EFT, Without the Brochure Language

Mar 8

2 min read

Updated: Sep 13

Every couples therapist's website promises to help you reconnect. Almost none of them say what that actually involves, because what it involves does not photograph well.

So here is the unglamorous version.

First, the name, because the internet gets it wrong constantly and I would rather be precise about my own trade: it is Emotionally Focused Therapy. Not emotional focus therapy. It comes out of attachment research, and the name matters because the emphasis is on emotion as the thing being worked with, not a topic being discussed.

What a session is actually like

You come in. One of you gives the account of the problem you have both been rehearsing in the car. I let that run for a while, because I need to hear it, and then I start interrupting.

I interrupt both of you, at roughly the same rate. This is not rudeness and it is not refereeing. It is that the rehearsed version of the argument is the least informative thing in the room, and we do not have to sit through all of it to get underneath it.

What I am listening for is not who is right. It is the sequence. One of you moves toward the other — usually with heat, because moving toward someone who has gone quiet is frightening. The other one goes still, or reasonable, or absent. The first one escalates because still feels like gone. The second one withdraws further because heat feels like danger.

Round and round. Neither of you designed it. Both of you are trapped in it. Read more about the pursuer-withdrawer cycle.

The part that does the work

At some point, usually in the first month, one of you says something out loud that you have been carrying for years without ever quite putting into words. Often it is small. Often it is something like I did not think you would come after me.

And the other person hears it, because by then we have slowed things down enough that hearing is possible.

That moment is the mechanism. Not insight. Not technique. A thing said, and received, that could not previously get through.

Why the sessions are long

Because the first forty minutes are the rehearsed version, and everything worth having is underneath it. Fifty minutes with a distressed couple gets you far enough in to open something and not far enough to do anything with it, which is a rude thing to do to people.

Sessions run 100 to 110 minutes — the mini-intensive, the only format I offer — at $180, private pay, in person at my office in Webb City, MO.

The longer background on the method is here: EFT and why it matters.

Call or text 417-768-9089 · shira@radicalrelationshiptransformation.com