“Distressed partners may use different words but they are always asking the same basic questions, ‘Are you there for me? Do I matter to you? Will you come when I need you, when I call?’ Love is the best survival mechanism there is, and to feel suddenly emotionally cut off from a partner, disconnected, is terrifying.” – Sue Johnson, Hold Me Tight
EFT or Emotionally Focused Therapy helps you look at the things that are triggering you, how they make you feel, messages you tell yourself (what you think) and the actions/behavior (moves) you make in response. It then talks about what happens when you make those moves and if they align with what you are longing for. Often times the moves we make push us further away from the things that we want, but we do them because they are the only moves we have. Through understanding what is happening and sharing that with your partner, a greater sense of safety and security will be built so that we can shift to new moves that support the relationship and your longings instead of pushing them away.
We want to feel heard and be seen in our relationships, we long for intimacy and connection with our partner(s) and when this doesn’t happen, our fears take over and begin making the moves for us. They are habit, things we learned growing up that may have served us then but aren’t serving us in our current relationship(s). The hope is that we can step into our partners experience and while we may not agree with it, we can at least make sense of it. We will identify the cycles that you get stuck in and start blaming the moves we make instead of one another.
EFT Helps Individuals:
- Become aware of their emotions, name them, understand/allow them, and regulate them.
- Look at how the way we are expressing our emotions is contributing to the moves that our partner makes
- Identify the source of unhelpful emotions, where we learned to express ourselves this way, how it supported us in the past and how it isn’t supporting us now
- Develop alternative, healthy ways of coping with situations that often elicit hurtful emotions
Unlike other therapeutic approaches, EFT assumes that emotion can be a source of healing and works with specific emotions to increase adaptation. If you are seeking help identifying, utilizing and processing your emotions, I encourage you to contact me today. Together, we’ll work on increasing awareness of emotions, separating useful from hurtful emotions and using healthy emotions to guide action.
Contact me today, I look forward to speaking with you about how I can help.