Couples & Marriage Counselling
Couples come into therapy when they are experiencing distress. Most often they are caught in the same argument. Over and over again they keep repeating the same negative interaction and it leaves them feeling distant, disconnected and emotionally isolated from their partner. It’s difficult for them to see it is more about how they interact with each other than it is about their issues or differences. That’s where marriage counselling comes in.
Marriage counselling or couples therapy provides a place where both partners can talk about their concerns, thoughts and feelings with a unbiased other who can help weed through the distress to uncover what’s really going on for each partner. The model we use predominantly while working with couples EFT (see link).
In addition to EFT we use Imago therapy, developed by Harville Hendrix (Getting the Love You Want) to help couples communicate more effectively as well as the system described in the book Conscious Loving by Gay & Kathleen Hendricks.
Family Counselling & Coaching
Families can develop rigid patterns of intention based on powerful emotional experiences that hinder emotional engagement. Treatment aims to enhance empathetic capabilities of family members by exploring deep-seated habits and modifying emotional cues using validation, heightening, reframing and restructuring.
Family coaching examines the family as a system as well as the individual relationships within the system.
Emotionally Focused Couples Therapy
EFT (Emotionally Focused Therapy) was created by Sue Johnson of Ottawa and Les Greenberg of Toronto. In it, we focus on emotions because our emotions move us in our intimate relationships. As human beings, when we feel safe and secure in relationship we feel loved and cared for and when we feel threatened we feel scared and unsafe. Differences come up for couples and they get into negative cycles/interactions and start to feel unsafe with each other. It is less about the content/issues that couples fight about and more about how couples fight/interact that makes them feel unsafe and therefore defensive.
EFT helps couples de-escalate, slow things down and start to feel, think and express to their partner, what is really going on for them under the surface, to help them connect in a more powerful and loving way.
About EFT
Emotionally Focused Therapy was created by Sue Johnson and Les Greenberg almost thirty years ago. Today it has been proven that it is an effective treatment for distressed couples and is considered a short term therapy. In EFT research studies, most couples (over 70%) turned their relationship around in 15 – 20 sessions and over 90% of couples “significantly improved” when seeing a trained and certified EFT Therapist.
Emotionally Focused Therapy for Couples (EFT) offers a comprehensive theory of adult love and attachment, as well as a Therapy process for healing distressed relationships. It recognizes that relationship distress results from a perceived threat to basic adult needs for safety, security, and closeness in intimate relationships. EFT helps couples by working to strengthen attachment bonds. Having strong attachment bonds means couples feel safe together, know they are most important to their partner, are more flexible in problem solving, communicate, and feel securely connected. The same old fight is finally resolved. The walls that kept you away from each other crumble away and the feelings that brought you together in the beginning revive and grow.
EFT research has been published in professional journals proving its effectiveness. As a model of therapy, it is respected widely in the field as is the therapy co-originator, award winning psychologist, Dr. Susan Johnson. Over the past 30 years many research studies have proven EFT works!
If you’d like to increase your closeness, improve communication, stop fighting or renew the spark of early courtship, then EFT can work for you!
Coaching & Counselling
Coaching or personal counselling is an intentional interpersonal relationship used to aid a client in problems of living. It aims to increase the individual’s sense of well-being. We use a range of techniques based on experiential relationship building, dialogue, communication and behaviour change, that are designed to improve the mental health of a client or to improve relationships.
Fran Has over 20 years of experience working with:
Mood Disorders (Depression)
Anxiety Disorders
Adjustment to Traumatic or distressing events
Sexuality, Sexual Abuse, Boundary issues and LGBTQ issues
Addictions (substance or other behavioural)
Existential concerns (death & mortality, finding meaning in life, freedom & responsibility)
Feeling stuck, frightened, isolated, shut down
Life transitions, Loss and bereavement
Work and money issues
Stress, Feeling of hopelessness or unease.
Benefits
Increases inner well being and ability to personally grow
Assists understanding of one’s own patterns
Allows for healthy resolutions of past conflicts
Enables breakthroughs for new thinking
Releases pent-up negativity
Helps a person find healthy relationships and boundaries