Emotionally Focused Therapy
Emotionally Focused Therapy
Couples often find themselves comparing and contrasting their relationship to others. Because everyone is different and acts differently in their specific relationships, it can be difficult to draw accurate parallels this way. In fact, one of the therapy techniques with the most scientifically-backed validity of its effectiveness is Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). Primarily used for couples, EFT is a therapy technique focusing on attachment theory and patterns learned during one’s upbringing.
What is Emotionally Focused Therapy?
EFT theorizes that every couple maintains a certain “dance” which is referred to as the EFT Tango and dictates the way they maintain the status quo, including current patterns that prevent secure bonding. Tracking this pattern and making modifications can create lasting changes. However, this can be easier said than done. Due to the biases each partner develops over time, couples often require outside assistance to regulate emotions while producing different, more healthy relational patterns.
Emotionally Focused Therapy
During EFT sessions, therapists such as myself offer observations on the couple’s apparent “dance” in order to identify corrective experiences. This approach is humanistic in nature, focused on rewiring for connection and changing dysfunctional patterns at the deepest level. These modifications are designed to help each partner develop new and distinct views both of themself as an individual and as part of a couple. Since these views and behaviors are almost always learned during one’s upbringing, it typically takes at least eight sessions and as many as 20 sessions to attain real results from an Emotionally Focused Therapy regimen.
To shape love, we have to be open and responsive, emotionally as well as physically.
