EFT Couple Therapy Online
Welcome to EFT Online Couple Therapy!
We help you build a happy relationship wherever you are :)
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Do you want to build a happy relationship?
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Do you want to save your marriage?
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Are you looking for couple therapy in an online setting?
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Do you want to understand love?
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Do you want to learn to make love last?
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Do you want to improve your emotional communication skills?
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Do you want to end toxic conflicts and stop fighting?
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Do you want to learn to unlock one of the keys to happiness?
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Do you want to revive your relationship and recover your love?
Wherever in the world you are located, our team of online couple therapists is available to support you in all of these goals via a video conferencing app like Zoom, Skype, Facetime, Hangouts, WebEX, GoToMeeting or Whatspp.
Matthias Angelstorf
Psychologist, M.Sc. Clin. Psych.
Couple Therapist
Online Therapy
What we are about in a nutshell
At EFT online couple and marriage therapy we believe that a happy relationship is not just about doing the right thing, communicating right or functioning well. A good relationship is about love. The feeling of love is at the heart of a happy relationship. And this feeling needs to be nurtured. It needs to be nurtured through our emotions - through our emotional presence, attention and engagement.
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If we lose our feelings of love, then we lose the reason why we came together in the first place.
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If we lose our feelings of love, then we end up with a relationship that seems lifeless, flat and empty.
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If we lose our feelings of love, then we cannot accept each other’s annoying habits and everything becomes a big problem and a source of contention and conflict.
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Therefore in EFT online couple therapy we focus on love and on the emotions and the communications that nurture your feelings of love in order to help you build a happy relationship, shave your marriage and build a happy life.
We believe and science has confirmed that:
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Love is found
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Love triggers our deepest vulnerability
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Vulnerability triggers our tendencies for self-protection
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Self-protection leads to toxic communication patterns that erode love
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Self-reflection rescues love
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Emotional engagement nurtures, strengthens and deepens love
Our online couple therapists effectively guide you in the process of rescuing, reviving, strengthening and deepening your love
For those of you who want to know more: Here are detailed information about how to build a happy relationship, how to save a marriage and hour our couple therapy online works:
What is a happy relationship?
A relationship or marriage is happy when partners have sufficient moments of emotional connection that make both partners feel loved, nurtured and satisfied. If we do not have enough of these moments, then we start losing our feelings of love and we start walking around in our relationship (and in our life) with a basic sense of dissatisfaction. The loss of feelings of love and satisfaction is like a toxic breeding ground for conflicts and accumulating relationship problems.
Moments of emotional connection that make both partners feel loved, nurtured and satisfied are based on particular types of interactions between partners. These interactions might be verbal (like talking about our feelings and listening with the intention to understand), nonverbal (like looking at each other attentively and lovingly), physical (like reaching out to our partner with a hug, holding each other or caressing each other) or sexual (like making love). What all of these interactions have in common, is that they are face-to-face interactions (i.e. they do not involve a focus on external things, people or activities) and they need to be emotionally engaged in order to lead to emotional connection and feelings love, satisfaction and happiness. Emotionally engaged means that our words, our listening, our hugs, our looks, our touches need to be driven by love-enhancing emotions and emotional states such as vulnerability, tenderness, open-heartedness, receptivity, longing, desire, enjoyment or care. Without emotions a hug is just the physical act of putting arms around another person. Emotions are the “stuff” that turns a hug into an experience.
When partners first meet and fall in love, both partners usually are automatically in touch with love-enhancing emotions. But after a while, many couples “lose their way.” Usually they lose their way because deep love evokes a deep vulnerability: The more we love somebody, the more we can get hurt by that person. And we also know that we can never make somebody love us and that we could lose our partner’s love. These realizations are scary. And we all have our particular automatic and often unconscious strategies for lowering our fear and protecting ourselves from potential hurts. However, often these strategies backfire, because they end up hurting or scaring our partner. When self-protective strategies come online, couples quickly get stuck in viscous interactional cycles that “push out” and replace their love-enhancing interactions and emotions. In a prototypical cycle called “pursue-withdraw” one partner protects themselves by shutting off their emotions while the other protects themselves through feeling and expressing anger. Expressions of anger hurt the first partner, who then shuts down and distances more. Shutting down and distancing scares the other partner who then gets more upset and angry. These vicious cycles can take on a live of their own and they close the door on love-enhancing emotions and moments of emotional connection that are nurturing and satisfying for both partners. Instead these cycles lead to more and more moments of disconnection, stress and pain. This is what gradually (and sometimes rather rapidly) turns a happy relationship or marriage into an unhappy relationship or marriage. In EFT online couple therapy or marriage counselling, we will help you break negative cycles and to learn with to deal with your existential human vulnerability together - in a way that will lead to positive interactional cycles and to interactions and emotions that are love-enhancing.
