Secure attachment offers us a potent sense of safety and a way to maintain equilibrium in the presence of danger or threat. These bonds allow us to tolerate and cope with our human frailty. The love one person feels from another has an enormous effect on them, both physically and emotionally. One of the goals of EFT is to help partners see how they are both caught in a recurring pattern of emotional disconnection, triggering each other into aggressively demanding a response or freezing up and shutting down. EFT therapists view their conflict as the patterns that create a lack of safety and this insecurity impedes growth on the part of both partners. In this presentation we will focus on how Emotionally Focused Therapy helps partners move, when needing contact or support, into positive experiences of secure connection. That is, we show them how to have bonding conversations in which both partners pinpoint and share specific attachment fears and needs in ways that pull the other close. Partners in these potent bonding conversations openly share fears of rejection or loneliness and then ask for reassurance in a way that makes it easy for the other to respond. We will focus on ways to create safety by deepening and enacting the expression of vulnerable emotions. Exploring deeper emotions and expanding emotional experience often leads to the vulnerability that cues compassion and “reaching” for one’s partner who now seems safer and less dangerous.

Educational Objectives:

1. Discuss relational distress from an attachment perspective as a strategy for protesting disconnection.

2. Describe emotional disregulation (I.e. anxiety or avoidance) as an alarm bell that cues a protective strategy in adult romantic relationships.

3. Explain how creating safety and restructuring the bond between partners in Emotionally Focused Therapy is achievable by deepening and facilitating the disclosure of emotions and attachment longings and fears.