Your relationship is riddled with challenges, but you’re not sure what to do.
You want to find a therapist who can help you and your partner or spouse re-build the secure bond you once shared.
It’s time to make a change in your relationship and get couples therapy or marriage counseling.
Perhaps, you’ve felt disconnected from your partner for quite a while. Maybe you’ve noticed you don’t spend time together or have much to talk about. This makes you feel lonely and unloved. Or perhaps, you and your partner are arguing all the time. Now, you don’t want to spend time with them or come home because you’re not sure what will set them off.
You know this isn’t healthy. Perhaps, you’ve asked friends for suggestions, or you’ve searched the internet for what a healthy relationship looks like, but everything you try seems to push your loved one further away. This leaves you at the end of the rope and you realize you have to seek help from a skilled couples therapist to save your marriage.
Our counseling clinic in Wake Forest, NC offers Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT) for all kinds of couples at any stage in life. Our goal is to help you or your loved one solve your problems, connect, and create lasting love.
What is Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy?
Emotionally focused couples therapy (EFT) is a short-term form of couple therapy. EFT was developed by Dr. Sue Johnson and Dr. Les Greenberg. It is a research-based approach to strengthening relationships between two adults. To do this your therapist will help you look at the negative patterns of behavior in your relationship and teach you tools to connect with each other.
EFT is based on the attachment theory. It asserts that attachment creates feelings of safety that help you cope with distress and challenging life experiences. You form attachments at birth with your caregivers. These can either be secure or insecure. If you grew up with insecure attachments you likely had to worry if the people who were entrusted to care for you would take care of your needs. When they didn’t you felt let down and hurt. These painful feelings may have caused you to develop coping mechanisms and negative communication patterns that can cause problems in your current relationships. For example, if your parents were emotionally unavailable and did not validate your feelings you likely stopped expressing them. This can make a partner very frustrated and cause misunderstandings and hurt feelings.
How EFT couples therapy Works:
EFT works at creating a healthy dependency between both partners. What this means is that the partners are both able to depend on each other to respond appropriately to their needs. The therapy process is broken down into three main parts: de-escalation, restructuring, and consolidation.
Deescalation:
During these initial sessions, an EFT couples therapist will listen to your complaints so they can learn where your problems lie. Then we focus on figuring out what your negative patterns of interaction are. These are the things you do or say that cause conflict with your partner. For example, when they bring up a complaint, you immediately shut down and look at your phone. This makes them feel invalidated hurts their feelings.
In each session, we reveal a new layer of emotions that are triggering conflict and learn what coping techniques you use to avoid this conflict. Even though these techniques don’t work anymore, it’s important to understand them so you can avoid them in the future.
Restructuring:
This is the part of the therapeutic process where you learn to confidently share your needs with your partner and how to respond when your partner shares their needs with you.
Learning how to share your needs appropriately and be vulnerable with your loved one will ultimately reduce conflict and create feelings of satisfaction. It helps build a strong emotional bond.
Consolidation:
In this step, you will work on learning communication strategies to help you avoid the places in your relationship where you’re becoming stuck. Once you learn how to express your needs in a way your partner can understand and respond to then you will begin to notice a positive long-lasting change.
Does EFT couples therapy actually work?
Research shows the EFT is very successful at helping couples in crisis strengthen their relationship. In fact, many consider it to be the “gold standard.” Furthermore, couples who have gotten emotionally focused couples therapy tend to see benefits long after their therapeutic relationship with their therapist has ended and are less likely to relapse into conflict again.
Begin EFT Couples Therapy in wake forest, NC With My-Therapist
Creating a healthier relationship is possible. You can learn to strengthen your bond and create a safe haven between you and your partner with EFT couples therapy. Our Wake Forest therapy practice has caring therapists who specialize in EFT couples therapy in Wake Forest, NC. To start your therapy journey, follow these simple steps:
Meet with one of our caring therapists
Start improving your relationship today!
“We now begin to see love as intelligible and malleable. We will be able to shift from an obsession with the FALL part of love to the MAKE aspect of love, and make this more than sexual connection. We can develop confidence in our ability to work with and mold our most precious love relationships. This changes everything!”
There are also several books that might be of interest. Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy For Dummies by Brent Bradley and Jamies Furrow, Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love by Sue Johnson, or An Emotionally Focused Workbook for Couples: The Two of Us by Veronica Kallos-Lilly and Jennifer Fitzgeralds are all good places to start.
Read More: Dr. Sue Johnson | Real Love Stories
The science behind why we're drawn to people. We spend our whole lives forming connections with the people around us; whether it's by talking to a stranger we normally pass on the street or falling in love with our soulmate, the strong bonds that we make throughout our life shape who we are. And, an EFT couples therapist can strengthen those bonds even further.
Dr. Sue Johnson provides a brief summary of Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). This leading edge, empirically validated form of therapy which is taught all over the world. EFT is based on the last 50 yrs of scientific research on bonding: bonding between mother and child and romantic bonds between partners. This is at the core of our emotionally focused couples therapy in Wake Forest, NC.
Services for building healthy relationships
Family Therapy
Family therapy helps individuals resolve their problems in the context of their family units, where many issues are likely to begin.
Learn how to work together to better understand each other and the family unit as a whole.
We also offer: Co-Parent Counseling
Prenatal & Perinatal Therapy
Working with an experienced therapist who can walk with you on this new and exciting journey will provide the tools you need to be successful.
We also offer: Infertility Counseling, Child Loss Therapy
Premarital Counseling
We know that it feels scary right now, but you don't have to walk through this journey on your own. Our counselors are experienced in working with couples who are taking this next step in their relationship. They know what works, and they can teach you the skills you need to succeed.