respond to each other in a soft and loving way.
During EFT marriage counseling
During marriage counseling the couples also have an opportunity to heal emotional injuries, clarify misunderstandings, practice communication skills, repair a relationship rapture, regain self-confidence, and restore trust.
By helping partners communicate their attachment needs and respond in an emphatic way to each other, an EFT therapist assists couples to overwrite negative past experiences with attachment figures with new positive experiences, thus, creating emotionally corrective experiences. As a result, couples are able to heal their attachment wounds and have more satisfying relationships.
As a result of the emotionally corrective experiences and bonding interactions, the couples are able to adopt a new way of interacting with each other. A relationship with a partner can become an emotionally corrective experience for a trauma survivor by providing a nurturing environment for effectively coping with the effects of a trauma, healing emotional wounds and restoring intimacy.
The couples are able to rebuild a positive way of relating to each other that makes them feel safe, loved, and connected, and it leads to a deeper emotional, spiritual, intellectual, and physical intimacy and a more satisfying relationship.
Emotional responsiveness, openness and softness help rebuild trust, safety and emotional connection between partners. Soulful conversations help couples reconnect on a deep emotional level and rebuild the bond that brings heaven to earth.