How our team from EFT online couple therapy helps you build a happy marriage or relationship
At EFT online couple therapy we use an approach to couples therapy that is based on sold scientific knowledge about relationships, that is systematic, and that has been proven to be effective in a vast number of research studies. The approach is called Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFT). It focuses exactly on the core of partner’s conflict and problems – on the core of what turns their relationship or marriage from happy to unhappy: EFT focuses on helping partners identify and break free from vicious interactional cycles that lead to disconnection, pain and stress and to learn how to create moments of emotional connection that bring feelings of love and satisfaction for both partners. Online couple therapy via Zoom or Skype or Facetime as we practice it helps partners identify and remove blocks (see below) to emotional connection in order to save their marriage and/or build a happy relationship.
Why is a happy relationship so important?
Most of us know intuitively that a happy relationship is one of the major keys to a happy life. Today we have a growing body of research studies that confirms this intuitive wisdom. Amongst these studies we have the Harvard Study that followed 724 men over the course of up to 80 years and that concluded that the quality of their relationships was a much more powerful factor in determining their happiness in life than factors like the size of their income or financial wealth. Unfortunately some people have given up on finding or building or longing for a happy relationship. And that makes sense too. Because yes, building a lasting and happy relationship is not easy. And unfortunately there are not many places where we are shown or taught how to do this and how to unlock the happiness potential that can be found in interactions with a loved one. But it can be done. Online couple and marriage therapy will help you learn how to build a happy relationship or marriage that lasts and that stays happy.
Why do couples fight so much?
All couples have conflicts. Because all couples are comprised of two imperfect human beings with different preferences, perspectives and desires. From research we know that even the happiest couples have a number of conflict issues that actually are not resolvable. When a couple never fights, it can mean that one or both partners are inauthentic and over-adapting to the others preferences, perspectives and desires. So not having fights can actually be a really bad sign; and conflicts are a sign of normality and relationship health. But not all conflicts are the same. There are the normal and inevitable conflicts that are not pleasant – but that can be tolerated like some clouds on an otherwise sunny day. And then there are the toxic conflicts that lead to growing stress, pain, mistrust and confusion and erode feelings of love and relationship satisfaction. These toxic conflicts are the fights that are driven by the dissatisfaction resulting form emotional disconnection and the strategies that partners use to reduce fear and to protect themselves from hurt. Partners who are stuck in toxic conflicts often report to us in online marriage or couple therapy that almost everything can turn into a fight, that they often do not even understand what the fight is about, that they feel intensely stressed or hurt in the fights and that they always feel weary about the next fight and feel as if they were walking on eggshells in their relationship. When a toxic conflict is triggered, both partners often get motivated to want to “hurt their partner back” and to reflexively blame each other or send each other messages of hostility. Because toxic conflicts overwhelm the part of our brain that controls our impulses and behavior, there is a great risk that toxic conflicts even turn physically or verbally violent. Over time these conflicts lead to both partners having an increasingly negative view of and basic feeling towards their partner. They increasingly see their partner as ill-intended, as a threat, as bad, as selfish, as uncaring. And of course this negative view makes them more likely to respond negatively to their partner.
If you reconstruct what happened in a distressed relationship or marriage from the beginning up until the point of starting online marriage or couple therapy, it often becomes evident that it all started with emotional disconnection. Emotional disconnection then lead to a loss of satisfaction, a loss of emotional balance and growing fear (of loss of love and further hurt and disappointment). In this negative emotional climate partners started using more self-protective strategies and were less willing to give and compromise. This in turn led to negative interactional cycles and a breakdown of communication and problem solving. In the last step of this “relationship-erosion-sequence” the couple is left with mostly negative feelings towards each other and a growing number of conflict issues and problems that neither could be resolved nor accepted.
Common blocks to emotional connection, love and a lasting, happy relationship or marriage
As mentioned above in marriage and couple therapy online, we help partners build a happy relationship and save their marriage by guiding them in removing blocks to satisfying emotional connection. Click here if you want to learn more about common blocks to happiness and emotional connection in a relationship.
Why emotions are so central in our approach to couple therapy
There are three main reasons why our online couple therapy focuses on emotions:
1. The emotions that we feel automatically lead to nonverbal signals that end up impacting our partner: When we feel positive emotions like joy or tenderness we will automatically exude a positive message for our partner: For example a smile or a caring look that tells them that they are wanted and loved. When we feel negative emotions like strong anger or contempt towards our partner, then we will automatically emanate a negative message: For example an angry or contemptuous look that tells them that they are disgusting and despicable.
2. Our capacity to act against our emotions is limited: Our emotions ready us for particular kinds of action. It is possible to deliberately inhibit or act against the action impulses that our emotions generate. But our capacity to do so is always limited. For example: It is very difficult or even impossible to send a convincing signal of love and care when we are feeling really angry.
