What Is Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) For Couples?

Many couples who lead seemingly “successful” lives find that juggling the demands of work, family, friends, and community leaves them with little bandwidth for each other. Although they desire intimacy, joy, ease, and connection, they struggle to maintain emotional closeness. Instead, their relationship often comes last on the list of priorities, leading to alienation, withdrawal, misunderstanding, and disconnection.

When barriers arise, such as betrayal, poor communication, or emotional triggers from the past, you may fear your relationship is on the brink of collapse. But despite your discord, you want to repair what has been broken and find a way to be joyful together again. 

Emotionally Focused Therapy is a breakthrough modality that helps us better understand the foundation of our relational wiring and how underlying fears and wounds show up in our relationships with our partners. By practicing new ways to interact in the moment and learning to engage with each other differently, EFT therapy can help us gain self-awareness and gradually shift away from our ingrained patterns and reactions to create a new, more empathic way to connect.

How Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy Works

To understand EFT therapy, we must first understand a little bit about neuroplasticity, the brain’s innate ability to reorganize and rewire its neural connections through growth and learning. With its basis in attachment theory, EFT couples counseling recognizes our ability to shift the ingrained wiring that causes a disconnect in our relationships. 

When we’re guided by a therapist to connect differently in EFT, our brain and nervous systems get to experience what’s occurring differently, too. With practice and repetition, new pathways will develop that allow fundamental change to happen emotionally between you and your partner. EFT allows you to shift away from patterns of defensiveness, criticism, and withdrawal, and be guided toward a softer, kinder, and more curious stance. Once you no longer come from a place of emotional protection, you can perceive and respond to your partner more vulnerably and authentically.   

The goal of EFT relationship therapy is not to “change” your partner but to transform the way you interact with one another. Because every relationship is a two-way street, EFT helps you recognize your role in the current dynamic and understand how your behaviors and actions affect your partner. Focusing on showing up differently in your relationship encourages your partner to do the same. With Emotionally Focused Therapy, couples can:

• Develop a deeper understanding and compassion for each other; 

• Identify when emotions are intensifying, when to pause, and when to regroup more empathetically; 

• Interrupt the patterns and narratives that keep you stuck in frustration and distance, allowing space for new perspectives;

• Feel a greater sense of security, ease, and tenderness in your relationship.

What makes EFT for couples so effective is that rather than assigning homework or running through structured exercises, this approach focuses on what’s happening in the present moment. Although we will touch on the past to gain a deeper understanding of your experience, staying in the here and now allows you to bring down your defenses in real-time and create new ways of connecting. To help remain present, we may incorporate some somatic techniques into EFT therapy, such as grounding exercises and breathwork.

Who Can Benefit From EFT Couples Counseling?

Emotionally Focused Therapy has been shown to help couples shift out of negative cycles and, in its place, create true repair and new ways to connect.  With years of research to support its effectiveness, EFT is the gold standard for evidence-based intervention in couples therapy. While all couples who enter counseling are unique when their therapist utilizes EFT as a core modality, the efficacy rates are spectacular. [1]

EFT therapy is most effective when couples are willing to take accountability and motivated to repair their relationship. EFT is not appropriate for anyone with an active addiction, currently engaged in an affair, or experiencing any form of abuse in their relationship. 

If you are struggling in any of these ways, we can still work together, but we’ll utilize other modalities and “pre-EFT” work to establish safety between you. I may also request that each of you attend individual therapy as an adjunct to our work.

Why I Decided To Become An EFT Therapist 

After taking an initial week-long EFT intensive training back in 2014, I was hooked. What drove it home for me was engaging in emotionally focused individual therapy as a young therapist and feeling the visceral change in my system firsthand. I realized right then and there that this is what people needed in order to experience real healing and change. 

Since then, I’ve gone on to receive extensive training in EFT. As an experiential modality, EFT takes time, repetition, and self-work to master. Although I am now an advanced EFT therapist, I continue to pursue additional education and am always striving to improve.

When compared with other forms of couples therapy, one of the big differences I’ve noticed with EFT is that it goes beyond teaching skills and delves into the unconscious, somatic, and deep-rooted wirings of the brain and nervous system that keep us stuck. While some modalities take a cognitive approach that helps us understand what’s required for our relationship to flourish, we need muscle memory for therapy to “stick.” We must go beyond gaining insight and “do” what we’re thinking about through application. Emotionally Focused Therapy helps achieve exactly that. 

After witnessing dozens of different relationships, I’ve never seen one that falls outside of the common patterns that Emotionally Focused Therapy addresses so well. Although you may worry your problems are beyond solving, you’re not as flawed or damaged as you think. The truth is that as humans, we’re all wired the same way, more or less. If you both show up ready to do the work, EFT provides the blueprint for you to co-create a new, more connected relationship with your partner.

Find Out How EFT For Couples Can Help You 

To learn how Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) with Live Oak Counseling can repair your marriage or committed relationship, please visit my contact page or call 203-561-1675 for more information. 

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30605013/

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