Resources
What is Emotionally Focused Therapy?
If you’d like to know more about whether Emotionally Focused Therapy might be right for you and your partner, here are some resources including a video and a few books below.
Distressed partners no longer see each other as their emotional safe haven. Our lover is supposed to be the one person we can count on who will always respond. Instead, unhappy partners feel emotionally deprived, rejected, even abandoned. In that light, couples’ conflicts assume their true meaning: they are frightened protests against eroding connection and a demand for emotional reengagement.
Hold Me Tight – Seven Conversations for a Lifetime of Love
Heralded by the New York Times and Time as the couples therapy with the highest rate of success, Emotionally Focused Therapy works because it views the love relationship as an attachment bond.
This idea, once controversial, is now supported by science, and has become widely popular among therapists around the world. In Hold Me Tight, Dr. Sue Johnson teaches that the way to save and enrich a relationship is to reestablish safe emotional connection and preserve the attachment bond. Through case studies from her practice, illuminating advice, and practical exercises, couples will learn how to nurture their relationships and ensure a lifetime of love.
Created for Connection: The “Hold Me Tight” Guide for Christian Couples
For couples who prefer a Christian/Biblical perspective coupled with the science about love I recommend Created for Connection.
The message of CREATED FOR CONNECTION is simple: Forget about learning how to argue better, analyzing your early childhood, or making grand romantic gestures. Instead, get to the emotional underpinnings of your relationship by recognizing that you are attached to and dependent on your partner in much the same way that a child is on a parent, and we are on the Heavenly Father, for nurturing, soothing, and protection. The way to enhance or save our relationships with each other and with God is to be open, attuned, responsive, and to reestablish safe emotional connection. Filled with Bible verses, inspiring real-life stories, and guidance, CREATED FOR CONNECTION will ensure a lifetime of love.
NOT Just Friends – Rebuilding Trust and Recovering Your Sanity After Infidelity
Good people in good marriages are having affairs. The workplace and the Internet have become fertile breeding grounds for “friendships” that can slowly and insidiously turn into love affairs. Yet you can protect your relationship from emotional or sexual betrayal by recognizing the red flags that mark the stages of slipping into an improper, dangerous intimacy that can threaten your marriage.
Sacred Stress: A Radically Different Approach to Using Life’s Challenges for Positive Change
Stress is a part of modern life-discover how to use it to grow spiritually, emotionally, and psychologically.
“Stress takes life and gives life… It can propel us forward into new opportunities but can also hold us back in fear and exhaustion. It is our mission to help you learn how to adopt [new] strategies and turn stress into a positive force in your life.”
~from the Introduction~
Stress can limit our perspective, leaving us feeling trapped and out of control. But stress can also be a force for good: It is our challenges that most compel us to reach out for relationship. And our proudest moments come after overcoming obstacles we thought were insurmountable.
Based on personal experience and their work as therapists, and drawing on decades of psychological research, George R. Faller, MS, LMFT, and The Rev. Dr. Heather Wright have come to see that stress can be healthy and positive. They equip us with the skills and the knowledge we need to reframe our thinking about stress, understand and embrace our darker emotions, and become stronger through difficulty.
