Highlights below with emphasis on the bold parts below:
‘emotionally focused couple therapy’ (EFT)
Indeed, science has identified only four attachment styles.
We can think about these styles in terms of the scripts we habitually use to deal with our emotions and engage with others. Experiencing others as predictably responsive and present enables us to develop a secure attachment style in which we reach out when we feel vulnerable or in need of comfort. This is the style that helps us grow, learn from new experience, and deal best with life’s challenges.
There are also three more limiting, insecure styles of attachment.
The first type of insecure attachment is avoidant. When we mostly experience others as distant, dismissing and even dangerous, we shut down our emotions and distance ourselves. So, when vulnerable, we detach and shut down, shutting out our loved ones.
The second type of insecure attachment is anxious and preoccupied. Here, we have learned that others are not predictably responsive, and we become fixated on obtaining signs of reassurance that we will not be rejected and abandoned. We then tend to express lots of negative emotions and push and demand love, often inadvertently alienating our loved ones.
Finally, if we have been abused or traumatised, we get caught in chaotic emotions with intense longings and fears, and we tend to flip between anxious and avoidant styles; we are fearful and avoidant, first needing intense connection and demanding closeness, and then distancing and rejecting it. Here, others are the source of fear and the solution to fear, creating an impossible, paradoxical situation.
All these styles and strategies can be functional and useful at times, but if insecure styles become rigid they tend to narrow down our awareness and ways of dealing with our emotions as well as connecting with others, and so become self-perpetuating.
Understanding our own attachment style and the dance of connectivity is the hallmark of EFT therapy, providing a roadmap for relationship repair and growth. Instead of teaching couples set communication skills, we help them tune into the circular dance they are caught in, and grasp what it is all about. The more Andy pushes and criticises, the more rejected Sarah feels, and the more she withdraws.
So in the first stage of EFT — de-escalation — Andy and Sarah reduce the intensity of their dance, and move from blaming and withdrawal to understanding how they impact each other, and how desperate attempts to manage feelings of abandonment and rejection have now become the problem. Sarah is able to tell Andy:
I do turn off. It seems that I can never please you. I just don’t seem to be the wife you want and that terrifies me. So I give up. Hide. I don’t know what else to do.
After six sessions, the music has changed from attack and defend to Andy saying:
We really get stuck in this thing. We call it the spiral. I watch for any sign that she doesn’t need me, and then I do this push thing, and she just hears me accusing her. I told her last night: ‘Heh, we are in the spiral, so must be that we are both feeling alone. Let’s stop,’ and she gave me a hug, and somehow we shifted gears.
This couple begin to see the pain and longing underneath the negative responses that characterise their dance of distress.
Once the couple have been able to come together against this dance of disconnection, then we can begin — in Stage 2 of EFT, restructuring attachment — to move them into creating positive cycles of accessibility and responsiveness. The therapist gradually helps a couple such as Andy and Sarah move into a hold-me-tight bonding conversation. Success in this dialogue predicts relationship repair and improved satisfaction at the end of EFT sessions and at follow-up. It also predicts that partners can move into a more secure attachment style. Both can get their need for a sense of a safe haven with another met, sometimes for the first time in their lives.
The third stage of EFT, consolidation, is short. Here, we help the couple write a new, positive love story about how they have healed their bond and found the connection they have always longed for.
In EFT, we help couples pinpoint triggers, body sensations and meaning-making processes — the direction the emotion moves us in. Research tells us that people with the most emotional balance can make their emotions ‘granular’, that is specific and concrete. This in itself makes emotions more manageable. Andy is calmer and more in control when he can tell Sarah:
I see your face go still and then my stomach churns. My brain says: ‘She doesn’t want you — you’re not good enough’ and then I panic and I push. I try to control you — make you respond. Anything to not feel so afraid and lost. Right! I guess, bottom line is that I am always afraid with you, you matter so much.
Attachment teaches us that we have to be willing to feel and to risk telling our partner in clear terms about our most vulnerable places, our fears and needs, and this is what happens in a hold-me-tight conversation. And then we have to be willing to hang in and talk through how we and the other hears this kind of revelation.
Safety grows and later, after she is able to open up and share the fear of his criticism and doubts about her own worth that cue her stonewalling of him, he can begin his part of a hold-me-tight conversation.
I never understood why you married me. You are so beautiful. My Dad always reminded me that I was the family runt, small and pathetic. I am so scared of you discovering your mistake. The fear overwhelms me, and I end up pushing and then pushing you away. I need your touch, your reassurance that it is me you want. It’s not really sex; it’s that, in bed, for just a moment, I feel like you give yourself to me. That I belong. So I am asking. Can you hear me?
Sarah reaches out with her hand.
As a couple slows down their negative interactions, they are able to see their whole dance from a meta-perspective. Then they can reach for their vulnerabilities, own them and express the needs inherent in them, responding to each other with compassion. When this happens, the relationship and their sense of self opens up and grows.
This is the key, not just to more harmonious connections, but to more stable families and more emotionally resilient children. On a broader level, the attachment perspective tells us who we are and what we need to thrive. It offers a corrective to the impersonal, isolated culture we seem to be creating.
When I asked my family how to choose a mate, I was told by my pragmatic relatives: ‘Just make sure he has a suit.’ My daughter and I have a running joke about a mythical guy called Sid. I say: ‘Don’t worry about how difficult dating online is, Sid will show up one day.’ She says: ‘He’s late. And how will I recognise him anyway?’ I look at her and raise one eyebrow. ‘Okay, okay,’ she says, reciting the research: emotional responsiveness is the main thing that predicts happiness years into a relationship. So it’s all about: ‘Does he show up emotionally? Is he open and accessible, responsive and engaged? Do I feel safe and whole with him? I know, I know.’ And she does.
