Are You Looking to Increase Your Effectiveness and Expand Your Skill Set for Working with Couples?
- As a therapist do you sometimes feel like you are flying by the seat of your pants with highly distressed couples?
- Would you like a fresh perspective to breathe new life into your couples work?
The vast majority of couples seek therapy because they regularly get stuck in repetitive, destructive arguments. Therapists know that there is a lot of emotion flying around the room with distressed couples. They often feel unnerved when the reactive emotions of distressed relationships take over and control the session. It can be confusing to know which emotions to contain and which ones to bring out and focus on. When this happens the therapeutic process is likely to derail or get bogged down. If this has ever happened to you, you might feel helpless as to how to get the session back on track.
When we don’t know how to work with the negative emotions escalating between couples, it is natural to feel overwhelmed and inadvertently close our clients’ emotions down. Shutting down their emotions provides containment and helps you feel more in control of the session. However, the downside is that you miss the opportunity to use this emotional energy to tap into and help them express the deeper hurts that underlie their arguments. When you can support partners in communicating the vulnerable feelings they experience in the relationship, you help them evoke and express compassion toward each other. You also empower them to become aware and assertive about their needs in the relationship.
When you are able to help couples connect on this deep level, not only will you feel more in control of the session, you will be able to use your skills to facilitate healing the couple’s relationship bond.
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) will guide you to focus your therapy sessions toward establishing a secure relationship bond. In the context of a secure relationship partners can communicate their relationship needs more effectively. EFT will enable you to:
- Discover a remarkably effective road map for navigating couples through conflict deadlock
- Learn how to harness their emotions to help couples create and maintain a close connection
- Help your couples experience bonding emotions and find their happily ever after
EFT for couples is a short term approach to healing relationships that speaks to the core of the couple’s distress: An insecure attachment bond. EFT offers:
Benefit #1: An Attachment Framework
A compelling model of adult love helps you to formulate the couple’s presenting issues through an attachment lens and get to the heart of their problems.
Benefit #2: A Comprehensive Roadmap to Heal Distressed Relationships
A healing process that produces lasting results in only 9 steps, divided into 3 stages. The first stage, Cycle De-escalation, focuses on helping couples unlatch from conflict, ease tension, and diffuse power struggles. Typically, frequency and intensity of conflict decline markedly, creating safety for the second stage of therapy, Reconnection, which enhances relationship intimacy. During Reconnection, the partners learn to communicate their needs in a manner that creates closeness and enhances responsiveness to each other. The new ways of interacting come together in the third stage, Consolidation, as partners resolve long standing issues in their relationship and prepare to end therapy.
Benefit #3: A Method Validated by Empirical Research
You can have confidence in a method that has over 20 years of scientific research attesting to its high success rate. Over 90% of couples improve their level of satisfaction in the relationship after completing therapy with an EFT trained therapist. Between 70-73% of couples recover on standard measures of marital distress and the relapse rate is very low compared to other couple therapies.
Benefit #4: Grounded Therapeutic Methods that Work With Even the Most Challenging Couples
The therapeutic strategies of EFT enable you to overcome hurdles known to impede the effectiveness of other therapies. For instance, research finds EFT to be highly effective with couples who present with poor prognostic indicators (for other therapeutic approaches), such as, very low marital satisfaction and partners lacking in emotional awareness.
Benefit #5: Effective Interventions for Breaking Through Relationship and Therapeutic Impasses
Intervention techniques are specifically designed to break through highly stuck relationship impasses and attachment injuries.
Benefit #6: Methods that are Adaptable to Specific Populations
The EFT Model has been adapted to working with specific populations such as, trauma survivors and partners suffering from low sexual desire and other sexual problems. EFT is also remarkably effective with couples in which one partner suffers from depression, low self-esteem, or anxiety.
Benefit #7: Be a Part of a Growing Community of EFT Practitioners
Participicants are invited to join ICEEFT membership upon completing an Externship with us. The Vancouver Centre for EFT Training also provides ongoing support to therapists in implementing the model with advanced trainings, topics applying EFT to special populations, and consultation groups. Our trainings are specifically designed to meet the requirements for Certification in EFT established by ICEEFT and we have mentored many therapists and supervisors to get there. Our trainings are also recognized for continuing education credits by AAMFT, BCACC, and CPCA.
What people are saying about the Vancouver Centre for EFT Training:
“I think Yolanda and Veronica are exceptional trainers! They were so prepared, giving, authentic, accepting and knowledgeable. They built beautiful rapport….excellent modeling and probably, no surely, the best training I’ve been to.”
“Excellent! Veronica and Yolanda really made EFT come alive and make it workable!”
“Now I have a roadmap of how to counsel couples.”
“I expect the course to have a major impact on my practice.”
Veronica and Yolanda, Certified EFT Practitioners and Trainers, established the first EFT training program on the West Coast in 2005. Between them Yolanda and Veronica have over 35 years experience training at agencies, universities, and professional conferences. They have trained over 1000 therapists from Canada, US, Europe, Asia, and Australia.
At the Vancouver Centre for EFT Training our programs combine didactic presentations that are informative and practical, live and video demonstrations of EFT, and experiential skills building exercises in the context of a supportive, dynamic, learning environment.
If you are ready to gain the skills needed to increase your effectiveness with couples, click here to find out more about our programs and training schedule.