The Scoop: Can you fix your relationship conflicts with Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)? Married couple and therapists Kim and Dennis Eames think so. They’ve applied these principles to their own relationship and seen the benefits firsthand.
Thus far in the history of humanity, our species has figured out how to grow our own food, heat our own homes, and travel across the ocean in flying metal machines. Yet, when it comes to matters of the heart, we admittedly find ourselves stumped.
For so many of us, relationships feel like an unsolvable Rubik’s Cube, with every twist and turn presenting us with new (but just as frustrating) challenges.
Kim and Dennis Eames, two therapists (and husband and wife) at Hold Me Tight Seattle understand this more than most — not just from their years of work with couples and parents, but from their own partnership.
“We got to a point where all the bandaids we’d been trying to use had stopped working,” Kim explains.
The married couple began to seek new strategies for navigating their conflicts, and one in particular — called Emotionally Focused Therapy (or EFT) — became their marriage life raft. This transformative approach enabled Kim and Dennis to get “unstuck” from their negative relationship patterns and cultivate the tools to help other couples achieve the same success.
Turns out, the patterns that were holding them back — and that hold most couples back — are predictable, and, much of the time, fixable. But it’ll take a bit of digging.
Unpacking Emotionally Focused Therapy
Dennis, who was the first in the duo to follow the therapeutic path, came to a fork in the road many years into his career. Before that point, he had worked with dozens of couples seeking to mend holes in their relationships but felt like his efforts were all for naught.
“It was like there wasn’t much that helped. They came into the office, they would learn to do some skills, but when they went home, it kind of all fell apart, and they couldn’t make any sort of lasting difference,” Dennis describes.
And these tools weren’t just failing within the relationships of the couples he was counseling — they were failing in his personal life, too. Kim and Dennis loved each other dearly, but couldn’t claw their way out of the vicious emotional loops they had found themselves in. Evidently, the standard therapeutic model had some plot holes.
Years later, before Kim started her own therapy training journey, they were confronted with the missing link: Emotionally Focused Therapy. EFT is a relationship therapy model based on the idea that 1) all emotions are linked to deeper needs, 2) understanding these deeper needs, and 3) creating new “corrective” emotional experiences with our partner, is how we move out of negative interpersonal patterns.
“Emotion is a big piece of why we get stuck. Because emotion moves us, whether we are aware of it or not. Sometimes we think we’re in this very cognitive place of, ‘Oh, I’m not being emotional about this,’ but that is an emotional response in itself,” Dennis tells us.
Looking at relationships through the lens of EFT also helps us stop seeing our partner as the enemy and, instead, as someone who’s struggling with their own unique set of needs and past experiences.
The Roots of Negative Dating Patterns
EFT is partly founded in attachment research, which posits that the types of relationships we had with our caregivers during our developmental years influence the relational dynamics we find ourselves in once we reach adulthood. The most common relationship dynamic is that of the anxious and the avoidant (or, as Kim, Dennis, and other EFT practitioners refer to it as, the pursuer and the withdrawer).
“About 70% of couples worldwide fall into this pattern,” Kim points out.
This relationship can be characterized by having one person (the pursuer) who moves toward conflict and attempts to resolve the issue in the moment, and another person (the withdrawer) who avoids conflict at all costs, and will pull away/shut down to do so.
“This pattern is a disaster, as neither one of these people are getting their needs met,” she tells us.
Luckily, EFT helps us see that our partners are (usually) not reacting this way to cause harm; in fact, both of your behaviors are rooted in the same instinct: to save the relationship.
Kim, who tends to move away from conflict, and Dennis, who tends to move toward it, have gotten stuck in an endless loop of unresolved issues as a result of this exact dynamic. But through an understanding of EFT, they’ve learned that these cycles don’t have to be endless after all.
Out With the Old and In With the New
The tug of war between pursuing and withdrawing ceases (or, at least, starts to) when you can ditch your efforts to solve things logically and allow your focus to drop into the body.
“It kind of reminds me of that kids song about going on a bear hunt. ‘You can’t go over it, you can’t go under it, you have to go through it,’ ” Dennis adds with a cheeky grin.
Essentially, you have to first experience the uncomfortable emotion associated with your unmet need to process it and, consequently, create new thought patterns around it.
Dennis shares an example of this from his marriage with Kim:
“There are moments where I’ve called Kim out for something, and then I immediately become afraid that Kim thinks I’m a bad husband and wants nothing to do with me.”
This comes from a deep-rooted fear of being abandoned, or deemed unworthy. And in these moments of panic, he’s been afraid of expressing these fears with her out of concern of being deemed weak.
With an understanding of EFT in his back pocket, Dennis hasn’t necessarily gotten rid of his ingrained feelings of unworthiness — as these thought patterns have been years in the making — but he feels more empowered to share them with Kim when they arise.
Here, in this space of open communication and safety, Dennis has offered Kim authenticity and honesty, and Kim has offered Dennis reassurance and compassion. This is the first step to transitioning from logically understanding a need, and viscerally understanding it.
“Being able to ask for that reassurance and receive it has been so amazing for both of us,” Kim beams.
“Exactly. We needed to have a new experience in order to feel that shift in an embodied way,” adds Dennis.
Three Steps To Breaking Free
Just to wrap this conversation up in a tidy little bow, we’ve summarized the aforementioned EFT process in three clear-cut steps. Continue reading to educate yourself on how to help you and your loved one not only recognize negative conflict patterns, but break free of them once and for all.
Step One: Reframe Your Perspective
Before you do or say something you may regret, pause and take a breath. Remind yourself that your partner’s pursuit or withdrawal is not meant to hurt you. In fact, their response to this conflict is really just a protective strategy they developed long before you met. Chances are, they want this relationship to work just as much as you do.
Step Two: Lean Into Vulnerability
You’ve got to get out of your own head. Instead of trying to solve this logically, or in isolation, share your needs and fears openly, and ask for reassurance or boundaries when necessary.
The more you can create this safe space for communication, the easier having difficult conversations will become.
Step Three: Create New Experiences Together
New outcomes create new neural pathways. Use these moments of vulnerability and communication to rewire the emotional patterns that fuel your behavior.
Use EFT Tools to Deepen Your Connections
If you and your loved one find yourselves stuck in the same negative patterns every time you fight, it’s probably because you’ve forgotten one very important thing: the emotion behind the behavior.
As Kim and Dennis Eames have shown us in this vulnerable interview, using EFT to understand the unmet needs bubbling under the surface of the argument is what is going to get you moving away from the unsolvable-Rubik’s-Cube relationship and toward a bond based on honesty, open communication, and authentic intimacy.
“EFT has become this roadmap to predicting what is going to go wrong in a relationship and why. Once we identify these patterns, we can finally make sense of them, and start to reach out and engage with our partners in new ways.”