3. As mentioned above, it is emotions that make our actions (like talking, listening, looking, hugging, touching and sex) meaningful and impactful. Without emotions talking and listening would only be a rational exchange of information as it might happen between two computers. Without emotion a hug would be nothing but set of arms wrapped around another person’s body. Without emotion sex would be mechanical rubbing of skin against skin or the biological act of uniting two sexual organs.
Please send us an email and let us know if you would like to receive more information about the centrality of emotions and emotional connection in a happy relationship or marriage and one of our team members of online EFT couple therapy will gladly send you more information.
How can emotions be changed?
Emotions are spontaneous reactions of our nervous system to events of in our environment that are relevant to our innate needs. In other words: We do not choose our emotions. And therefore, of course, we cannot directly change our emotional reactions as if we were pushing a button. But we can change our emotions indirectly. Here are some example how we might do this:
We can change emotions by reflecting on our emotions and what triggered them and by developing a more precise understanding of the situations, signals and events that triggered them.
We can change emotions by noticing our primary emotions. Primary emotions are our first initial emotional reaction to an event or to a response that we get from our partner. Often people automatically cover their more vulnerable primary emotions with harder secondary emotions. For example they feel hurt by something and instead of feeling and expressing pain and sadness (primary emotion), they feel and express anger (secondary emotion) instead. Often people have learned to overlook their primary emotions and instead automatically go to secondary emotions – because feeling secondary emotions makes them feel less vulnerable and more powerful and in control. When we notice our primary emotions and allow them to unfold, we tend to automatically send our partner positive nonverbal messages that can lead to moments of emotional connection. Secondary emotions tend to automatically send our partner negative messages, they fuel negative interactional cycles and toxic conflicts and lead to emotional disconnection, stress and pain. One of the key things we help partners do in EFT online couple therapy is partners become notice, feel and express their primary emotions.
We can change emotions by understanding them differently. When we understand what our emotions tell us about our needs, this will lead to a more positive emotional state of feeling clear, empowered and grounded. When we do not understand what our emotions mean, then we are likely to feel overwhelmed by them, we might get swept up in them, and they might cause us great distress.
We can change our emotions through changing how we express our emotions and our needs – and that in turn will change the responses that we get from our partner – and the new responses that we get from our partner can change how we feel.
We can change our emotions by allowing emotions and impulses that are negatively associated (because of past experiences of expressing this emotion and receiving a painful response for others), by expressing them and then receiving a new and positive response form our partner. (For example having a new experience of being held and feeling loved in one’s sadness vs. the old experience of being rejected and feeling unlovable in one’s sadness).
We can change our emotions by healing an emotional wound. When our partner sends us a hurtful signal, we will feel pain. Sometimes this pain is amplified because we have received similar hurtful signals in our past. So inside of our emotional brain there are emotional memories of past hurts and our partner’s current hurtful response also reactivates the pain that is contained in these memories. The emotional memory of past hurts is like an open wound that hasn’t healed but that can be healed. Such a healing experience needs three ingredients: (1.) We need to consciously feel the pain in the context of the emotional accompaniment by a competent and caring therapist. (2.) We need to remember and articulate the past experiences and what were so hurtful. (3.) And then we need to receive a loving response from our partner that makes us feel held, cared for, understood and not alone in our pain. This loving response then puts the reactivated past emotional memory into the context of a new and positive experience and thereby transforms it and takes out its “sting.” This can be pictured as healing an emotional wound by re-experiencing it, articulating it and wrapping it in love. Then, later, when our partner happens to send us a hurtful signal again, we will no longer react so strongly because now the emotional wound is healed. In our online EFT couple therapy sessions we will help you facilitate such healing experiences. This typically happens at a later stage of the therapy process.
Does EFT online couple therapy ever focus on practical problems and solutions?
Yes. If there are practical problems that can be readily solved, online marriage and couple therapy will always focus on specifying and facilitating these solutions.
But as research has shown, most problems that couples have cannot be resolved (because the problem is connected to important and cherished values of both partners that cannot be surrendered without harmful over-adaptation). But irresolvable problems can be accepted if couples have a deep love nurtured by regular moments of satisfying emotional connection.
Clinical experience has also shown that resolvable problems can usually only be resolved after the couple has strengthened their emotional connection. Only then do partners have the emotional balance and the willingness to give and compromise that is necessary to deal with problems constructively. So most of the time practical problems are only focused on at a later stage in the online couple therapy process.
Click here if you would like to know more information about how online couple therapy works.
Contact
EFT Couple Therapy Online
Please contact us here info@eftcoupletherapy.online for questions or to book a first session or use the contact form below.