Resources for Couples

Do you need encouragement that transformation and safe connection are really possible in your relationship?

Books to help your connection:

(Click on images to get linked to Amazon.com. Sue Johnson’s are available by audio book as well.)

Podcasts to help your connection:

Check out their podcasts for additional powerful and relevant topics!

And in their new book, Brave Love, Great Sex, with research-based advice and relatable examples, they show us how to:

  • Identify Negative Cycles: Recognize your sexual and emotional attachment patterns

  • Replace Protective Strategies: Learn how to turn fight or flight dynamics into bonding moments

  • Shift Perspectives: Move from blame to understanding and shared empathy

  • Enhance Sexual Conversations: Improve discussions around specific turn-ons and turn-offs to increase levels of engagement

  • Foster True Closeness: Learn how intimacy creates safety and joy in sexual exploration.

This illuminating guide will help couples who are struggling with intimacy issues, as well as those who simply want to dial up their connection, ensuring a vibrant, secure, and lasting bond that is both emotionally intimate and sexually erotic.

For those recovering from an affair, listen to these podcasts:

Caring For and Soothing Your Nervous System

. . . Podcasts:

Befriending your Nervous System - for understanding your self and your partner (including when one or both of you have experienced trauma (including lack of secure attachment as a child) that gets us dysregulated). In this Podcast, Deb Dana shares her insights into how Polyvagal Theory can help us!

  • From the Sounds True website: “Deb Dana is a clinician and consultant specializing in complex trauma…. Her work … is focused on using the lens of Polyvagal Theory to understand and resolve the impact of trauma, and create approaches that honor the role of the autonomic nervous system. With Sounds True, Deb has created a new audio program called Befriending Your Nervous System: Looking Through the Lens of Polyvagal Theory. In this podcast, Deb offers an introduction to the human nervous system, how Polyvagal Theory informs our understanding of the nervous system, how to manage the state known as “dysregulation,” and more.'“

Becoming an Active Operator of your Nervous System - more from Deb Dana

  • From this Podcast on the Sounds True Website: “Deb Dana, LCSW, is a clinician and consultant specializing in using the lens of Polyvagal Theory to understand and resolve the impact of trauma and create ways of working that honor the role of the autonomic nervous system. Her Sounds True publications include the audio program, Befriending Your Nervous System: Looking Through the Lens of Polyvagal Theory, and her new book Anchored: How to Befriend Your Nervous System Using Polyvagal Theory. In this podcast, Tami Simon converses with Deb Dana to offer listeners a practical understanding of Polyvagal Theory and how we can begin to decode the language of our body for better health and better relationships. Tami and Deb also discuss the dorsal, sympathetic, and ventral states of our nervous system; the gifts of becoming “anchored in ventral”; neuroception, your nervous system’s way of taking in information to assess your safety; curiosity and the capacity for self-reflection; the importance of self-care; co-regulation as a biological imperative; why self-regulation is especially critical for therapists and other helping professionals; music and nature as healing resources; the practice of self-compassion as a means of “getting our anchor back”; and more.”

Handout to nurture your bond:

Click on image to get the .pdf!

Video to help your connection:

Drs. Sue Johnson & Ed Tronick discuss the Still Face Experiments and attachment responses over the life span. This helps you understand why a Pursuing partner goes into attachment panic when the Withdrawing partner’s face goes blank:

Two experts in bonding look at key responses in love relationships.

Remember to check out EFT for Couples, along with What is EFT?

and

Hold Me Tight® Workshops for Couples too!

(Hold Me Tight® is a registered trademark to Dr. Sue Johnson.)

If you need more resource suggestions, feel free to ask!

Safety First!!

On this journey of EFT, we are seeking to help you grow your relationship in a way that you can both feel emotionally and physically safe and secure and there can be SPACE to breathe the free air and flourish as individuals and as a couple. Sometimes, dynamics enter a relationship that create the opposite effect. If we are not able to help those dynamics shift, and if a partner is not able to take ownership for their steps in the “dance” of the Negative Cycle between them (i.e. if ownership is not mutual where both people own their own Protective Moves/Adaptive Strategies/”dance steps”) AND if they cannot see the need to shift (thinking the other person is the only one who needs to make modifications) AND if there is no room for the input, perspective, and heart/feelings of the other person, THEN EFT CAN’T WORK!

