How does Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy Work?
In my provision of Christian marriage counselling in Toronto and GTA I focus on couple bonding and make use of Emotionally focused couple therapy. Listening skills are the key to creation of an emotionally safe couple connection.
In interweave individual psychotherapy sessions with couple sessions since we all have a back story and need for healing. These make us of an integration of EMDR, Emotion-focus, Memory reconsolidation and, where appropriate, Christian Listening Prayer Therapy.
In Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy:
In my provision of Christian marriage counselling in Toronto and GTA I focus on couple bonding and make use of Emotionally focused couple therapy. Listening skills are the key to creation of an emotionally safe couple connection.
In interweave individual psychotherapy sessions with couple sessions since we all have a back story and need for healing. These make us of an integration of EMDR, Emotion-focus, Memory reconsolidation and, where appropriate, Christian Listening Prayer Therapy.
In Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy:
- I will help you to track down the primary emotional issue in intimate relationships and how that is effecting your marriage.
- We will learn to identify the usual pattern your marriage issues take and learn to address that when it happens.
- I will affirm the research and your own intuition that a lot of emotional security rides on the relationship with your marital partner.
- We will observe and track with the feelings that occur in interaction patterns and learn to speak with clarity about some of the emotions that sometimes hide behind the surface of these patterns.
- You will learn to repair relationship wounds. What to do when hurt and trust keeps cycling back to a unresolved issue.
- We will develop tools for conflict resolution, trust development and deeper bonding.
- For Christian Couples this work looks the same but is put in the context of prayer and inviting God's presence to participate in the therapy.
- to establish or restore bonding
- to understand personality differences,
- to learn to listen to the other,
- to learn clear and clean communication.
- to have empathy for the other,
- to resolve conflicts and learn conflict management
On the agenda of a couple counselling set of sessions:
- Identify counselling goals,
- Clarify primary motivation of each person,
- Clarify the background life cycle,
- Get the couple communication cycle on the table,
- Learn to share the soft feelings associated with attachment and connection,
- Learn to defuse relationship wounds,
- Learn to acknowledge each other.
What is Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy?
Bonding Focused Couple Therapy focuses on attachment needs; on the feelings associated with distance from one's lover; on overcoming the relationship patterns that block the meeting of these needs.
Outcomes: When a therapist takes this focus couples stay in therapy, make gains and sustain these gains over time. As a Christian marriage counsellor I have found that almost everyone in Christian couple therapy identifies bonding as the key issue.
Meaning: What does it look like when Emotionally focused couple therapy makes bonding the focus of marital therapy. We focus on those needs and feelings and conflicts related to closeness and attachment the primary issues that get our attention. Things are less important than the people and their relationship.
Research Orientation:
Psychological Research Basis of emotionally focused couple therapy
John Bolby, Ainsworth and others discovered and described "Attachment" as a life supporting need of a newborn. For children who are given enough life-giving attachment to live, the quality of their attachment is a significant factor underlying adult personality development.
Upon closer examination, researchers and therapist have found it fruitful to look at committed adult love relationships as a form of bonding equivalent to that between mother and child. For partner, as for child, the relationship provides comfort, security, the courage to be oneself, to love, to learn and to change.
A Theology / Biblical Perspective
How does emotionally focused couple therapy fit with a Biblical perspective?
From Genesis:
"It is not good for man to be alone", says God, in the creation story of the Bible. Genesis chapter two.
For this reason a man shall leave his mother and father and be joined (cleave) to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
They were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
"Live (abide) in me. Make your home in me just as I do in you. In the same way that a branch can't bear grapes by itself but only by being joined to the vine, you can't bear fruit unless you are joined with me. When you're joined with me and I with you, the relation intimate and organic, the harvest is sure to be abundant. Separated, you can't produce a thing." Jesus in the Gospel of John, chapter 15.
At the heart of marriage is a God-given bond, a loving contact, a unity. This intimate attachment, dependency, connection is good, of God and meets a fundamental God-given need in mankind not to be alone. On the other hand a relationship without such a life-giving connection, intimate bonding, unity is not healthy, not God's plan and represents an emotional and spiritual divorce even in the midst of a legal and church sanctioned 'marriage.' Should one end and expose this 'white-washed tomb?'
