By: Tricia Kim Walsh, LMFT
Skills and Training: You have a couples therapist with extensive training and evidence-based skills to help you and your partner. This therapist is taking coursework in addition to their licensure, which acknowledges how much they care about being well-trained and qualified to be in front of a couple.
Ongoing Consultation: EFT Therapists are committed to doing better, so when they ask if they can video-record your work, know it’s because they want their work to be reviewed again, either by themselves or with your legal permission (written consent) by a seasoned EFT Certified Supervisor or EFT Certified Trainer. You will incur no cost and have extra eyes and ears on your work, consistently improving your relationship with your partner. So, when your therapist asks you if it’s okay to video record your work so they can have the opportunity to review it or to have another professional review and audit their work, I highly recommend you to say “yes.”
A Roadmap to Love: EFT is designed to strengthen relationships because it understands the science of love: attachment (theory). Your couples therapist will consistently know how they work with you because EFT has an excellent roadmap that helps them understand what interventions to use with you and your partner and where to go next. Dr. Sue Johnson’s EFT model has been thoroughly researched, is evidence-based, and shows “In a meta-analysis, an effect size of 1.3 was found. This implies that approximately 90% of treated couples rated themselves better than controls. In this meta-analysis (Johnson et al. 1999), 70-73% of couples recovered from distress at follow-up (trend: improvement continues after therapy)”- https://www.nyceft.org/about-eft
Courageous growth through Vulnerability: Your EFT therapist is dedicated to helping you experience something new. Something powerful. Something life-changing. Your EFT Couples Therapist will introduce you to skills and techniques that will make sure and allow you to remember them, even when you get triggered and escalated at home. You will feel hope again. You will feel more confident to know what to do when you get caught up in old patterns of “negative cycle,” as EFT therapists call it, and you will feel pride and joy when you can interrupt that cycle and create, instead, loving bonds of reaching, meeting, and succeeding. Your EFT Therapist will be skilled in training and compassionate in a model of science teaching how emotional bonding works, and your therapist will create a safe space of patience, trust, and healing. EFT therapists are in the business of seeing you and your partner have dramatic positive changes in your relationship. Still, to do so, you must get uncomfortable by showing vulnerability. If you are unsure if vulnerability is for you, watch this and imagine how it would be to enter into such a sacred space of witnessing your partner take beautiful, emotional risks through this mindset. Yes, this will be life-changing for both of you and could emotionally save your relationship.