This is How Positive Change Happens…
EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy) is one of the fastest growing models of couples counselling available today. It focuses on identifying dysfunctional communication patterns and creating a new, positive pattern of communication. When I do couples counselling in my practice in Vancouver, I always include the research-based approach of EFT. I find couples respond very well to this approach.
Bonding & the Pursuer- Withdrawer Dance
Yearning for love and connection is natural, normal, legitimate, and life-long. Experiencing a secure bond with someone increases our overall health and it helps us to explore our world more. When we’re experiencing distress or conflict in a relationship, it’s because the bond is experienced as insecure in that moment. We react to that insecure bond by anxiety or avoidance and then, the “dance of the distress” is sparked.
Identifying the dance of distress is crucial to moving the relationship into a more secure bond and therefore, a happier experience of intimacy.
One way to identify the pattern that gets set off is to ask:
“Who moves in closer at times of distress and who finds that distress something they want to get away from?”
During times of distress, one person will tend to be the “pursuer” (the one that moves in closer, tries to stay connected) and the other person will tend to be the “withdrawer” (tries to get distance, shuts down). It’s important to understand that these are coping strategies for dealing with distress. The pursuer’s behaviour is driven by anxiety. The withdrawer’s behaviour is also driven by anxiety. They’re just different ways of attempting to deal with the same emotion. Neither way is wrong or better. Neither way really works to fulfill the needs for healthy connection and soothing (which is what both people ultimately desire).
When we can seen the pattern or the dance of distress itself as the problem, the couple can join together and work as a team to learn how to free their relationship from that pattern. They might even give their pattern a creative name so they are both better able to identify it and speak to it when they’re in it. By doing so, the couple is on their way to allowing themselves to have a different, more real, more vulnerable, and more bonding experience together.
I regularly use EFT when working with people in individual counselling and couples counselling. The learning experiences help you create fulfilling and secure intimate relationships in your life.
I wish you well in applying some of what I have shared above to your intimate relationships.
Couples Therapy | Emotional Healing
