Your relationship started with an explosion of emotion and “lovin’ feelings,” but somewhere along the line the lost that spark and you don’t know how to get it back.  The good news is that it is possible to rekindle the spark in your relationship.  But first, let’s understand what that spark is.

You seek, you prod, you plead, you poke, you push, you have “come to Jesus” meetings, but the more you do, the more your partner shuts down and withdraws. How can you help your emotionally unavailable partner to come out of that shell?

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 have had thoughts of divorce recently about your own marriage, there is some good news.  While those thoughts do signal that your marriage has problems, they can also be a strong motivator to do something about those problems and take the necessary steps to save your marriage.

Here are seven relationship skills that you and your partner can learn to build that strong, loving, supportive relationship you each seek.

No one in a relationship wants it to fail.  Obviously, couples want their relationship to work and last a lifetime.  But how?  What is the secret to making a relationship work?  It clearly doesn’t happen all by itself just because they love each other.  What are the relationship skills that make a relationship work for life?

The couples I see in marriage counseling have one dance and it’s all they know.  I call it “The Dance of Disconnection.”  But using Emotionally Focused Therapy, I have taught hundreds of couples a new dance, “The Dance Of Connection.”  And you can learn it too.

What if there was a way to accomplish in 2-3 days what normally takes months of week-to-week marriage counseling?  If your schedule makes weekly couple counseling difficult, or if you want to get in a better place quickly, I have good news: SoulCare offers a private weekend marriage counseling intensive. 

The research on EFT is impressive.  90% of couples who go through EFT significantly improve their relationship and 70-75% move out of relationships distress after treatment.  Compare that to the next leading couples therapy at a 35% success rate.  So, doing couples counseling with a counselor trained in Emotionally Focused Therapy gives your relationship a huge advantage, but here are some tips for getting the most out of the EFT process.

You are married, yet you feel alone both physically and emotionally.  You and your spouse are gone from sunup to sundown.  When you are both at home, you eat dinner while watching television.  On the weekends, one of you goes to the mall and the other goes to the golf course.  You are together all alone.  This is not what you signed up for when you said “I do.”  What happened?

According to the American Institute of Stress, about 33 percent of people report feeling extreme stress, 77 percent experience stress that affects their physical health, and 73 percent have stress that impacts their mental health. Sadly, for about half of all Americans, levels of stress are getting worse, not better. What is “chronic stress” and how can it be treated?

Your brain instantly assigns meaning to everything your significant relationships do or say and then tells you what to do to get or keep your connection safe and secure. These are called “Attachment Messages.” What are your attachment messages and are they right?

For over thirty years, people have been told that the cause of depression is a chemical imbalance in the brain, specifically an imbalance of serotonin. If you suffer from depression, it is probably what you have been told and you were prescribed antidepressants such as selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to boost your brain’s serotonin levels. But a bombshell new study shows that there is no clear evidence that serotonin levels are responsible for depression.

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.”

Of course, men are not all carbon copies of one another. There are exceptions, but typically because of biology and environment, boys and men tend to be withdrawers emotionally. Women can also be withdrawers, but it’s more common in men. And it drives the women in their lives crazy. Why do men check out emotionally? Here are some reasons why most men are not emotionally present:

There is a great book about marriage preparation titled, “Before You Say I Do.” This blog could be titled, “Before You Say I No longer Do.” If you are experiencing marital distress and considering divorce, there are some things to think through before you take that step.

Many mental health professionals pathologize depression and anxiety. That is, they see these issues as illnesses, which they then label and treat with medical approaches. But in Emotionally Focused Therapy, we don’t think of anxiety or depression as mental illnesses; rather we group them together as emotional disorders. EFT therapists see people as emotional beings seeking connection above all.

Over my many years as a marriage therapist, I’ve seen marriages destroyed by affairs, but I have also seen many marriages repair, reconnect, and recover to become stronger than before. While the betrayal of an affair of any kind creates terrible damage to a relationship, it is not irreparable.

So, we work very hard to avoid anxiety. Yet, there are some good things that come from anxiety, some benefits of anxiety.

When dissociation happens infrequently, during monotonous tasks like driving, listening to a lecture, or reading, that is normal. However, if it goes beyond that, there is cause for concern.