The Science Behind EFT: How Attachment Shapes Your Love Life
What Is Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) for Couples?
Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) for couples is a well-researched, attachment-based approach with proven success in creating lasting change for relationships. You may have heard of EFT and attachment theory from well-known therapists like Julie Menanno from The Secure Love podcast or Eli Harwood from Attachment Nerd. Attachment theory is everywhere these days, and it's at the heart of EFT. With attachment in mind, EFT is an approach that helps you and your partner understand the negative interaction patterns that keep you stuck and supports experiential shifts in session to create a positive, secure connection.
Understanding Attachment Styles in Romantic Relationships
At the heart of negative interactions are your attachment longings: to feel loved, accepted, good enough, or worthy of love. At the sore spot of your negative cycle are your attachment action tendencies, or the ways you cope when those longings aren't being met. When they are not, it feels like a threat to the relationship, and alarm bells ensue.
Research shows that we all have an evolutionary basis to form relational bonds in order to survive. Think of it like a "pack" mentality. We are meant to be in connection with other humans. As a result, our brains are automatically shaped by our connections from birth onward. Those experiences from infancy through adulthood inform how we cope and what our attachment longings are in our adult relationships. Attachment experiences create patterns that often become most apparent when we're with someone long-term.
There are four common attachment styles that influence how we relate to others and our partners: anxious, avoidant, secure, and a combination of anxious-avoidant (sometimes called "fearful avoidant").
For example, when an avoidant partner begins to feel like they're failing in their relationship, they may withdraw to cope with that discomfort. An anxious partner, sensing that withdrawal, may become angry, critical, or hyperfocused on their partner's experience. This creates what's called a negative interaction pattern, a cycle that reinforces itself over time.
The Neuroscience Behind Emotional Connection in Relationships
The goal of EFT is to understand how this pattern impacts both partners and to recognize that these action tendencies are soothing strategies for the core vulnerabilities at the heart of your attachment longings. When you begin to share these vulnerabilities with each other, there's a shift in emotional connection between you and your partner, one that's really difficult to access when the negative cycle is running amok.
When a safe emotional connection is present in your relationship, it actually provides soothing comfort to your nervous system. This regulated state can positively influence your other relationships and how you show up in the world. From a neuroscience perspective, when we feel safe and connected with our partner, our brain releases oxytocin (often called the "bonding hormone"), which helps reduce stress and promotes feelings of trust and security.
Often, what can show up in your negative cycle is connected to pain from past pain in your current relationship, moments between siblings growing up, parents, friends, classmates, or previous romantic partners. Your brain holds implicit memories of those experiences and the pain or lack of safety that may have been present. These memories live in parts of our brain that don't use words, which is why sometimes our reactions feel so automatic or hard to explain.
The good news is that EFT offers the space to process those experiences with your therapist and partner, who can offer a secure, attuned response to what has been painful. This creates what's called a "corrective emotional experience" that can help reshape those neural pathways in your brain through the power of relationship neuroscience. Essentially, new positive experiences with your partner can help update old stories your brain has been holding onto.
Breaking Negative Cycles: How EFT Helps Denver Couples Reconnect
Emotionally Focused Therapy research demonstrates the effectiveness of this model and shows how understanding your negative cycle can bring powerful awareness that makes space for vulnerability and emotional connection between partners. When you begin to see your partner's tendency to withdraw or complain as a self-soothing strategy for something much deeper and more meaningful, it slows down your pattern in a way that creates space to work with one another against these cycles rather than against each other.
At Recentered Relationship Therapy, my goal is to support couples in Denver seeking relationship therapy to break these patterns with success. I've seen time and time again the effectiveness of the EFT approach, and how it changes the way couples approach one another, especially through the challenging periods of life. Reach out today to learn more about my experience using EFT with couples during a complimentary 20-minute phone consultation!