The Power of Emotionally Focused Therapy - How Can EFT Help You Build Healthy Lasting Relationships
Has your relationship been stuck in the same unhealthy patterns that cause you and your spouse to drift apart and feel unseen, unheard, and abandoned? Does your relationship seem like a roommate marriage without genuine emotional connection or passion? Do you struggle with communication breakdown, lost intimacy, emotional disconnection, and loneliness in marriage?
According to research, couples typically wait six years before seeking treatment, which allows their problems to build up and makes healing and rekindling more difficult. Seeking the support of a trained couples counselor early on may help you get unstuck, resolve challenges more positively and productively, and reignite your connection.
Why Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples?
Emotionally focused therapy for couples takes a structured and solution-oriented approach to overcoming relationship issues and developing healthier behavior patterns. EFT focuses on attachment in adult relationships, aiming to help couples turn toward each other more frequently and identify and change steps in their relationship dance – dominant emotional responses in situations of distress.
How Can EFT Help You Build A Strong Relationship That Works?
EFT focuses on emotions and patterns in the relationship, encouraging both partners to become more available, vulnerable, and emotionally connected. It provides a secure environment where you and your partner may feel comfortable being vulnerable, revealing your deepest feelings, and opening up about what you truly need to feel seen, heard, and validated. This communication shift will eventually result in the improvement of other aspects of your relationship, your other relationships, and your overall well-being.
1. EFT Can Help You Understand Your Emotional Responses
How do you reach out to your spouse when you feel hurt, upset, or insecure? Do you get furious, lash out at your partner, or become passive-aggressive? Do you shut down, suppress your feelings, and avoid bringing up the matter because you don't want to make things worse? Do you blame yourself, believing that you're not good enough?
While we cannot avoid conflicts and disagreements in our relationships, knowing how to express your feelings and reach out to your partner can make a significant difference. An EFT therapist can help you understand your main patterns and learn how to respond to each other with more empathy and care.
2. EFT Can Improve Your Communication
Communication breakdown is one of the significant reasons that brings couples to counseling because communication skills are something we must constantly work on. Marriage counseling can help you develop positive communication strategies and get past communication breakdowns.
For example, if your partner says or does something that hurts your feelings, avoid blaming and accusing them. Talk to them without passing judgment and show your curiosity by saying something like, "What is going on for you? How do you feel right now? I know you're a wonderful person who would never hurt me. But something inside you must be causing you to say or behave in such a way."
When you reframe a stressful situation this way, you are slowing your cycle and attempting to understand rather than becoming reactive, which usually leads to positive communication outcomes.
3. EFT Can Help Break Negative Cycles
Many couples often find themselves stuck in negative relationship cycles, patterns, or 'dance' of negative interactions. For example, in most relationships, one partner is usually the pursuer while the other is the withdrawer. A pursuer is a partner uncomfortable with separation and detachment, so they seek out more. When problems in a relationship arise, they may become irritated, snap at their partner, ask many questions, criticize, seek clarification, and so on. In contrast, the withdrawer typically tries to avoid confrontation, so they may refuse to talk, change the subject, shut their partner out, or minimize their concerns.
EFT may help you identify what you and your partner do when you are uncomfortable and in distress. Raising awareness of this and noticing the pursuer-withdrawer pattern may be essential in eventually shifting the entire dance.
4. EFT Can Help Build Trust
When we are in emotional distress, we don't need our partner to rationalize or fix things for us. What we need is a sense of security—the freedom to be vulnerable and the opportunity to feel seen and heard.
Couples therapy may help you explore the roots of distrust and overcome infidelity, lies, or other challenges that led to a breach of trust and learn to reestablish confidence in each other. Through EFT sessions, you can learn to turn to each other in challenging times. This can help build stronger and more resilient relationships.
5. EFT Can Equip You with Stress-Management Strategies
External pressures and significant life transitions can often trigger or aggravate problems in our relationships. EFT can help you develop tools and strategies for managing stress and changes in your life so that they don't have a grip on your marriage.
6. EFT Can Help Resolve Past Issues
Our past traumas, attachment styles, baggage from our origin families, scars from previous love relationships, or infidelity in the past can all have a significant influence on our current relationship. EFT may help you connect with your inner child, address and resolve past conflicts, and understand how they affect your current relationship, allowing you to move forward without the load of the past.
7. EFT Can Enhance Intimacy
The first step toward rekindling love and intimacy in a relationship is open communication that allows both partners to understand and respond to each other's emotional needs. By focusing on your emotional needs, vulnerability, and openness, your EFT therapist can help you develop a deeper level of understanding, improving your emotional bond and physical intimacy.
8. EFT Can Help Create Secure Attachment
The ultimate goal of emotionally focused therapy for couples is to create a more secure emotional attachment between partners in which they both feel seen, heard, and supported. By strengthening your secure attachment, EFT can help you achieve a more profound and authentic connection, creating a lasting positive change in your relationship.
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