by Liz Miller | Relationships
According to Dr. Susan Johnson, Emotionally Focused Therapy expert:
“Underneath all the distress, partners are asking each other: Can I count on you, depend on you? Are you there for me? Will you respond to me when I need you, when I call? Do I matter to you? Am I valued and accepted by you? Do you need me, rely on me? The anger, the criticism, the demands, are really cries to their lovers, calls to stir their hearts, to draw their mates back in emotionally and reestablish a sense of safe connection.”
From her book called Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love
Couples don’t commit to each other to live in a disconnected, isolated, alienated way. The whole point is to love meaningfully and respectfully, and mutual enjoyment of each other. But it’s no secret that as time goes on maintaining that connection is often difficult, and for some the path to intimacy can become an impasse.
So what do you do when lasting love seems hard to achieve, and you’re overwhelmed by negative emotions you just can’t seem to get a handle on?
Dr. Johnson is the pioneer of Emotionally Focused Therapy for couples, and she has a few ideas.
What EFT is and Why it Matters
Emotionally Focused Therapy treats the connection between partners as an attachment bond. This bond is formed, developed, and sometimes even destroyed by how well a couple dances together in the push and pull of meeting each other’s needs. The dance may be one of increasing closeness and coordinated movement toward each other. Or, it might be one marked by ongoing cycles of disconnect, conflict and hurtful stepping on each other’s emotional toes.
Since the 1980s, Dr. Johnson has explored ways to help couples feel more secure in their interactions. Her approach is meant to reduce the painful patterns of needy or demanding pursuit and painful withdrawn shut-down that happen in so many hurting relationships.
Emotionally Focused Therapy helps couples find ways to better understand each other’s dance steps rather than fight them. This way, both partners feel empowered to be the kind of partner that the other continues to trust and enjoy wherever life’s music takes them.
Just as expert dancers use what they’ve learned to create both connection and freedom on the dance floor, Emotionally Focused Therapy enhances the quality of connection to allow couples greater freedom and ease together. It was developed so that you can address the rifts between you without damaging the connection that binds you. You can even make your bond more secure. How?
Couples that employ Dr. Johnson’s Emotionally Focused Therapy methods see substantial relationship improvement and growth due to increased ability to choose closeness over criticism or retreat.
Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples is the most research-proven method of couple therapy, and it is effective because it is closely aligned with the science of adult attachment and interpersonal neurobiology—how adults bond. (Research information can be found by visiting the website listed below for the International Center for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy.)
EFT has core strengths that make it particularly helpful for distressed or confused couples
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- First and foremost, EFT takes that view that relationship behavior, however negative it may seem, is likely each partner’s best attempt to get their needs met. Johnson calls this the “howl for connection.”
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- EFT relies on some key fundamental, mapped steps that facilitate change in a relationship.
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- EFT is a proven, workable, and lasting method that works in a variety of circumstances, across varying people groups around the world, and even improves the emotional well-being of individuals who apply the concepts.
Emotionally Focused Therapy goals are clear:
- Shift the negative cycles of your couple dance by understanding and adjusting your emotional responses to each other.
- Position yourselves differently in the dance by learning new “steps” or cycles of interaction rather than pursue/withdraw or criticize/defend.
- Practice the new dance steps so that your bond is more secure and enjoyable.
Think about it. If you each knew that you were valued, loved, and respected, and you knew that you were each able to meet each other’s needs, what topics or areas of conflict would remain unmanageable?
How EFT Works and How it Helps
Over several decades, Dr. Johnson has shared with couples how openness, attunement, and responsiveness solidify connections. Her work implements these seven key conversations, that help couples create what she calls “a lifetime of love.” She details the following in her book, Hold Me Tight:
1. Recognize “the demon dialogues.”
What negative communication patterns exist in your relationship? This is the true problem. That same fight you have again and again? That’s your negative cycle of conflict showing up despite the topic (finances, family, etc.). Taking the pressure off each other and noticing your repetitive pattern makes emotion sharing much less risky because it becomes you two against the cycle, not each other.
2. Uncover your relational “raw spots.”
What attachment needs are repeatedly unaddressed between you? EFT work helps you see through your knee-jerk, automatic responses. You can then examine the hurts resulting from emotional deprivation and see each other’s true feelings more accurately.
