Respond to classmates posts in 100-150 words:
1)According to our text, Emotionally Focused Therapy, or EFT, is an experiential therapeutic intervention that focuses and emphasizes on emotional engagement between couples and families, identifying feelings that define the quality of their relationship, and helps to create secure attachment bonds within the family or couple (Goldenberg et al., 2017). Susan Johnson goes on in the video, Couples Therapy with The Experts (2001), to also describe EFT as a humanistic approach that helps people talk about, develop, and move through their emotions to organize and heal their relationships and the interactions that occur within them. Johnson breaks EFT down into three stages: de-escalation- analyzing the cycles of interactions that make a couple or family feel stuck, creating new patterns of interaction- creating an “antidote” for negative cycles and creating more secure bonds, and finally consolidation- talking about how they repaired the relationship and turned the negative cycles to positive cycles (Johnson, 2001). According to EFT, in a healthy functioning relationship, all parties should be able to express their emotions, problems arise in relationships and families when one or more parties are unable to do so.
Scott and Leslie are having marital issues because of Scott’s anger problem. Leslie wants Scott to control and change the way he portrays his anger. Scott wants to work on it and on the relationship because he does not want to lose Leslie. After reading the text and learning about EFT approach, and after watching the video, it becomes clear that both Scott and Leslie’s problems stem from both, but mostly Scotts in my opinion, inability to express what they are truly feeling and their emotions they are not comfortable or unable to express.
I do not think Johnson missed anything when dealing with this family. As an emotionally focused therapy session, I felt Johnson did a great job of reflecting emotion, helping Scott and Leslie better organize their feelings and experiences, asking them lots of questions for them to identify, sort out, and expand on their emotions, and communicating them to each other. There was one point where Leslie was expressing how she felt that Scott’s anger scared her and when Johnson reiterated that to him, he was still kind of denying that his behavior scared her. I found that to be interesting and a perfect example of why they needed to be in an emotionally focused therapy session. Johnson was helping Scott to really hear his wife and what she was feeling and then she did the same for him when he was expressing how he feels criticized, defensive, and like Leslie is disciplining him like a child, when he has his bouts of anger and how that makes him feel inadequate or bad about their relationship.
I liked how Johnson pointed out to them that by not communicating and expressing their true feelings to one another, they were both left alone and unhappy in their relationship, even though that is the opposite of what they both want. Scott said he did not see the point of talking about the softer side of his feelings and Johnson brought up that he said previously he wanted to work on things and not lose Leslie, to try to help him see that is what he was going to have to do if he did not want to lose her. Johnson did a great job of getting Scott to realize he needs to be more willing to talk about his emotions in order to try to save his marriage and family.
References
Goldenberg, I., Stanton, M.,