EFT - Emotionally Focused Therapy

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EFT focuses on the emotional experience of each person in the relationship and the pattern of interaction between them. Other types of marital counseling will often focus on communication skills, changing behavior, or problem-solving techniques. Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy helps couples increase their understanding and appreciation for how they feel while building trust and security they can rely on. 

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When couples are in conflict, most often one person in an effort to reach their partner, pursues them and the other will defend and possibly withdraw. This may sound familiar and is very common. EFT helps you to understand these reactive patterns while developing understanding as to how you can get caught in them. Partners learn to join together to fight against this pattern instead of fighting each other. Relational distress is not about how many arguments or fights you have but whether you are able to hold onto an emotional connection during conflicts and repair the relationship afterward. Each partner needs to understand the emotions dictating their actions. The emotions behind perceived problems are the key to understanding each other.

 

     In Emotionally Focused Therapy, couples learn to:

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• Recognize the cycle they are stuck in, where often one person criticizes and the other responds defensively or withdraws

• Identify the fears and complex emotions that keep them in that cycle

• Empathize and become more supportive of each other

• Come together through the new emotions they are each expressing, and begin to comfort and respond to each other in a new way

     

     In addition, EFT can lead you:

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• From alienation to emotional connection

• From vigilant defense and self-protection, to openness and risk taking

• From feeling helpless and hopeless in the face of the reactive pull of the dance of distress, to an ability to actively create the  dance of love and connection

• From desperate blaming of the other, to a sense of how each partner makes it difficult for the other to be responsive and caring

• From a focus on the other's flaws, to the discovery of one's own fears and longings

• From stress and pain to comfort and joy

• But most of all, from isolation to re-connection

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