On being an EFT guy

Last week, I accomplished a goal that I set for myself back in 2018: to achieve full certification in the practice of Emotionally Focused Therapy for couples, or EFT. This is the only form of couples therapy with a significant base of clinical research proving its effectiveness, which is why I chose it. It also plays to my strengths as a therapist - it’s a fit for my personality and temperament. The certification process was a real schlep, and I’m eternally grateful for the guidance of my clinical supervisor, Neil Weissman, as well as to the couples who allowed me to videotape our sessions so that the EFT honchos up in Ottawa could see my work in action.

When I first started off in private practice, I figured that working with couples was the same thing as working with individuals. I learned rapidly that this was not the case. EFT gave me a way in - a lens for making sense of how and why couples argue. I’ve always felt that understanding why things unfold as they do can reduce suffering and provide a foundation for creating change. Over and over, I’ve seen EFT offer couples a needed off-ramp from cycles of emotional disconnection.

Something I’m always hearing myself say during therapy is, “Being a person is hard.” What I mean is, there’s a lot of pain and suffering in this world, and most of it is beyond our control. It may even have happened before we were born, and gotten passed down to us through our genetic code. Similarly, the desire for relief from suffering is universal - it’s organismic. For me, one of the main functions of a successful romantic relationship is that it offers a safe haven from the pain and suffering of being a person in the world.

This is certainly true of my own experience as a person with depression. Being able to turn to my partner to care for me when I’m feeling blue has been an essential part of feeling okay in adulthood. I mean, obviously I’d prefer to not be depressed, and I definitely do lots of stuff to manage my symptoms of depression even as I dig at the roots of it in my individual therapy. But I also choose to leave room for the possibility that the depression will always be there, perhaps in part because it’s interegenerational and is connected to ancestral experiences of pain, loss and oppression. Where the romantic relationship comes into play is connected to my desire to feel okay even though there’s also suffering present.

In EFT, we call this “facing the dragon, together.” In other words, there are some experiences that cause pain but which are beyond our control as individuals - racism, inequality, trauma that occurred before you showed up to therapy (to name a few). What we know from science is, pain that is felt alone is felt more intensely; pain that can be shared is mitigated. Personally, I feel committed to participating in broader social projects to eliminate racism and other forms of inequality, and to prevent trauma from occurring to children and other vulnerable individuals. In my day-to-day work, however, I choose to focus on helping individuals share their burdens with one another, so that whatever it is they’re going through, they don’t have to go through it alone. For many of us, that’s the best that can be hoped for in the short term. In the medium-to-long term, being securely emotionally connected to a trusted other also can give us strength to participate in fighting the bigger battles for social justice. In this way, the micro and macro are intertwined.

As a group, therapists tend toward cultishness and sometimes subscribe fervently to a particular way of seeing the world. Personally, I remain agnostic on the question of whether EFT is a fit for every couple. In the years I’ve been practicing EFT, I’ve noticed that a history of childhood trauma often (but not always) increases the complexity of couples therapy. For adults who emerged from a childhood situation where nobody cared about their emotional experiences, and/or where they weren’t allowed to express their emotions openly, EFT can feel daunting. As my level of skill and experience with this modality has increased, I’ve become better at making EFT accessible to survivors of childhood trauma.

That said, EFT is (in the words of my supervisor) an “open” form of therapy; often, adults who were emotionally abused or neglected as kids received a thorough education in how to survive while being “closed.” This is, I think, one of the cruelest ironies of trauma: having been abused or neglected makes it harder to get access to the thing that would help the most, i.e., secure, reliable, intimate emotional connection with a trusted other.

(It’s also worth noting that our society trains people assigned the gender “male” to hide and disregard their emotions; compared to women, cisgender men tend to be less attuned to their internal experiences of emotion and their external expression of it. This is connected to how misogyny and homophobia operate in society: by teaching men that emotions are “gay” or “for girls,” it diminishes guys’ abilities to participate fully in pair-bonding activities, causing them to miss out on crucial experiences for connection and healing. Fortunately, unlearning that crap is often fairly straightforward and a matter of practice. All humans are hard-wired for deep emotional connection with other humans - this is the basis of attachment theory.)

Hence, I feel optimistic about the possibility of combining EFT with the regulated use of MDMA, which works by boosting production of oxytocin (the “bonding” hormone) in the short-term, decreasing guardedness, and increasing motivation for connection as well as openness to both praise and feedback. My hope is that the Biden administration reschedules this medicine in the near future to become available by prescription, to assist individuals who need and deserve access to the healing power of secure attachment. Feel free to contact your federal elected officials (Senators and U.S. Representatives) to lobby them in favor of this policy change.

All in all, I feel glad to have achieved full certification in the practice of EFT. It puts me in the company of some of the therapists I most respect. Whatever’s going on, feeling alone makes it worse; to me, EFT offers a path forward for those who are partnered but still feel alone in some ways - but don’t want to any more.