Rebuilding Couples’ Communication With Emotionally Focused Therapy

This post is part 2 of a series.

The emotion-focused couples therapist guides clients to first fully connect with and understand their emotions, and then create new responses and interaction patterns (Johnson, 2007). Emotionally focused therapists use emotion tracking, reflecting, and heightening to help clients recognize their emotional responses and ultimately shift their emotional responses from secondary emotions (a.k.a. “hard” emotions like anger and hostility) to primary emotions (a.k.a. “softer” emotions like sadness or fear).

Encouraging clients to express their underlying primary emotions restructures the couples’ communication patterns. The goal of restructuring interactions is to have partners respond to each other with more responsiveness and support, as would a responsive caregiver. This results in a more secure attachment between partners (Johnson, 2007).

A Focus on the Present Moment

A focus on the present moment in emotionally focused therapy emphasizes that emotions are experienced moment to moment and are most important to the process of emotional and relationship change; content issues and past experiences of couples’ problems are of less concern (Johnson, 2007). For example, if a couple finds they have reoccurring arguments about money, an emotionally focused couples therapist would help each individual explore their internal emotions and discover what money represents to them…