Research shows consistently that no matter what counseling method is used, the connection between you and your counselor is the essential factor in you feeling better about yourself and your life.
As such, a safe and supportive relationship is created. It is important that you feel heard, acknowledged and supported. This is the significant ingredient for your personal and relationship transformation.
In addition to deep listening, it is also helpful to understand how to cope with difficult feelings and situations. Learning how to be resilient and knowing that you can support yourself through life’s challenges will give you a sense of empowerment and self-esteem. An active, warm, supportive, and very practical approach is used in the sessions.
Emotionally Focused Therapy – or EFT – is the form of therapy that is used. This type of therapy helps couples identify the emotions that are underneath the ways people act in relationships and in good times and in bad. Sometimes couples get stuck in repeated arguments and these then can emerge to become a negative cycle. Emotionally Focused Therapy is based on the belief that all adults seek the same mutual comfort and love that they once received from their parents. Since all people are wired to seek out comfort when they feel distressed, it makes sense that a partner who feels bad will reach out in some way to the other person. A negative cycle can emerge when that partner is not available to meet the needs of the person who reached out.
EFT encourages couples to repair communication patterns through gaining awareness of deeper emotions that guide their behavior patterns. Therapy can teach you how to identify underlying emotions to what is really going on between you and your partner. EFT is helpful when couples get stuck fighting about topics such as chores, money, jealousy, infidelity, sex, or parenting issues. Underneath all of this fighting, generally, are more tender emotions like feeling ignored, unloved, or somehow betrayed. EFT helps partners to express their deeper needs and desires in a safe way. The therapy helps you
Emotionally Focused Therapy teaches you how to respond to each other in a respectful and loving way when there are problems or disagreements. The eventual goal of EFT is to reconnect you and your partner, so that you both can ask for and receive what you need in your relationship.
A respectful, collaborative, optimistic and holistic approach is used. People are best understood based on how they relate to others. This is rooted in the patterns learned in their most significant relationship experiences – usually their relationship with their parents. So your family history is very important.
Since reality and meaning are created by you, what you think about your problem and yourself is very important. It is also significant what is happening for you in the present moment, in the therapy room and in the therapeutic relationship. Your problems will be undermined by looking at some of your beliefs about yourself, the world and how you might be unknowingly perpetuating the problem.