Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy (EFT)

Relationships are challenging.

Perhaps you find that you and your partner or spouse are struggling with one or more of the following challenges:

Do you find yourself fighting frequently and/or repetitively?
Do you feel disconnected from your partner?
Do you get along ok but feel more like roommates or co-parents than intimate partners?
Are you struggling in the aftermath of betrayal or infidelity?
Do you and your partner struggle to communicate effectively and find yourself wishing you had better tools to communicate?
Is your relationship generally satisfying but you want to feel even closer and more connected?

It’s normal to have relationship challenges.

If you answered yes to one or more of these questions, first, know that you are not alone. As humans we are wired to connect, and in modern society, our romantic relationships often serve as a primary point of connection and security. But just because relationships are important doesn’t mean they come easily. Like most things in life that really matter, relationships take work. Most long-term relationships have rough patches, and it can be difficult to find your way out of the woods without a map. This is where Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) comes in.

Emotionally Focused Therapy gives us a map out of relationship distress, and back into connection.

EFT has decades of research validating it’s effectiveness in helping couples move from distress and disconnection to feeling closer than they ever thought possible. Unlike many couples therapies, which may show short-term positive effects during and immediately after completion of therapy, EFT has been proven to create lasting positive change for couples, even many years after completing therapy.

CTC therapists create lasting change by getting at the underlying cause of conflict and communication challenges and transforming insecure relationships to secure ones. We believe that teaching rules for communication or I-statements may be temporarily helpful, but if we don’t get at the underlying lack of secure connection, couples will ultimately end up stuck again in cycles of conflict or emotional disconnect. Let’s talk about specifically how our skilled EFT couples therapists will guide you through this process.

Female therapist talking to male client sitting in backwards chair

The Process of Emotionally Focused Therapy

Woman looking at man sitting on couch together for therapy

First, we will get to know you and your relationship. We need to understand what brought you and your partner together in the first place, as well as your current strengths and challenges. In our first session, we’ll create a safe space for you and your partner to begin to share how each of you sees your relationship. Our therapists are highly trained to create an environment in which we can be direct and get to the heart of the matter, while still maintaining a safe space in which your arguments will not be allowed to go off the rails or turn the therapy space into a war zone or venue for unconstructive criticism.

After an initial session with you and your partner together, your therapist will meet with each of you individually. We want to get to know you better and learn about how your identity, context, and history impact the way you show up in your current relationship. We take a strengths-based, non-pathologizing approach.

We’re not interested in slapping a label on you, but rather in getting to know you as a whole person.

Demystifying Conflict

In our extensive experience working with couples, we find that almost always, couples have some type of repetitive pattern of interaction or conflict. Maybe this looks like angry exchanges back and forth, or maybe it is a quieter pattern of withdrawal and distancing. Maybe it’s a combination of both! Each couple is unique, and we want to understand exactly what happens when you and your partner get caught up in your particular pattern, which in EFT we often refer to as a “negative cycle.”

We’ll explore together what this cycle looks like from the outside - who typically says what, and who typically does what. But we’ll also start to look at what’s happening underneath the surface. What are the more vulnerable emotions that each partner is experiencing? What are the stories you’re telling yourself about what’s happening between you and your partner?

We often find that there is a nasty feedback loop that can take hold, even when neither partner is intending to create it - each partner in a negative cycle is responding to reasonable hurt or fear or longing, but often the action that they take in response pushes a button in their partner that creates fear or hurt. The partner then reacts in a way that pokes a tender spot in their partner, and before you know it, this negative feedback loop has developed a momentum that can be hard to interrupt.

We Help You See the Cycle as the Problem

Most couples don’t come to us and say “our problem is our negative cycle!” Most couples come and politely describe their issues as “communication problems.”

If we dig a little deeper, they often explain that the problem is that their partner clams up and disappears at any sign of conflict. Or that their partner is always finding fault no matter what they do.

As trained EFT therapists, we believe that while we are each responsible for the ways that we contribute to a negative cycle, we really do see this nasty feedback loop as the problem, not any one person. We don’t expect you to see it that way right away (and this does not apply in cases of true abuse), but we do find that as we work with couples and help them understand their negative cycle and why each partner feels and behaves the way they do, that they come to find this framework of “the cycle as the problem” as helpful and ultimately hopeful - if the only explanation for why you’re in conflict is that your partner is a hopeless narcissist, it’s hard to see a way back into connection. But if the goal is to catch and pause a negative pattern before it takes hold, most couples can start to see that this as achievable.

Learning to Reach Directly and Effectively

So how do you stop a negative cycle of disconnection and start a positive cycle of connection and safety?

You practice noticing and communicating the vulnerable emotions that bubble just below the surface in conflict. You start to notice the ways that yours and your partner’s distress is actually about how much they matter to you - how you want to be seen and treated by them, the ways you want to feel that they are there for you, that they care for you, and that they LIKE you. Together, our couples therapists will help create a safe space to discover and share about these hurts, fears, and longings. We’ll help you notice the protections you’ve developed and perhaps the walls you’ve built to avoid being hurt in the negative cycle, and we’ll help you and your partner develop the safety to take these walls down and reach for each other in direct ways that bring each other closer.

Experiential and Lasting

Studies have shown that one of the reasons that EFT works so well is because we are creating new experiences in therapy.

We aren’t just talking on an intellectual level about your problems, we are helping you have different experiences of and with your partner.

