Emotion-Focused Therapy: Helping Issues Faced in your Romantic Relationship

Do you feel that you and your partner are having difficulties communicating? Or that there always seems to be a conflict that both of you struggle to solve? 

Maybe you find yourselves repeating negative behaviours, and that you are also struggling to correct these. If you find your relationship to be facing these issues, emotion-focused therapy can help build a stronger emotional bond for you and your partner.

Understanding Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT):

Emotion-focused therapy (EFT) helps create secure connections with others. Within EFT, this therapeutic tool focuses on how emotions are central to our relationships. EFT is effective in helping people express and then transform the emotions they experience. It is designed to help both you and your partner work through the various emotional issues you may be facing. 

EFT can help strengthen your relationship’s emotional bond, reduce conflict, and help you and your partner discover how to discuss the difficult moments that happen in the relationship in a supportive, empathetic manner.

Improving Effective Communication

A lot of couples struggle with communicating effectively or sharing their needs openly, which can be a frustrating pattern that feels difficult to resolve. When going to therapy as a couple, you may often find that one of the main issues addressed in a session are communication problems. 

EFT techniques are used here to help you and your partner healthily express your emotions, enabling you to communicate your needs to each other in more effective ways. With Emotion Focused Therapy, you will both be encouraged to validate each other’s emotions, creating a safe environment that fosters mutual understanding and open communication.

Overcoming Insecurities

In couples therapy, both partners work toward re-establishing a secure relationship and overcoming attachment insecurities. EFT uses attachment theory to help couples build a more secure connection in their relationship. In a session, you would benefit from identifying your attachment patterns and how they influence the interactions within your relationship. The goal is to challenge the difficult emotions linked to an attachment style, such as fear of being abandoned or alternatively fear of being overwhelmed in a relationship, and reframe these feelings and perceptions to create healthier, more secure interactions between you and your partner.

Strengthening Emotional Regulation and Appreciating Vulnerability

Couples can often have difficulties being comfortable with being vulnerable with each other and accepting their emotions. In sessions using EFT techniques, we build toward a goal of approaching your emotions and making sense of them, rather than avoiding them. This in turn also makes it easier to be vulnerable with your partner, creating a safe space where you can openly share your emotions and needs. A very important part of this is accepting your emotions and your partner’s, while also helping to challenge unhealthy set patterns and transform them. Through EFT, you and your partner can foster an environment of intimacy, safety, and trust.

If you feel that your relationship is struggling, there is help available to you.

Being in a relationship with another person creates an important emotional bond, and it can be difficult to maintain this bond when there are big challenges, conflicts or insecurities. We are here to help you and your partner work through these issues using EFT techniques, so that you can build toward an environment of acceptance, healthier interactions, and connection, leading to a secure and strong emotional bond. If learning more about this therapeutic technique interests you, please reach out to us.