Here are some dynamics of relationships characterized by COERCIVE CONTROL. See if these resonate with you as you reflect on your relationship. IF THEY DO, seek quality individual therapy (feel free to ask me for a recommendation) and explore the fact that you may be in a relationship that does not have the capacity to be healthy and life-giving for you, and in fact might be dangerous. Support resources are listed below. Read these characteristics and watch the videos in this section:

The 3 D’s*:

DISRESPECT - A pattern of behaviors that communicate the partner is less important, less capable, less deserving, and less worthy of respect, care, and consideration:

  • Verbal explosions, yelling, name calling;

  • Persistently criticizing, belittling, making snide remarks;

  • Chronically dismissing the partner’s needs, feelings, and opinions;

  • An attitude of entitlement and intellectual superiority;

  • Unequal division of household tasks and shared responsibilities;

  • Consistently prioritizing personal wants over family needs and shared responsibilities;

  • Haranguing - engaging in prolonged, relentless verbal attacks … hours and hours, waking partner, wearing the partner down, demanding apologies;

  • Exploiting pre-existing insecurities and known vulnerabilities (e.g. history and trauma, strained family relationships, personal fears, or mental health struggles);

  • Using prolonged or repeated silent treatments as punishment;

  • Consistently failing to support the partner’s physical or medical needs, and when they need extra rest, treat them even worse

DISEMPOWER - A pattern of behaviors that remove choices, restrict opportunities, limit access to resources, create fear, and make the partner incredibly dependent:

  • Threats, angry outbursts, intimidation tactics

  • Economic abuse - financial control, employment sabotage and/or financial exploitation

  • Isolating partner from family and friends

  • Monitoring partner through technology

  • Micromanaging family life and activities

  • Making significant joint decisions without partner’s input

  • Creating physical exhaustion by preventing sleep, rest, or medical recovery

  • Threatening suicide to influence the partner’s decision-making

  • Pressuring or coercing partner into unwanted sexual experiences

  • Shaping partner’s behaviors through instilling fear of consequences

DISTORTION - Using various strategies to manipulate reality, create confusion, shift blame, undermine the partner’s trust in themselves, and influence how others perceive them.

  • Perspecticide - intentional killing off of perspective of partner and replacing it with one’s own

  • DARVO - Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender

  • Repeatedly shifting blame and refusing to take accountability

  • Using manipulative tactics (e.g. gaslighting, lying, inducing guilt, cheating)

  • Making controlling behaviors appear reasonable, necessary, or acts of care

  • Displaying rapid and unpredictable shifts in mood or personality

  • Discrediting, ridiculing, or weaponizing the partner’s emotional reactions to the abuse (e.g. their distress, confusion, or anger)

  • Displaying excessive mistrust, jealousy, and baseless accusations

  • Crafting a false public persona that conceals the private harm

  • Creating strategic reputation damage, convincing others that the partner is unstable

  • Turning family members and children against the partner

(*The wording of these 3 D’s is from Dr. Katie Kjalsaas and Krasi Kirova.)

In relationships with these characteristics as part of an overall pattern, which is not reciprocal (but one way), it has the effect of erasing the other person.

Notice the FUNCTION of these behaviors as well … they are not the empowerment, respect, thriving, etc., of their partner as one beloved. They serve the one doing them, not the partner on the receiving end.

Intent vs. Impact: Just because the INTENT of the one doing the erasing might be (or be reported as) “good”, if the IMPACT is injury, that is what counts. Your experience matters, no matter what the intent may be!

Watch these videos and notice what happens inside you …. Does your nervous system resonate?? (If you think you might be in this kind of relationship, for your safety, watch within this webpage; and if you watch on Youtube, be sure to clear your browser history after.)

Coercive Control explained.

When you watch these videos, do you resonate? Does this pattern feel like what you are living in right now?

What do you want to do?

What support would you like?

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25% of women, and 17% of men, will experience some form of DV in their lifetime.

