Emotionally Focused Relationship Counseling in Philadelphia, PA
A roadmap to reconnection.
Online Couples Therapy for PA Residents or In-Person Couples Therapy in Newtown, PA
Something isn’t working in your relationship…
In the early years, you were inlockstep about your future as a couple. You wanted to be true partners throughout marriage and parenthood. You intended to model a healthy relationship for your children and you felt confident in your strong bond and connection.
Now you have the beautiful family and home that you both worked hard to build together. But life has gotten busier and more stressful and you’ve both drifted into a sort of tense relationship survival mode. Your relationship feels more conflictual than connected and it doesn’t seem to be getting better. You find yourself worrying about what this means for your future together: what if you grow so far apart that you can’t find your way back again?
You’ve likely spent hours going down Google rabbit holes researching effective couple communication or listened to podcasts featuring advice about healthy conflict from relationship experts. Maybe you’ve tried scheduling regular date nights or have taken a quiz about your love languages.
Sometimes the dynamics between you improve for a little while. But inevitably an argument pops up again and suddenly it feels like your brain can’t access any of those communication tips and tricks. You find yourself doing whatever you can to get your point across and make yourself heard. And when you feel your partner shut down or pull away, you’re left feeling so frustrated, misunderstood, and alone.
This happens over and over, and every time you both feel more exhausted and stuck. At this point, one thing you and your partner can agree on is that something needs to change.
You don’t need more communication tips. You need a therapy approach that will get to the root of the problem.
What does Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy look like?
Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFCT)/Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) doesn’t rely on teaching skills to couples. Instead it helps couples slow down, explore the patterns in how their conflicts get activated and escalated, and experience different and more connective ways of responding to each other in session.
When the human brain is overwhelmed by intense negative emotion, such as during an argument with your partner, it reflexively becomes more reactive and focused on emotional self-protection. In this state, the brain cannot access and apply information and logic as effectively. This is why merely having knowledge about healthy communication techniques is not enough to create lasting change in a couple’s pattern of conflict.
In most couples, one partner tends to engage in self-protection from negative emotional overwhelm by automatically shutting down or trying to avoid the conflict in some way, while the other partner instinctively tries to engage their partner in an attempt to fix the disconnect between them. These reflexes are deeply ingrained for each partner with roots in their childhood attachment patterns. Ultimately, this dynamic can result in cycles of escalating conflict in which the more one partner tries to avoid the emotional intensity of a conflict, the more the other partner feels invalidated or rejected and attempts to to pull them back in.
Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy recognizes the key role that emotions play in maintaining negative relationship patterns, but it also utilizes the power of emotion to help couples build more connected and loving relationships.
Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy treatment takes place across 3 Stages:
Stage 1-Assessing and de-escalating your cycle of conflict with each other.
We’ll slow those fast-moving arguments way down so you can better understand the nuances of the thoughts and emotions you each experience in the moment and how they are interconnected, and you will begin to get some relief from the conflict roller coaster.
Stage 2-Changing old patterns of conflict.
In this stage, we’ll delve deeper into the dynamics of your relationship and the underlying emotional needs and fears that are key triggers for your relationship conflicts. Through guided interventions, you'll practice engaging in more constructive, empathetic, and responsive ways with each other. As a result, you’ll begin to notice increased feelings of safety and trust in your relationship and experience feeling more consistently heard and understood by each other.
Stage 3- Reinforcing positive changes in the relationship.
This stage is about solidifying the new emotional connections, communication skills, and mutual understanding that you've developed. We will explore ways to maintain and nurture your healthier interactions, so that the progress you've made becomes a lasting part of your relationship even after therapy ends.
Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy can help you:
Get unstuck from unhelpful patterns in your relationship
Experience healthier ways of communicating with each other that allow you to feel more supported and understood
Build a deeper and more fulfilling connection with your partner that is better able to withstand life’s challenges
Couples with Mixed Neurotypes
I specialize in working with mixed neurotype couples, which is a fancy way of saying that one partner is neurotypical while the other partner is either autistic, has ADHD, or has AuDHD. If this sounds like you and your partner, click below to learn more.
You don’t have to wait for life to slow down to get your relationship back on track.
I’M HERE TO HELP.
