What is the core need that every person on earth has, the one thing that we crave from our partner above all else?  What is essential to a healthy relationship like oxygen is to life?

If you are new to the term “Emotionally Focused Therapy” and doing some research on what it is and how it works, there is no doubt but you’re wondering, “What happens in the Emotionally Focused Therapy counseling sessions?”  That’s a great question.  Let me break it down so you can know what to expect.

In an ever-escalating cycle of conflict, one partner stridently pursues and the other partner avoidantly withdraws. It’s a script written in the subconscious mind by past experiences that when certain things happen, we are not safe and must either push in or pull away to find safety.  This “push-pull” is at the heart of all relational conflict.  To break that cycle of conflict, first you must understand your role in it.  You are either the pursuer or the withdrawer.

What’s the old rhyme? “No more pencils, no more books, no more teacher’s dirty looks.” But that isn’t true. f you go to couples counseling, there will be homework. Hopefully, there will be no dirty looks, but part of your therapy will include homework assignments.

My wife and I own two Christian counseling practices in the Dallas/Fort Worth metroplex: SoulCare Counseling in Colleyville and Christian Counseling Associates in Grapevine and Plano. Both practices do Christian counseling. But at a meeting of our counselors a few weeks ago, one of them asked, “What is it that makes counseling ‘Christian counseling’?” That is a great question that has different answers, depending on who you ask.

It struck me that a lot of couples could use a starter kit for Emotionally Focused Therapy. There is hope and there is help for your relationship distress. Through EFT, you can reconnect and have that close, intimate, fulfilling, long-lasting love that you both signed up for when you said, “I Do.”

In the 80’s there was a famous anti-drug commercial that showed an egg frying while the narrator said, “This is your brain on crack.” In this blog, I want to talk about your brain on love. Science shows a definite correlation between your brain and the quality of your relationships.

Even though attachment injuries are painful and do damage, the good news is that research has shown that they can be healed through Emotionally Focused Therapy.

We have blogs posted on the secure, anxious, and avoidant attachment styles, which you may want to check out. Here, I’m going to focus on the disorganized attachment style, sometimes also called the “chaotic attachment style.”

In this blog, I’m going to explore the anxious attachment style. Maybe this is you. 20% of the population has an anxious attachment style which makes them extremely sensitive to any disconnection in their relationships.

In this blog, I will focus on the avoidant attachment style. About 25% of the population has avoidant attachment style. Maybe you do.

Maybe you have realized by now that there are many therapy models used by professional counselors. Every model is based on what is believed to be the answer to the question, “Why do we behave the way we do, and how can we change?” All therapy models have an answer to that question, but some have better answers than others; and none has a better answer than Emotionally Focused Therapy.

Sometimes you hear people say, “We tried marriage counseling and it didn’t work.” Their conclusion is that all marriage counseling is the same and it doesn’t work, at least not for them. The truth is that there are many different kinds of couples therapy with varying degrees of success, but one stands out.

You have already decided that you need to go to a counselor, or you wouldn’t be reading this article. But which counselor? Counselors aren’t like mechanics or dentists that are all basically the same, so you just choose one close to home. Counselors are not all the same.

Having been a pastor since I was 20, when my wife and I founded SoulCare Counseling in 2007, there was no question but that it would be a Christian counseling center. The only question was, what kind of Christian counseling would SoulCare do?