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Support for Victims/Survivors:

Support for Perpetrators - Grow and transform in community!:

  • She is Not Your Rehab - an anti-violence movement that exists to address and dismantle the cycles of intergenerational trauma, violence, and abuse by promoting safe relationships and providing support and resources for individuals and communities globally: https://www.sheisnotyourrehab.com/

  • Man Up - Australia: https://www.manupwa.org.au/

  • It is a long process, and the best programs are volitional, relational, long-term, and embed the recovering perpetrator in community.

Get support! You don’t have to do the journey alone!

For Couples Considering Divorce, EFT Can Help:

No one goes into an intimate relationship planning for it to not work. And sometimes Negative Cycles (and the echoes of our own and our partner’s own histories which predate the relationship) can emerge and sabotage connections against our will, leading couples to part ways. No one intended it. And it happened.

In EFT we say, “Get out of the cycle before getting out of the relationship.”

If you have sought to get out of the cycle (through EFT Couples Therapy) and have gotten clear that your hearts have gone into detachment or you are no longer a fit, then consider finding peaceable ways to uncouple. Here are some resources to help you (and they are congruent with the Attachment oriented process you have walked through with me):

Diana Mercer, J.D., is a lawyer who gave up litigation and turned to helping couples mediate their uncoupling process peacefully. And Marsha Kline Pruett, Ph.D., is a psychologist who embraces the lens of Attachment, like we do in EFT. These will be helpful resources that can help you navigate your relationship’s uncoupling process in a way that is consistent with your values and to help you honor what your connection has meant to you even as you shift out of marriage.

Early on, consider writing a “Mission Statement” for your divorce process, to guide you away from conflict and toward peaceable relating. This helpful website has a tool to create your own (with sample statements to consider including):

If you would like help navigating the terrain of uncoupling peaceably, I am glad to come alongside you both.

It would require you both to: 1) be able to be in sessions together, 2) feel safe enough with each other, 3) be open to the other’s perspective while still making space for your pain, and 4) be able to agree on common goals for our time.

Some possible valuable goals for such post-marriage counseling could include:

  1. Develop a clear narrative of how the Negative Cycle got into the relationship and sabotaged it, so you can see that the Negative Cycle is the Bad Guy and neither of you. (This is helpful for your own healing and for how you talk about the separating/divorcing/uncoupling to other people.)

  2. Develop a list of unanswered questions and fears that you want/need to process to be able to move forward without pockets of pain holding your heart in a cage. Bring those questions and fears to each other to process and get answers straight from the source. (This can be so powerful and really helps with healing.)

  3. Grieve the losses that come with what the Negative Cycle did to you both and your love, and grieve the losses that come with moving forward apart.

  4. Collaborate on co-parenting in a way that honors what your attachment relationship has meant to your kids and helps them feel you are still a secure base for them as your lives together change.

  5. You may think of other goals that would be valuable in your uncoupling process….

Take time to get clear on the “dance steps” of the Negative Cycle, the fears fueling it underneath, and what it did to you both. Then process the pain and grieve so you don’t just take the old “dance steps” with you to the next relationship.

Dr. Kathryn Rheem (EFT Trainer), says, “Unprocessed pain, unprocessed fear moves under the surface and tweaks behavior.” That is true here as well. Process the pain and fears now so the Negative Cycle doesn’t sabotage your heart again in the next relationship!

Consider these helpful resources as well:

The authors are Certified EFT Trainers and know the journey well, personally and professionally. You will be in good hands and be glad you let them help you! You don’t have to do this alone!

Lastly, don’t go it alone!

We all need safe others to do this journey of life with us. So too in uncoupling and divorce.

  • Consider safe-haven friends who can be there for you.

  • Look into getting a warm, supportive therapist to come alongside you. You may find many at: https://centralpaeft.com/find-a-therapist and https://directory.iceeft.com/. EFIT (Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy) and AEDP can be powerfully helpful in grieving a crumbled relationship. … AND …

  • Consider joining a Divorce Care group. Check out: https://www.divorcecare.org/ to find a virtual group or an in-person group new you.

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Including safe-haven others with you on the journey will help you walk through the path in a way that invites you process the pain (FEEL it, not run from it), come to a different relationship with it, find ways to let others be with you, realize you are NOT alone, view yourself and others more positively, and walk into a new tomorrow emotionally freed so your next relationship has the chance to be safer, more secure, life-giving, and warmly connected. Safe, secure connection IS possible!