Emotionally Focused Therapy In Couples & Mindfulness

Emotionally Focused Therapy in Couples and Mindfulness

"This approach includes nine steps or interventions that are commonly employed. 

• They are (a) delineating conflict issues in core struggle (where  the therapist assesses the conflicting issues presented), (b) identifying negative
• interaction cycle (how each partner contributed to the transactional
• patterns that have become negative), (c) accessing the unacknowledged
• feeling and underlying interactional positions (assisting the partners to identify
• and own feelings that contribute to the perpetuation of the transactional
• patterns), (d) reframing the problem in terms of underlying feelings and
• attachment needs (translating the conflictual behavioral and communication
• patterns in terms of emotional needs), (e) identifying disowned needs and

• (g) facilitating experience of needs and wants and creating emotional engagement (helping partners to articulate their emotional needs and helping them to build an empathic connection), (h) establishing the emergence of new solutions, and (i) consolidating new emotional and therefore behavioral positions in relation to one another (S. M. Johnson & Greenberg, 1985).

EFT focuses on both the immediacy and family of origin work that may be
incorporated to ensure emotional clarity regarding the impact that childhoodexperiences may have on adult attachment relationships and their ensuing
conflicts.
Mindfulness Practice
Mindfulness can be defined as “the direction of attention toward one’s
ongoing experience, in a manner that is characterized by openness and
acceptance” (Bishop et al., 2004, p. 231). Mindfulness stems from an Eastern
tradition of meditational practice and is an ongoing practice in which one
pays particular attention to one’s thoughts, feelings, and bodily sensations in
the present moment without having to alter or avoid them. This approach,
originally employed in group form, fosters the client’s abilities to stay in
the present moment and obstruct reactive negative thought cycles (Teasdale,
Segal, & Williams, 2003). In depression relapse prevention, clients are taught
mindfulness practices such as how to stay in the present moment and
heighten sensory awareness; how to disengage from their judgmental, evaluative
language; and then how to specifically apply these skills to notice and
disengage from depressive thinking before it spirals into depression relapse.
Clients are encouraged to try and maintain a more objective relationship
to their thoughts, that is, “thoughts” are “thoughts” rather than “truths” and
these thoughts may hold some significance and they may not (Greason &
Cashwell, 2009; Segal, Williams, & Teasdale, 2002; Williams, 2008)."