A Focus on Emotion in Marriage Therapy

Dec 14

By Jay Slupesky

Fuller School of Psychology Sign This week I’m in Pasadena, studying Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFT). The workshop is being taught by two of the best-known researchers in the field.

Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy is quite different from many other marital therapies. There is no educational aspect to it: no lessons in communication skills or conflict management. Also, there is no behavioral aspect to it (such as trying to do more nice things for your spouse).

The three stages of EFT are:

De-escalate the conflict cycle.
Changing interactional positions (such as softening blame and getting the withdrawn partner to re-engage).
Consolidate and Integrate.

EFT has done very well in effectiveness testing with real couples.

Tags: Communication, Emotionally Focused Therapy

This entry was posted on Friday, December 14th, 2007 at 6:34 am and is filed under About Marriage Therapy, Communication.

2 Responses to “A Focus on Emotion in Marriage Therapy”

Faith and Love in Marriage Therapy | A Marriage Therapist's Blog Says:
January 5th, 2008 at 4:08 pm
[...] did ask me, but I went ahead and told me that I was a practicing Catholic. I also mentioned that Emotionally Focused Therapy, which is the mode of marital therapy that I favor, is well-known in Christian circles and is [...]
guna segaran Says:
May 2nd, 2010 at 6:14 pm
Dear Sir / Mdm,

My wife left me after a quarrel an she is a very emotional and a very manipluate person , all she wants is her way,we have been married for 16yrs and I have taken all her ways but she doesnt want to understand, i doo have have my temper n pushed a couple of times but she seem to bottled up all her feelings and gets angry with every little things, so please help how am going to make come back na dhave a happy married life, please

A Marriage Therapist's Blog

Thoughts on Marriage Counseling