Emotional Wellbeing Centre

Couples and Relationship Counselling

Love can be intense and wonderful in the beginning. Challenges experienced over time can change your relationship with and perception of your partner. It’s inevitable that you’ll step on each other’s toes at some point if you’re dancing with someone.

Arguments occur when people feel disconnected emotionally. When couples are in distress, they need to know if they can count on each other. An expression of love requires the comfort of touch and connection during a time of need. 

Losing that connection jeopardises your sense of security, setting off an alarm in the amygdala, the brain’s threat and fear centre. 

With couple’s counselling, Sue helps you understand, heal, and strengthen your emotional connection, enabling you to dance together with responsive engagement. She sometimes sees couples who are distressed and hurt after an illness or an affair. While others have lost their initial connection and want to rediscover it.

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT)

By utilising EFT for Couples, Sue can help you improve your shared understanding and safety in your relationship. EFT is a well-researched, structured approach to couples, therapy founded by Dr Susan Johnson in the early 1980s. 

With 30 years of research, this attachment-based approach is unique, as it is most effective when working with couples. According to attachment science, human beings are innately relational, social, and wired for intimate connections. An essential part of the EFT model is the concept of attachment and emotional regulation as key agents in organising individual experience and relationship dynamics.

A variety of research studies have proven that EFT is an effective method for treating couple distress and strengthening attachment bonds. EFT helps approximately 70 to 75% of couples move from distress to recovery and approximately 90% say they’ve seen significant improvements.

Couples of all ages, cultural and demographic backgrounds have found EFT to be beneficial. This includes individual partners who suffer from mental disorders like depression, post-traumatic stress disorders and chronic illness.

Whether you are married, de facto, heterosexual or of the same gender, you can use the EFT approach to move forward in your relationship, together. 

Besides couples, Sue offers EFT counselling to individuals as well.

EFT’s Individual Goals for Couples

• Understand and reorganise key emotional responses, the “music” of the dance.
• Expand your core sense of self and the way you respond and start new interactions.
• Foster the development of a secure bond between partners through resilience and enhanced agency.

Benefits of Emotionally Focused Couple's Therapy

• Because EFT is based on clear conceptualisations of marital distress and adult love, it’s supported by empirical research on adult attachment
• With its combination of experiential Rogerian techniques and structured systemic interventions, EFT is collaborative, respectful, and client-centric.
• The heightened state of emotions evokes partners to engage in new, more responsive interactions. Throughout the drama, emotions are tracked, unravelled, and tied to key steps.
• Nine key moves and five key events are mapped out in the change process, which each couple travels through at their own pace.
• Valuation creates a safe environment in the session for both parties.
• Your responses are defined and clarified within your understanding of attachment.
• Partner interactions are now shaped so that each partner can reach out to the other and respond with care. New enactments facilitate this move.
• EFT does not imply blame, nor does it endorse any faith.
• The EFT technique is appropriate for those in a couple who wish to improve their sense of connection, regardless of their gender or whether or not they are monogamous.

Contact Sue now if your relationship needs the guidance of a qualified couple’s counsellor!