This is much more impactful than simply taking a cognitive approach to change. When you can have the experience in therapy of breaking out of a negative cycle and connecting in an authentic way with each other, you learn on a deep level that this is something that you can do outside of session. It’s sort of like developing muscle memory - you wouldn’t learn to shoot a free throw by just talking about the mechanics of how to flick your wrist, would you? You’d have to try it! Our skilled and experienced therapists will create a safe practice environment that will, over time, translate into confidence in interrupting your negative cycle and communicating directly, lovingly, and effectively with each other.

Ready to Reach Out?

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Creating Secure Attachment

The ultimate goal of EFT is to create a strong and resilient bond between you and your partner. We see your need to feel secure and connected as an entirely reasonable need and longing - after all, people evolved to count on a trusted and secure other (or others) from the cradle to the grave. If you think about an infant, it is critical that they send clear signals to their caregiver when they are in distress, like crying when their diaper is wet. They rely entirely on their caregiver to be there for them and respond with their soothing presence and attention to the concern. While as we grow into adults we learn to be more self-sufficient, we actually never outgrow that basic need to feel that we have a safe, accessible, and responsive other that we can turn to in moments of distress. Just as our respiratory system makes sure we get oxygen to our organs, the internal system that makes sure we have safe and supportive connections with others is our attachment system.

Research tells us that much of what drives negative cycles is actually our attachment system alerting us that we don’t feel safe. While in a fight with our partner it hopefully isn’t true that we are physically unsafe, this powerful system signals that we may not be emotionally safe. From an evolutionary perspective, we can see why this would develop to be a highly powerful system - humans that didn’t have close connections with other humans - who were abandoned or cast out of community - would probably die!

When the people we are in relationships with are generally consistent, accessible, responsive, and emotionally engaged with us, we typically develop what we call a secure attachment with that person. They don’t have to show up perfectly every single time, but we generally expect that they will be there for us, that they care for and like us, and that we can count on them to be a safe base and secure haven. In adult romantic relationships, a negative interactional pattern can interfere with this secure connection. We end up sending and receiving signals that threaten rather than soothe our partner’s attachment system. Over time, this can create an insecure attachment with our partner, the person we are most wanting to feel securely connected to!

The amazing power of EFT is that it actually helps partners to create a secure attachment with each other. For some of the couples we work with, we are simply helping deepen and make more explicit this secure connection. For some couples, we may be helping them experience a secure connection for the first time in their lives. We find it deeply rewarding and meaningful to help guide people through this process.

Why You Don’t Need to learn I-Statements

OK, we’re being a little sassy with this one. If you love I-statements and have found the format helpful, more power to you! If you don’t know what we’re talking about, no problem. The point is that when you have completed Emotionally Focused Therapy with your partner and created a secure connection, you won’t need highly specific tools to structure your communication. You will naturally communicate with empathy and vulnerability, and you’ll naturally give each other the benefit of the doubt and be more flexible when something goes wrong. This is the power of secure attachment.

It doesn’t mean that you’ll never fight again, or that your life will be a romcom. But you’ll have the tools to interrupt negative patterns before they take hold, and to keep coming back into connection.

We are EFT Specialists

There are a lot of practices with counselors who have a little bit of training in everything. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not us. Every therapist at Colorado Therapy Collective has extensive training in Emotionally Focused Therapy and experience working with couples.

EFT isn’t just one of many modalities that we pick and choose from, but the foundation of the way that we view relationships.

Our founder and Clinical Director Nancy Brittain, LCSW, is a certified EFT therapist and Supervisor with the International Centre for Emotionally Focused Therapy. Nancy provides ongoing training and supervision for every couples therapist at CTC, including directly consulting on cases. Nancy is also involved in training EFT therapists and Supervisors on the international level. You can see her here co-training with Dr. Sue Johnson, EFT founder.

Nancy Brittain co-training with Sue Johnson and Nalini

Nancy Brittain, LCSW, co-training with Dr. Sue Johnson and Nalini Calamur, LMFT

Your relationship is important. Trust it to the experts.

If you are struggling with any aspect of your relationship, whether it’s recurring conflict, trouble with your sex life, or a slow and painful drifting apart, our skilled and specialized therapists can help. You can call us, send us a message, or schedule an appointment or consultation directly with our LoHi, Denver couples therapists. We see clients both in person and via telehealth. Take the first step to a thriving relationship today.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. Our skilled EFT therapists are trained to recognize negative patterns and the attachment needs and longings that drive them, even in people who don’t consider themselves particularly emotional. We understand that there are many ways people express emotion, and that these are impacted by lots of factors including culture, trauma, socialization, etc. We don’t expect every client to sob in our office - we’ll get to know you as individuals and together come to an understanding of your unique relationship challenges.
Part of our assessment process is understanding where each partner is in terms of commitment to the relationship. We’ll help create a plan for therapy that honors where each partner is in their process. We find that often when couples are able to have a clearer sense of where the disconnection is coming from, and a road map for how to address it, they have more hope for the relationship
While EFT does not rely on simplistic, one-size fits all tools to create change, your therapist will help you clearly identify at each point in the process what you can be working on. We often find that our clients tell us “the tools you taught us are working!”, even though we don’t hand out one-size fits all tools or relationship instructions. Essentially, clients are discovering tools organically through the therapy process.