3. Review “a rocky moment.”
What happens when you and your partner “go there?” Work through the demon dialogue. Examine your interactions. Take responsibility for your own behavior, emotions, hurts, and needs. Own your impact on your partner and the relationship. Then come together as you share deeper parts of yourselves.
4. Ask these transformative questions:
What do I fear most? What do I need most from you? This vulnerability creates a more available, emotionally responsive, and closely linked partnership. From here, you can establish positive interaction patterns.
5. Heal via forgiveness.
What pain remains unresolved between you? Relationship trauma must be faced honestly. Then it must be forgiven. This is how continual connection is built. Seek to have conversations that support healing and rebuild trust.
6. Bond via intimacy, sex, and touch.
Do you feel emotionally safe enough for lovemaking? In a committed relationship, sex plays a crucial role in rebuilding and cementing lasting connections. When emotional safety lags or gets very compartmentalized into pure sensation versus shared experience. Lacking in these areas further erodes the bond between you.
7. Maintain and nurture your love.
How will you engage each other to keep love healthy and growing? Dr. Johnson implores couples to keep talking, sharing, and responding in emotionally accessible ways. How?
- Be vigilant and reflective as it pertains to unsafe actions and counteractions.
- Openly celebrate your relationship “wins” or successes.
- Develop your own rituals to lovingly acknowledge periods of separation and reunion.
- Gently help each other recognize your unique attachment issues.
- Create your distinct relationship recovery story together.
- Allow yourselves to fully imagine and begin creating your new love story.
- Come to terms with the truth: love is an ongoing journey. You will perpetually seek, lose, and recover your emotional connection. Stick with it.
Sue Johnson’s decades of work, many successful outcome studies, and the phenomenal success struggling couples enjoy reveal EFT effectiveness. This therapy addresses your longing for deeper emotional connection by getting past simple “conflict containment.” Instead, you become better able to access your emotions and enjoy a mutually responsive relationship.
So what’s the next step?
Dr. Johnson reassures readers in a blog post titled, “Where Does Love Go Wrong?” this way:
“…When folks caught in Demon Dialogues come in and ask, “Is there any hope for us?” I tell them, “Sure there is. When we understand what the drama of love is all about, what our needs and fears are, we can help each other step out of these negative dialogues into positive loving conversations that bring us into each other’s arms and safely home.”
If you and your partner are suffering from a pervasive sense of aloneness within your union, EFT can go a long way in helping you get to the heart of your hurt. From there, you can recover well in a lasting way.
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Johnson, Susan M. Hold Me Tight: Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love. New York: Little, Brown & Co, 2008.
International Center for Excellence in Emotionally Focused Therapy
[Please note that these principles for creating safety, and EFT, may not be appropriate for every stage of marital distress, especially ongoing abuse or the type of domestic violence known as intimate partner terrorism.]
Liz Miller, LPC – Licensed Professional Counselor in Idaho, LMHC – Licensed Mental Health Counseling in Washington. Serving residents of Idaho and Washington.
by Liz Miller | Anxiety, Trauma
Lots of people can relate to being anxious, and wonder if they have anxiety or PTSD.
Sometimes the feelings are mild: slightly elevated heart rate or blood pressure, some discomfort in social settings, or too many thoughts to get back to sleep easily. Other times, experiences of anxiety are really debilitating: panic attacks that make the heart race and leave a person feeling like they are having a heart attack, or physical symptoms resulting from obsessive worry about all the “what ifs” involved with an upcoming event.
There are many types of anxiety. Social anxiety, generalized anxiety, acute stress disorder, and phobias all fall under the “anxiety disorder” umbrella, among others. But, up until 2013, so did Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). And, with quite a lot of overlap in symptoms whether it’s anxiety or PTSD, it can be hard to distinguish the variety of anxiety disorders from PTSD, which the newest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders now calls a “trauma and stressor-related disorder.”
So, what is trauma?
It would be so much simpler if we could just identify which stressful experiences are “traumas,” and which aren’t. The trouble is that trauma isn’t in the event itself. It’s in each person’s experience of the event—even an event that happened to someone else, but was witnessed—and how his or her brain and nervous system perceive and process the threat.
You might not necessarily tie a traumatic event to your anxious thoughts and feelings, or even realize you experienced “trauma.” You might think you just feel bad. You might want help for your persistent nervousness or tools to manage the unexplained panic that comes “out of nowhere.” You may be frustrated by how out of control you feel when you’re stressed.
