Couples Therapist Melbourne
EFT-Based Couples Counselling at EWC
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.
As a qualified couples therapist Melbourne trusts, 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? - Couples therapist Melbourne
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.
Here is a great video by Dr Sue Johnson that helps explain 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.
What our clients say about Emotional Wellbeing Centre
