EFT Therapy

7 Reasons You and Your Partner Should Try Emotionally-Focused Therapy

Confused about therapy? You’re not alone. Choosing the right therapist can be a daunting task. After all, your relationship might depend on making the right choice. When you begin looking for a marriage counselor, you may be surprised by how many different types of therapy exist. Individual therapists have their own preferred styles of therapy. Just as your relationship with your therapist should be a good fit, therapeutic style should also be a good fit for whatever issues you’re seeking therapy.

Over the years, I’ve come to favor a few therapeutic styles because experience has shown me how useful they can be. For couples experiencing marital or relationship problems, emotionally-focused therapy (EFT) has proven itself time and again one of the most effective treatments in existence.

While I know anecdotally that it works, EFT is also backed by some solid scientific research. In fact, studies have shown that about 90% of couples who undergo EFT see improvement. EFT draws heavily from attachment theory to address core issues plaguing couples. (If you’re not familiar with the theory of attachment, I’d recommend reading my previous post detailing what attachment is, why attachment styles develop, and how attachment affects our relationships throughout the lifespan.)

In a nutshell, during our most formative years - infancy and early childhood - we form a particular style of attachment with our primary caregivers (usually our parents). If our parents are responsive, warm, and in-tune with our needs, we will usually form a secure attachment. If our parents are distracted, neglectful, or - in extreme cases - abusive, we might form an insecure attachment.

As adults, we tend to recreate our earliest attachment patterns - especially with romantic partners. If our earliest relationships were less-than-ideal, we might display avoidant or anxious behaviors in our adult relationships, often without realizing we are doing so. These insecure attachment patterns can spur a lot of conflict in our relationships.

How can you figure out if you or your partner suffer from an insecure attachment style? There’s no quick or easy way to know, especially since so many of our behaviors are subconscious and are carried out outside of our awareness. But a qualified professional can help assess your attachment styles and determine if they’re affecting your relationship.

Unfortunately, many unqualified self-help gurus get rich by writing books that claim to solve communication issues between partners. They take advantage of couples desperate to repair their marriages and relationships, and they want you to think that they have an easy, quick-fix to your troubles. While there are some great books out there, be wary of resources that come from disreputable publishers or from authors who lack professional experience working with couples.

Improving communication is vital to improving relationship quality. However, problems will never fully resolve until you can unmask the vulnerabilities hiding beneath the communication breakdown. When trying to resolve a relationship problem, we often need to unearth the insecurities that formed when we were young children and to work with a trusted professional who can guide us toward developing a more secure attachment style.

EFT is great at doing just that: getting below the surface. While a spouse or partner may feel or display anger, anger is not a primary emotion. Underlying the surface-level hostility hides a more vulnerable emotion - usually fear: fear of abandonment, fear of not being good enough, fear of loss. Often, partners who experience anger will not realize these fears are hiding underneath, but sure enough: they’re there and without being addressed, they can wreak havoc on your marriage.

WILL EFT WORK FOR YOUR RELATIONSHIP?

Of course, no reputable professional would ever guarantee with 100% certainty that a treatment will heal a relationship. But my experience has shown me there’s a good chance EFT will benefit most couples.

EFT may be especially helpful for you if:

• You’re tried therapy before. You’ve been to couples therapy before and worked on communication strategies, but problems continue to overwhelm your relationship. Maybe your therapist wasn’t a good fit, maybe you didn’t attend therapy long enough, or maybe the therapy style wasn’t right for your relationship. Whatever the reason, failing therapy once does NOT necessarily mean you’re doomed to fail it again.

• You can’t stop fighting over everything. You and your spouse or partner feel trapped in a never-ending pattern of conflict. Every time you think things are starting to get better, the old fights return. You make up, resolve to handle things better next time, but conflict continues to rear its ugly head.

• Every disagreement ends in anger. Small conflicts escalate into tearful screaming matches wrought with anger. Sometimes, you don’t even know how fights start. When you look back, you can’t remember how or why your relationship got to this point.

• You’ve lost that loving feeling. You just don’t feel the sense of closeness with your partner you once felt. Even if you’re not fighting all the time, your partner seems distant from you. You don’t talk much anymore - at least not about the big stuff. You or your partner might even forgo conversation as a defensive mechanism to avoid conflict.

• You or your partner have lived through trauma. If you or your partner have lived through a traumatic event, trauma’s aftermath can have a profound effect on the quality of your relationship - especially if one or both of you meet the criteria for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which often includes symptoms like flashbacks, insomnia, and even anger. A recent study conducted at the Baltimore VA Medical Center studied the effectiveness of EFT on couples where one partner was a veteran with PTSD. Both the veterans and their partners reported significant improvements in symptoms and relationship quality, suggesting that EFT may be an effective treatment for PTSD and its effects on relationships.

• You’ve tried to communicate better, but problems remain. If your relationship suffers from frequent fighting, you might assume the difficulty lies in how you communicate with each other. While you’re right that improving communication will benefit your relationship, there’s more work to be done. Without treating the underlying causes of your communication problems, communication strategies are unlikely to be effective in the long-term.

• You’ve tried to work on issues on your own. We have more resources available to us than ever before. Bookstores and websites are filled with self-help books, workbooks, and online courses available to individuals and couples who wish to better themselves. In many ways, so much information is a wonderful thing. There really are some useful books and courses available, but for serious relationship problems, these resources usually work best when used in conjunction with therapy.

• You love your partner and want things to get better. Even if you fight every day, you know you love your partner and want your relationship to succeed. While love on its own may not be enough, it’s an essential factor in relationship healing.

If you want to know more about EFT, here are some links for further reading:

MY OWN BLOG:

• Fighting Words: What Anger Can Reveal About Your Relationship

• How Your Attachment Style Affects Your Adult Relationships

• Could EFT Benefit Your Relationship?

OTHER RESOURCES:

• International Centre for Excellence in Emotionally-Focused Therapy (ICEEFT)

• Psychology Today

• Dr. Sue Johnson (creator of EFT)