Connected relationships makes us feel alive, enriched and expansive. Ultimately, our closest most intimate relationships in our lives have the power to heal but also to wound us significantly. Relationships are life and death and evoke strong and powerful emotions. When we feel secure we are comfortable with closeness and confident about depending and being there for loved ones. We are better at giving and receiving support. Emotion is a pivotal organizer of inner experiences and in key interactions in loving intimate relationships. At LifeChange we uphold to a strong focus on emotion as the transformative element in effective couple therapy (Johnson, 2005). The word “emotion” comes from the Latin word “to move” and it’s this movement or in this evoking of emotion that stirs us to connect, reach for and bond with our partners (ibid). The recent research on couple distress (Gottman, Johnson, 2005) emphasizes the vital role of emotional communication in deescalating distress and eliciting bonding and soothing behaviors. At LifeChange we adhere to an emotionally focused approach to healing relationships. Therefore, angry protests, passionate pleas and desperate defensiveness all make sense within the context of the attachment framework. We believe in an attachment and bonding framework to understand the sufferings that distressed couples go through.
To learn more in enriching relationships read on…
• Parent & Adolescent Dyads