The purpose of the next series of posts is to share a number of add-ons to eft couples therapy that I have found helpful in treating an expanded range of couples with eft treatment. What I have in mind here are couples who present larger than usual challenges to eft therapy. Trauma situations, personality immaturities, alignments with narcissistic false self organization, rigid resistances to opening vulnerability, intransigent high conflict situations, and addictions are all situations that can deeply interfere with successful eft treatment. One caveat to begin with… though the roots of eft treatment are in short term therapy, all that follows presumes a long-term adaptation of eft treatment. 

First a caveat… all of these additions to eft are directed towards the effective furtherance of the “eft tango,” which I and others view as the heart of eft couple’s treatment. (lay out the eft tango)

Text Communication To Couple A Few Days Following The Eft Session

Many couples in eft therapy struggle with holding onto the core message of eft sessions in the days following the session.Texting or phoning-in a “summarizing thought” in the days following the session, both helps lay in more deeply the underlying message of the session, and helps the couple more fully generalize the healing benefits of the session into their lives outside in the world. In addition, this brief communication following the sessions enables the therapist to more effectively tailor the therapeutic message to the particular resistances within the couple that were evident in the session. It provides a second opportunity for the therapist to refine their interventions address any piece of the therapeutic picture that they missed in the session. 

The Individual Project

An essential aspect of eft work is to drill down within the couple to the core individual vulnerable feelings that underlay and drive the negative cycles in the marriage. To this process I add a clarifying conversation for both in the marriage; that it is important for each in the marriage to slowly formulate an individual psychological project that is their individual work to do… that will then feedback in a positive way to reducing negative cycles and enhance the marital attachment. It is my experience that this adds a dimension of individual responsibility to the therapy… that compliments the couples interactional healing forged in the eft tango process. The creation of the individual project sets up a powerful interactive process between couples attachment on the one hand and individual individuation on the other. This, in turn, deepens both… individuation deepening attachment, and attachment deepening individuation!  

Review Of Session Tapes

Individual meetings with each partner have long been an aspect of emotion focused couples work. These episodic individual meetings, among other things, support a deepened conversation with each partner about the individual dynamics  in the marriage… and enable guidance with respect to the individual projects. In addition, these meetings allow a listening review of recordings of the prior eft couples session. This review enables a highly granular look at exactly how the negative cycles unfold in the marriage (blow by blow) including a probing inquiry into what is happening individually while these cycles unfold. This is a vivid powerful process.

One of the great contributions that Emotion Focused Therapy (EFT) has brought to marital treatment is an understanding/method to take down the negative cycles in struggling marriages. In addition, with the inclusion of what is called “stage two work” we have an understanding/method to convert the marital negative cycles into empathic healing and attachment intimacy in marriage. To this is added “stage three work” where both in the marriage are supported in bringing forth their underlying needs/desires/hopes into a safe sharing/reception within the marriage. My concern for the long term health of marriages is that the encountering conversations continue to happen both between sessions but also long after the therapy has come to an end. For this reason, it is important to continue a deepening of the couples therapy past the resolution of areas of conflict; because the more long-lasting changes in the marriage depend upon changing the “interactional process” in the marriage, not the resolution of content differences. That is, that the couples therapy is only enduring if it alters the actual dance that the couple does. To last, the therapy must impact the actual process of the couple. Otherwise, the improvements within the marriage inevitably recede over time.

There is a concept in psychoanalytic thinking of the “bad object.” The notion is rooted in the black and white thinking of early childhood, where the world gets divided up into “the good and the bad.” Often times, this oversimple breakdown of life survives within each of us, even as we grow up and mature into a much more realistic view of life. One prominent place it continues to live inside of us, and in our society at large, is in the area of shame. In public discourse, for example, accusations of shame commonly boil down to projecting “badness” onto the person shamed. Few things in public life are more painful than having ourselves attributed with such labels of badness. 

This is especially true in marriage. In choosing our primary partner, we hope to establish an emotional home base where we are protected from the threats of being shamed and diminished so common in the outer world. At least with our chosen partner we are hopeful of being seen as essentially good… good and worthy. In my experience, this is a nearly universal longing in all marriages. 

But a truism about marriage is that this is exactly where we are revealed in all of our limitations. And yet, it is exactly with our partner that we most need to be seen for best in us. In marriages dominated by the negative cycle, the opposite happens. Our partner mirrors back to us the ways they are disappointed in us, and we in turn mirror back our disappointment in them. This “death by a thousand cuts” can easily do in any marriage… even marriages with fundamentally good potential. 

Shame by itself is also a normal part of life, as in shame over this or that misstep. The place where shame becomes hugely damaging (to self and other in relationship), is when it rises to the level of toxic shame. In toxic shame we are not just ashamed of a misstep in the world or with our partner, in toxic shame we are essentially ashamed of ourselves, our own being in the world, our inherent nature. There is a common phrase in todays world where one claims something shameful of ordinary scale… we say “that’s my bad.” I actually find this non-catastrophic acknowledgment of misstep as helpful in marital healing. By contrast, in situations of “toxic shame” the feeling is one of “all badness” … that I have no worth, that there is no goodness or love within me, that I am “bad-bad” in that way that young children can concretely feel. Couples amidst the negative cycle are highly at risk of evoking this feeling of “bad-bad” in each other, at times passing it back and forth like a “hot potato!