At Mending Roots Healing Center helping you to build “a safe haven” in your relationship is our most important task.
As a couple have you found yourselves arguing about issues such as jealousy, sex, household chores, the children, or finances? Are you lacking trust, acceptance or understanding in your relationship? Do you find your conflicts have become escalated leading to feelings of disappointment, hurt, or despair? It’s natural to feel distressed when the person with whom you yearn to feel closely connected is critical, emotionally unavailable, or not meeting your needs to feel safe, understood, and accepted.
In Emotional Focused Therapy (EFT), we focus on understanding and then changing these negative patterns or cycles of conflict in a way that doesn’t assign blame to either partner, but rather looks at each partner’s responsibility and makes sense of their reactions.
One of the most important tasks in EFT is learning to be compassionate toward yourself and your partner as you both learn how your vulnerable feelings and unmet needs are leading to protective reactive behaviors that are unfortunately hurting your partner and damaging your relationship.
Couples begin to recognize and then express their need for love, support, and comfort that previously were hidden by stonewalling or harsh and angry words. Partners begin to “listen with their heart,” one of the cornerstones of EFT, which involves being able to listen not only to the literal meaning of a partner’s words, but to the vulnerable ‘soft’ feelings that lie beneath the surface. This is the emotional focus of Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy. Helping you to build “a safe haven” in your relationship is our most important task.
We will help you focus on your primary needs (e.g., feeling close, understood, accepted, secure, and responded to) which underlie most of your conflict and help you and your partner become more accessible, responsive, and emotionally engaged.
Once this safe haven and connection have been (re-)established, you’ll be better able to manage conflict and the hurt feelings or difficult disagreements that inevitably arise from time to time in any close relationship.
Furthermore, each of you will be able to send clearer messages and will be better able to hear the other’s perspective without hurtful, protective, defensive behaviors getting in the way so quickly. You’ll be better able to collaborate, solve problems, make decisions, and more rapidly repair any moments of discord.
In other words, you’ll continue to practice the secrets of a strong, satisfying, successful relationship!
Couples Therapy: is not covered by insurance. The purpose of insurance is for the diagnosis and treatment of a mental illness. Insurance companies do not recognize relationship concerns as a mental illness; therefore, my relationship therapy services are not reimbursable.
“The most functional way to regulate difficult emotions in love relationships is to share them.” – Sue Johnson
LGBTQ+ AFFIRMING PRACTICE | ANTI-RACIST PRACTICE
West Location
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