Gottman / EFT Couples Therapy

Does Your Marriage Feel Derailed?
I Have Good News

When you married each other, you thought (or you hoped) things would feel that way forever. You’d always be so in love. Thoughtful acts would just spring forth naturally from each of you. Your words would be kind, and life would be lovely. Well, perhaps you have found out by now that the beautiful dream we tend to hold as we say our vows does not, on its own, come true. Life can hit our marriages just as hard as it hits us individually – maybe harder.

Here Is the Good Part…

Just because you are in a marital slump does not mean you have to stay there. Effective therapy can help get things back on track and help your relationship to grow and mature in a healthy direction.

Let’s meet a couple of therapist/researchers:

Can a researcher predict who will stay married and who will split up? There is a guy named Dr. John Gottman. A couple of decades ago he decided to study couples and find out how to predict which ones would stay together and which would divorce. But then he went further. Dr. Gottman wanted to figure out how to help them make their marriages work. So, being a research-minded kind of guy, Dr. Gottman measured and collected data, and observed and catalogued and tested, and tested some more until he developed a solid, research-based type of therapy for couples called the Gottman Method. It was one of the first empirically based, statistically proven methods for helping couples change. Before that, we had methods that worked, but no one had ever done the kind of research that Dr. Gottman did, to find what worked best. In Gottman’s therapy, you get real, practical help in disarming conflict, increasing friendship, intimacy and affection, and getting rid of the things that keep you feeling distant and stuck. The goal is to increase feelings of empathy and understanding and to help you find your way back to each other when you have been feeling alone.

…and Gottman is not the only research-y therapist…

Around the same time, another research-minded therapist, Dr. Sue Johnson, was also collecting data, and testing therapy, and studying couples. Dr. Johnson, too, created a therapy model for helping couples regroup and heal their wounded relationships. It is called Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples, or EFT. EFT focuses on the bonds in the relationship, the way spouses are attached to each other and to others in their lives. Couples begin to understand how the bond between them has been damaged, leaving them feeling separate and alone, even within a relationship. The goal of EFT is to identify patterns in which couples get stuck, where they wind up damaging the bond between them. As therapy progresses, those patterns are re-structured so that each spouse feels seen and heard in the relationship in ways that heal those wounds from the past. Couples report feeling close again for the first time in a long time.

You Want to Know the Best Part?

The best part is that the Gottman Method and EFT dovetail well together! That’s what happens when researchers are really getting to the truth of what drives human beings and what makes our relationships work. What’s true in one method should be true in another if they are uncovering how things really work. So, when I work with couples, I often borrow from one or the other when I feel a couple needs a certain thing. Your therapy is never “cookie cutter,” because what one couple responds to, another might not. Each couple’s therapy is tailored specifically to them. Now that you know more than you ever wanted to know about two specific types of therapy, give me a call and let’s get your relationship back on track.