There is some complex neurobiology at work in a brain that perceives an event as traumatic. But, when most people think about anxiety and trauma, they think about their experiences. Let’s look at those.
How Do Anxiety and PTSD Compare?
There are clear symptomatic similarities. Anxiety and PTSD affect sleep and energy. They both impact disposition and mood. They both fuel a need to be alert and exhaustingly on guard. Both conditions generate fear and worry surrounding non-imminent threats.
For the most part, typical anxiety is often generated without an actual precipitating situation. Thoughts present in anxiety disorders do not necessarily relate to past events, and no real circumstance needs to drive the upset. The worry and fear are real, but the cause is often based on unsupported assumptions.
On the other hand, PTSD’s symptoms are driven by a significantly different force than other anxiety types. Suffering occurs because frightful circumstances are not imagined. Something frightful actually happened, and in fact, a person with PTSD experiences the symptoms as if the event was happening again and again.
While anxiety symptoms and PTSD symptoms can overlap, PTSD is always related to traumatic and stressful past events.
You might ask, “Isn’t social anxiety sometimes linked to stressful past social situations, for example?” Sometimes, but it’s much more usual that anxieties are not specifically related to a certain past event. For example, the stressful thoughts suffered by someone with Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder are not usually provoked by past experiences.
But, PTSD is always related to specific past events. It might be a one-time event in adulthood, like a horrific car accident. It could be a series of events over a period of time like many combat veterans experience. Or, it might be the ongoing developmental or complex traumatic stress experienced in childhood or later developmental years. Whatever the event(s), traumatic stress disorders have their roots in past events, and they can produce many symptoms in a sufferer’s current life.
PTSD is much more than fear and worry related to the frightening circumstance.
Enduring something so frightening or terrible that our very existence is threatened—or perceived to have been threatened— has the power to change not only perceptions, but the nervous system itself.
In fact, trauma survivors are distinctly and uniquely affected as the nervous system adapts to what it perceives as a more dangerous world in the aftermath of trauma. It is an inability to release oneself from the emotional, mental, and bodily sensations that accompanied that experience. It’s like the traumatic event or events are still happening. The brain and nervous system find ways to compensate for the perception of danger, and distinct symptoms result.
Let’s compare common symptoms of anxiety unrelated to trauma and common PTSD symptoms.
Anxiety Symptoms
- Fatigue and restlessness
- Hypervigilance
- Irritability
- Excessive, persistent worry
- Intrusive, fearful thoughts
- Difficulty with sleeping, digestion, and tension
- Reduced concentration
- Racing heart, sense of doom
Although many of these are also associated with PTSD, Traumatic Stress Symptoms Fall into Four Categories, and Include:
- Re-experiencing symptoms, such as nightmares and dissociative flashbacks, or intense distress related to triggers some parts of the event, and/or having bodily sensations specifically associated with the traumatic event.
- Avoidance symptoms, such as avoiding any people, places, actions, words or objects related to the event, and feeling detached, “spaced out,” or emotionally numb.
- Negative thoughts and mood, including difficulty remembering important parts of the event(s), ongoing negative moods and trouble having positive experiences.
- Arousal symptoms such as irritability, angry outbursts, recklessness, self-destructive actions, watchfulness or edginess, feeling easily startled, poor concentration, sleep problems.
While some anxiety symptoms and PTSD symptoms clearly overlap, the difference is that with anxiety, the intrusive thoughts, persistent worry, and other difficulties are generally not tied to a specific or past event, whereas in PTSD, they are.
PTSD impairs your ability to recover from overwhelming events, or to establish healthy thought patterns and relationships. It deserves to be set apart from standard anxiety disorders for good reason. To recover is possible, but the care of a well-trained therapist using safe, effective, research-based methods can be crucial.
How about you? Are you anxious and unsure why?
Do you need help distinguishing the way you feel now from what you endured in the past? Or, are you unsure if your current symptoms are related to anxiety or PTSD? Getting answers to these questions and gently working it out with a compassionate, skilled trauma therapist can make all the difference.
Liz Miller, LPC – Licensed Professional Counselor in Idaho, LMHC – Licensed Mental Health Counseling in Washington. Serving residents of Idaho and Washington.
