Emotionally Focused Therapy | Powerful Counselling For Couples

Couples & Relationship Counselling

Are you wanting to be Understood, more Connected and Accepted for who you truly are?

Are you feeling flooded and misunderstood?
Do you feel despair where once you felt secure and safe?
Is there conflict where once there was love and fun?

In the beginning, love can be intense, wonderful. With the passage of time, challenging experiences can change the way you interact with and feel about your partner. If you’re going to dance with someone, you’re going to step on each other’s feet once in a while.

I offer you support to understand, heal and enhance your emotional connection – enabling you to dance together with responsive engagement. Some couples come to me distressed and hurting, perhaps from a crisis such as illness or an affair. Other couples have lost their initial connection and want to feel closer and more connected.

In my work with couples I have found an attachment-based approach called EFT – Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples – to be most effective. EFT is backed by 30 years of research. This research has proven EFT to be effective model for addressing couple distress and strengthening attachment bonds. Using EFT, 70-75% of couples move from distress to recovery and approximately 90% show significant improvements.

Goals of EFT - Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples

For each of you:

To recognise and re-organise key emotional responses – the “music” of the dance with each other.
To expand your core sense of self and how you respond and initiate new cycles of interaction.
To foster the creation of a secure bond between partners with resilience and enhanced agency.

Why an attachment based approach?

Attachment science views human beings as innately relational, social and wired for intimate bonding with others. The EFT model prioritises attachment and emotional regulation as key organising agents of individual experience and key relationship interactions. EFT provides a deep understanding of attachment in love relationships. Most fights are really protests over emotional disconnection. Underneath the distress, partners are desperate to know: Are you there for me? Love demands the reassurance of connection and touch in a moment of need. Losing the connection with your loved one jeopardises your sense of security. It sets off an alarm in the brain’s threat & fear centre – the amygdala. Once the amygdala is triggered, you don’t think — you react – leading to a primal feeling of panic. It’s your perception that counts, not the reality. The EFT approach enhances shared understanding and safety in the relationship through deep connection. See here for more in depth information and resources about Emotionally Focused Therapy.

Strengths of Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples

EFT is based on clear, explicit conceptualisations of marital distress and adult love supported by empirical research on adult attachment.
EFT is collaborative and respectful and client-centric combining experiential Rogerian techniques with structured systemic interventions.
Profound core emotions are heightened and evoked to move partners into new, more responsive interactions. Emotions are tracked, unpacked, and tied into key steps in the couple’s drama.
Key moves and moments in the change process are mapped into nine steps and five change events which each couple moves through in their own time.
Validation is used to create a safe haven in the session for both partners.
Responses are framed and clarified within your new understanding of attachment.
New enactments are shaped to help partners move into interactions where each one of them can reach for the other and respond caringly to the other.
EFT is non-blaming, nor is it affiliated with any particular religious beliefs.
EFT is for any individual in a couple wanting to improve their sense of connection, whether they are mixed gender, same gender, monogamous or non-monogamous.

EFT is a well-researched, structured approach to couples therapy founded in the early 1980’s by Dr. Susan Johnson. EFT is being used with distressed couples in private practice, university training centres and hospital clinics. EFT has been proven applicable to couples from many different cultural and demographic groups, ages and backgrounds. This may include individual partners suffering from disorders such as depression, post traumatic stress disorders and chronic illness.

Whether you are married, defacto, heterosexual or same gender attracted the EFT approach can help make sense of your world and move toward where you wish to be – together. EFT is a proven effective treatment for healing couple distress and strengthening resilience and core sense of self in relationship.

I am recognised on the ICEEFT website as an EFT therapist and an active member of the Australian MCEFT chapter.

More detail on the EFT approach is available online. You can read about EFT in this article by the founder Sue Johnson.

Here is a great video by Dr Sue Johnson that helps explain Emotionally Focused Therapy

What our clients say about Emotional Wellbeing Centre

"Sue Dawson has greatly assisted me with issues from my past, which unbeknownst to me, were still affecting my life. I had one session with her where we chatted in depth, followed by a Kinesiology treatment. Throughout this process I felt comfortable, secure and confident. Sue is a proficient, knowledgable and capable practitioner and counselor, and I would highly recommend her to anyone seeking relief with emotional/psychological issues. Sue shows a caring and kind regard for her patients and there is a genuineness about her that is refreshing."

"I highly recommend Sue. Our 6yo son was having difficulties expressing his emotions after some difficulties at school. Sue was very caring, kind, and showed empathy towards our son and what he had been facing. We were very pleased with the results after our first session. And things only improved from there. Thank you Sue for helping our family."

"Over the past year, Sue has made profound differences for me in many areas. On a personal level through mind and body, she adapts our sessions each week accordingly as the journey of day to day life naturally evolves. Her sessions have also expanded to play truly beneficial roles from dealing with physical and chronic pain in the early days right through to her innate ability in playing a key role for my approach to business, with what I would now class as business coaching. I highly recommend Sue and want to thank her too for making a real difference for me."

"We went to see Sue for my teenage daughter who had the longterm habit of picking her fingers quite badly which resulted in sores and calluses. Sue was very gentle and supportive when dealing with my daughter. After the first session, my daughter understood why she picked and was much more aware of herself doing it. She actually didn't pick for a whole week after the first session! A second session was all we needed to help my daughter break the habit. Her fingers are now looking beautiful and she is very proud of herself. I am so glad we went to see Sue, it was definitely worth it!"

Emotional Wellbeing Centre