So many of us, in our insecurity and traumas, feel like we are a fraud, waiting to be found out. In this underlying frame of mind, we largely dismiss our genuine accomplishments… that in terms of what is emotionally important, they don’t count. Years of this experience can damage our inherent sense of “being real.” By this, I mean the emotional sense of being real… that one has truly lived and has partook in life, as have others around us. This is an enormously painful human place, a tragic combination of not feeling loved in ones core fused with annihilating shame. (to be cont.)

I remember back four decades to when my cohort of young therapists began training in psychotherapy. Though technically a science, the feeling of it all was more akin to religion than science. We were young and idealistic, and profoundly invested in finding the “right path” to psychological healing. We had countless debates between us as to what was the truly potent form of therapy. In truth, we were all on a quest… looking for a kind of “holy grail.” We wanted to become healers of human suffering, not just to help those who came to us, but somehow to help ourselves with our own terrible suffering.

This is just a first entry of a topic I will repeatedly return to. I am posting it here as a note to myself.

This is the holy grail of psychotherapy; emotional healing… what is it?

Thinking back over the years to my own relationship history, and those of so many of the couples I have seen in therapy, I am struck by a paradox. It is falling in love that draws us to our partner, and leads us to have positive intention in so many ways towards our partner. At the same time, the deep emotional intensity of loving someone comes from such a deep internal place within, based upon our individual histories of love, it is inevitable that this very positive energy that draws us to our partner will also partially blind us from seeing how our partner’s individual history makes them love differently than we expect. Hence we come towards our partner with such wonderful hopes and yet at the same time we do not accurately see our partner.

EFT’s focus upon revealing underlying positive intention of partners to each other, with the goal of unpacking what is really going on with and between partners, is absolutely crucial to couples healing. A long term goal of eft couples treatment is to help the couple into the dance with underlying positive intention rather than the dance with surface disappointment.

Many people come into therapy seeking to be happy. Or rather they come to therapy because they are suffering and they are hoping to find a certain vision of happiness that will make the suffering go away. That they are suffering is genuine and is the best reason they are there, but that therapy will provide them the vision of happiness they seek is almost certain not to happen. The problem is, the “vision of happiness” is often an aspect of the continued suffering in the first place!