When your relationship doesn’t feel like it once did, or you hoped it would, it can feel earth-shattering. When the days of joy, connection, and safety feel like a distant memory and you find yourself caught in the same rip currents over and over, hope seems out of reach. It can feel impossible to find the way home to each other.
While tools are great, a pruning shear can’t resolve root rot. We utilize Emotionally Focused Therapy to focus on the deeper root issues. This deeper change happens by examining how the bad cycles we fall into with our partner are neither as protective nor as helpful as they feel in the moment and how in reality they push us further apart. Through building honesty, safety, and attunement, we work to restructure those stuck cycles to be bonding and healing rather than divisive and hurtful.
How does that actually work you may ask? The answer is a lot of practice, experientially, after working hard to create safety and understanding. Relational intimacy is deepened through new insight and in-session experience of interacting honestly and presently with one another. This enables us to look at the within processes of each relationship and create new patterns of support and understanding.
While this is more conducive to creating lasting change that reaps rich fruit in the future, most of us aren’t taught how to create safety. Additionally, laying down our defenses for deeper connection feels incredibly counterintuitive in the moment. Truthfully, most of us have defenses for very good reasons. These considerations, as well as the many other experiences we have learned our defenses and strategies from, are really important to an EFT therapist. This means there is hope and a roadmap for change, while also an understanding that this is hard, that you’re trying your best and it is still incredibly hard. EFT encourages a nonjudgmental and honest exploration of those defenses and strategies that hurt our relationship while encouraging safe and supportive disclosure to create new systems of deep connection.