COUPLES
THERAPY
Tampa, Florida
Emotionally Focused Couples Therapist & Marriage Counselor in Westchase-Tampa Florida
When your relationship is in trouble, simple worksheets and communication strategies alone aren’t going to save it. Your challenges and needs go deeper than that. You’ve already sought advice from your friends. Although you appreciate their support, you don’t need more people to side against your partner. You need a professional who is on your side as a couple, and someone who knows how to help you move forward together. You need help to reconnect, heal, and feel like true partners again.
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Emotionally Focused Therapy addresses the root causes of disconnection and miscommunication in relationships. You don’t want to waste time addressing symptoms—you want to get to the core issues that can make or break your relationship.
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How can EFT help us save our marriage?
Emotionally Focused Therapy helps you get unstuck from negative patterns and build secure bonds of love and trust. As this happens, you build confidence that you can truly count on each other. You both come to trust each other to “be there” during both the joyful and the difficult moments of life.
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In these ways, EFT helps you create a safe haven within your relationship:
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Your relationship can become a place where each of you feels deeply valued.
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Both of you will learn to confidently turn to each other for comfort and strength
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You’ll gain a solid sense of partnership where you work together to address challenges.
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Your sense of true belonging will increase as your relationship becomes a place where you are unafraid to be yourself.
With the help of Emotionally Focused Therapy, you can create a connection that becomes the foundation for a lifetime of love.
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It's not you or your partner that's "broken". Your relationship, your connection to each other, is the item in need of repair.
The goal of EFT is to create a strong and resilient bond between you and your partner.
Relationships can be dysfunctional. People are not.
Why should I choose a EFT therapist over another marriage counselor?
Benefits
20 Years of clinical research shows that 86% of couples improve after a brief period of EFT guidance, and 73% have maintained their improvements two years later.
Unlike many couples therapies, which may show short-term positive effects during and immediately after completion of therapy, EFT has been proven to create lasting positive change for couples, even many years after completing therapy.
WE create lasting change by getting at the underlying cause of conflict and communication challenges and transforming insecure relationships to secure ones. We believe that teaching rules for communication or I-statements may be temporarily helpful, but if we don’t get at the underlying lack of secure connection, couples will ultimately end up stuck again in cycles of conflict or emotional disconnect.
PROVEN EFFECTIVENESS
LASTING RESULTS
With Emotion Focused Couples Counseling You Will…
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Stop having the same argument(s) over and over again
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Return to a deeper level of intimacy
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Recover from an infidelity or another breach of trust
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Work on your relationship even though your partner doesn't seem available
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Feel more secure in your sex life
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Navigate life transitions from a place of connection and understanding of each other
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Reduce the frequency and intensity of communication breakdowns
The Process of Emotionally Focused Therapy
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In our first session, we’ll create a safe space for you and your partner to begin to share how each of you sees your relationship. After an initial session with you and your partner together, your therapist will meet with each of you individually to learn about how your identity, context, and history impact the way you show up in your current relationship.
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Demystifying Conflict
We'll explore together what happens when you and your partner get caught up in your “negative cycle.” - who typically says what, and who typically does what. We'll explore the more vulnerable emotions that each partner is experiencing and the stories you’re telling yourself about what’s happening between you and your partner.
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Learning to Reach Directly and Effectively
You'll practice noticing and communicating the vulnerable emotions that bubble just below the surface in conflict. We’ll help you notice the protections you’ve developed and perhaps the walls you’ve built to avoid being hurt in the negative cycle, and we’ll help you and your partner develop the safety to take these walls down and reach for each other in direct ways that bring each other closer.
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Creating Secure Attachment
The goal of EFT is to create a secure attachment bond with you and your partner.
While in a fight with our partner our attachment system signals that we may not be emotionally safe. In adult romantic relationships, a negative interactional pattern can interfere with this secure connection. We end up sending and receiving signals that threaten rather than soothe our partner’s attachment system. Over time, this can create an insecure attachment with our partner, the person we are most wanting to feel securely connected to!
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If my partner or I aren’t really emotional people, can EFT still work for us?
Yes. Our skilled EFT therapists are trained to recognize negative patterns and the attachment needs and longings that drive them, even in people who don’t consider themselves particularly emotional. We understand that there are many ways people express emotion, and that these are impacted by lots of factors including culture, trauma, socialization, etc. We don’t expect every client to sob in our office - we’ll get to know you as individuals and together come to an understanding of your unique relationship challenges.
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STOP FIGHTING .
START CONNECTING