To answer that consider what Jesus said, in a similar and parallel situation. Jesus (John 15) insists that a life-giving bond, attachment, connection to him is essential to a life of fruitfulness. Without this continuing and abiding attachment there is no life and no fruitfulness. And Jesus does not hesitate to declare the end of this situation. Such a branch is discarded. "If anyone does not abide in Me, he is cast out as a branch."
Emotionally-focused couple therapy can now be enhanced with EMDR:
Using EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) for:
Note: The fee schedule is $160 / hour or $240 / 90 minute session with George. Couple counselling involves a nix of individual sessions and couple communication sessions.
- Emotionally focused couple therapy makes adult attachment (bonding) a priority in the session.
- Emotionally focused therapy is based on research on bonding and attachment,
- The Bible teaches that 'life-giving-attachments' are the key to life, love and God.
Bonding Focused Couple Therapy focuses on attachment needs; on the feelings associated with distance from one's lover; on overcoming the relationship patterns that block the meeting of these needs.
Outcomes: When a therapist takes this focus couples stay in therapy, make gains and sustain these gains over time. As a Christian marriage counsellor I have found that almost everyone in Christian couple therapy identifies bonding as the key issue.
Meaning: What does it look like when Emotionally focused couple therapy makes bonding the focus of marital therapy. We focus on those needs and feelings and conflicts related to closeness and attachment the primary issues that get our attention. Things are less important than the people and their relationship.
Research Orientation:
Psychological Research Basis of emotionally focused couple therapy
John Bolby, Ainsworth and others discovered and described "Attachment" as a life supporting need of a newborn. For children who are given enough life-giving attachment to live, the quality of their attachment is a significant factor underlying adult personality development.
Upon closer examination, researchers and therapist have found it fruitful to look at committed adult love relationships as a form of bonding equivalent to that between mother and child. For partner, as for child, the relationship provides comfort, security, the courage to be oneself, to love, to learn and to change.
A Theology / Biblical Perspective
How does emotionally focused couple therapy fit with a Biblical perspective?
From Genesis:
"It is not good for man to be alone", says God, in the creation story of the Bible. Genesis chapter two.
For this reason a man shall leave his mother and father and be joined (cleave) to his wife, and they shall become one flesh.
They were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.
"Live (abide) in me. Make your home in me just as I do in you. In the same way that a branch can't bear grapes by itself but only by being joined to the vine, you can't bear fruit unless you are joined with me. When you're joined with me and I with you, the relation intimate and organic, the harvest is sure to be abundant. Separated, you can't produce a thing." Jesus in the Gospel of John, chapter 15.
At the heart of marriage is a God-given bond, a loving contact, a unity. This intimate attachment, dependency, connection is good, of God and meets a fundamental God-given need in mankind not to be alone. On the other hand a relationship without such a life-giving connection, intimate bonding, unity is not healthy, not God's plan and represents an emotional and spiritual divorce even in the midst of a legal and church sanctioned 'marriage.' Should one end and expose this 'white-washed tomb?'
To answer that consider what Jesus said, in a similar and parallel situation. Jesus (John 15) insists that a life-giving bond, attachment, connection to him is essential to a life of fruitfulness. Without this continuing and abiding attachment there is no life and no fruitfulness. And Jesus does not hesitate to declare the end of this situation. Such a branch is discarded. "If anyone does not abide in Me, he is cast out as a branch."
Emotionally-focused couple therapy can now be enhanced with EMDR:
Using EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) for:
- generating peak learning and peak performance,
- treating symptoms of stress, trauma and PTSD (Post traumatic stress disorder)
- to heal our emotional personal trigger points,
- to bring healing to our own personal blocks to intimacy and
- to deal with core belief issues and relationship traumas,
- EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing) as a resource for healing painful childhood memories and for reducing severe anxiety
- The Peak Psychotherapy model - a thorough systematic emotional healing program
Note: The fee schedule is $160 / hour or $240 / 90 minute session with George. Couple counselling involves a nix of individual sessions and couple communication sessions.