About Relationship Therapy

What is EFCT?

Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy (EFCT) is a well-validated, structured approach that is designed to help couples understand each other’s emotions and respond effectively to each other’s needs. It is a collaborative model based on adult attachment theory and is widely heralded as one of the most successful approaches to creating loving relationships and lasting bonds.

In EFCT, couples learn to identify their negative communication cycle, how to be with feelings together, reach towards each other, and be responsive in more loving and positive ways.  When couples can clearly communicate and respond to attachment needs, it can create the safety, trust and support that couples long for.

EFCT recognizes that we are doing the best we can to feel close to our partner, even in the midst of conflict and disconnection. Unfortunately, the strategies we use often cause more distance, conflict, and distress. We often do not know what we or our partner is feeling or how we can be there for each other. Many of us need help learning and experiencing how to be more accessible, responsive, engaged to improve our connection and communication with one another.

How does EFCT work?

• 70-75 percent of couples move from distress to recovery. These couples report being much happier with each other (compared to 35 percent for cognitive-behavioral counseling).

• 90 percent of couples make significant improvements due to EFCT.

The foundation of EFCT is built upon partners recognizing their emotional dependence on each other. This includes:

• Love

• Comfort

• Support

• Protection

• Emotional security

When couples feel such safety in their relationship, they grow far more comfortable with navigating difficult situations and feelings. Hence, EFCT teaches us that we may already possess good communication skills. But, it’s not enough.

Emotional security must also be present in order for such skills to be properly and regularly applied. This belief is a component of attachment theory.

Attachment, of course, is not a one-time event. It’s ongoing and fluid. EFCT helps couples grow in this process, with one of the goals being a deeper, more secure emotional connection. From this springs more loving and productive interactions.

Some Goals When Using EFCT for Couples

• Re-organize our palette of emotional responses

• Create new cycles of communication

• Cultivate a more secure bond between partners

Emotionally Focused Couple Therapy is based on the following assumptions:

• There is an inherent, universal need in all humans for a safe haven relationship where a loved one is experienced as accessible, responsive, and emotionally engaged.  

• A relationship is a series of powerful emotional feedback loops where each person shapes the other’s responses. One person cannot solely be “the problem”.

• Feelings are often hidden, unexpressed, misinterpreted, or misunderstood.

• All relationship responses are understandable and reasonable. Partners are not viewed as deficient or damaged - but instead viewed as struggling to find the best way they know how to manage painful feelings of disconnection and vulnerability.

• Relational responses (such as acting out or withdrawing) are strategies to manage emotional distress and often work to some degree, in certain contexts. If couples are to understand their own and their partner’s responses, there is need for acknowledging the validity of these strategies and the emotions driving them.

Therapists trained in EFCT:

Caroline Capute, Kathleen Collins, Andrea Medaris (certified), Julie Quimby (certified), Heather Taylor

What is PACT?

The Psychobiological Approach to Couples Therapy® (PACT) relies on the application of research in neuroscience and attachment theory to improve interactions between couples. This approach, which was developed by Stan Tatkin, aims to help couples notice their reactions as they occur and learn how to better address one another's attachment needs.Stan Tatkin, a researcher, clinician, and teacher, created PACT specifically for work with couples. PACT is similar to other attachment-focused approaches but relies on research on three different topics, which are referred to as the domains of PACT: 

1. Arousal regulation: The way the human mind and body respond to and manage moods and emotions—both their own and their partner's—such as stress, anger, or affection

2. Attachment theory: This theory helps explain how people come to form and nurture attachment with significant people in their lives. 

3. Developmental neuroscience: How the brain changes over time in response to both environmental and biological inputs and the impact these changes have on relationship behavior, from infancy to adulthood.

Understanding the human need for connection can help couples form more secure attachments and deepen their existing attachments by developing secure-functioning relationships based on mutuality, sensitivity, collaboration, and fairness. To this end,PACTproposes a set of principles: 

• Creating a "couple bubble" allows partners to keep each other safe and secure. 

• Partners can "make love and avoid war" when the security-seeking parts of the brain are put at ease. 

• Partners who are experts on one another know how to please and soothe each other.

• Partners should prevent each other from being a third wheel when relating to outsiders. 

• Partners who want to stay together must learn to fight well.

• Partners can minimize each other’s stress and optimize each other’s health.

Early relationships affect each person’s attachment style, and this attachment style tends to persist in adult relationships. PACT endeavors to help couples create secure attachments within the relationship and to address the effects of attachment threats. Better management of arousal—including fear and distress—in the moment can help couples understand one another and work through conflict, which can undermine the ability of one partner to understand the other, or even to correctly remember the source of the conflict. The PACT method also emphasizes that repetitive physiological reactions, such as the fight, flight, fawn response, can undermine communication and trust, and PACT treatment focuses on noticing and understanding these in-the-moment responses. 

Therapists trained in PACT: Lisa Palladino

What is the Gottman Method?

The Gottman Method is an approach to couples therapy that includes a thorough assessment of the couple’s relationship, and integrates research-based interventions based on the Sound Relationship House Theory. The goals of Gottman Method Couples Therapy are to disarm conflicting verbal communication; increase intimacy, respect, and affection; remove barriers that create a feeling of stagnancy; and create a heightened sense of empathy and understanding within the context of the relationship.

The Gottman Method is designed to support couples across all economic, racial, sexual orientation, and cultural sectors.

Interventions are designed to help couples strengthen their relationships in three primary areas: friendship, conflict management, and creation of shared meaning. Couples learn to replace negative conflict patterns with positive interactions and to repair past hurts. Interventions designed to increase closeness and intimacy are used to improve friendship, deepen emotional connection, and create changes which enhances the couples shared goals. Relapse prevention is also addressed.

Some of the relationship issues that may be addressed in therapy include:

• Frequent conflict and arguments

• Poor communication

• Emotionally distanced couples on the verge of separation

• Specific problems such as sexual difficulties, infidelity, money, and parenting

Even couples with “normal” levels of conflict may benefit from the Gottman Method Couples Therapy. Gottman-trained therapists aim to help couples build stronger relationships overall and healthier ways to cope with issues as they arise in the future.

Therapists trained in the Gottman Method: Michael Tartaglia