Approaches and modalities

Emotionally Focused Therapy  prioritizes emotion and emotional regulation as the key organizing agents in individual experience and key relationship interactions.

Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is a well-known humanistic approach, developed in tandem with the science of adult attachment.  Attachment views human beings as innately relational, social and wired for intimate bonding with others. Understanding attachment theory has expanded our understanding of individual dysfunction and health as well as the nature of love relationships and family bonds.

Change in EFT occurs, not from insight, catharsis, or improved skills, but from the formulation and expression of new emotional experience that transforms the nature of the interactional drama, particularly as it pertains to attachment needs and emotions. 

Couples can begin by learning the patterns of their conflict-based “dance” or “sparring match”  sometimes based on attack-withdraw, attack-attack or withdraw-withdraw dynamics.  

Once we have an understanding of these patterns, in session, we can focus on deepening access to intimate and engaging encounters.  

In our sessions, we may opt to combine meaningful dialogue with 

a trauma-informed, sensorimotor approach. 

Sensorimotor Psychotherapy includes the practice of mindfulness and awareness of the body, with a spotlight on the following: an understanding of the quality of our thoughts (meta-cognition), our ability to name and validate our feelings, our capacity to engage in or enjoy our senses, our ability to resource and treat internal body sensations, and to increase awareness of our nervous system as seen or experienced through movement, posture and gesture. Our body offers a wealth of information when we learn how to listen and respond to its needs in a responsive rather than reactive way. 

Sensorimotor approaches are often used in treating situational trauma, such as car accidents, assault, abrupt life-transitions and other shocking events. It can also be used in the process of uncovering important resources that may not have been accessed or developed due to developmental and relational-trauma, such as long-term family conflict, and/or abuse. Clients with developmental trauma often express feelings of being stuck, depressed, overwhelmed, numb, "floaty," enraged or flooded and hijacked by sensations or "feeling-states" such as fight, flight, submit or freeze. In this form of work, we engage in a safe process of integration and transformation en route to nurturing experiences of stability, centeredness, and healthy vitality. 

In couples work, it can be essential to resource some of the trauma-based behaviours, action tendencies or patterns that individuals enact in relationship. Many of these behaviours were meant to ensure safety in the past and continue to “fire and wire” in the present.  With effort, courage, compassion and support, these safety-seeking tendencies can be witnessed, validated and integrated. 

"Sensorimotor Psychotherapy blends theory and technique from cognitive and dynamic therapy with straightforward somatic awareness and movement interventions...that promote empowerment and competency." - Dr. Daniel Siegel, Executive Director, Mindsight Institute

Internal Family Systems (IFS) 

is an evidence-based model of psychotherapy that aims to help people notice, identify and work with parts of themselves 

or "self-parts." 

Self-parts are aspects of ourselves that we can take responsibility for 

in addition to sharing those understandings with our partner(s). Thus, IFS serves as an excellent adjunct to couples work in that the method spotlights where co-dependency, enmeshment or boundary impingement distracts from self-part healing or integration.

Dr. Richard Schwartz, the founder of the IFS model, began his career as a systemic family therapist and an academic. He developed the practice in response to clients’ descriptions of various parts within themselves.  

For example, a partner might share something such as, "I have a part that gets so enraged and heated and I want to leave right away." Or, "I have a part that becomes shut down, silent, submissive and intimidated.  Why does that happen when I am a leader in other capacities?" Another example is, "I have a part that uses substances, accesses pornography or purchases services from sex-trade workers."

Schwartz found that when the clients’ parts feel safe and are allowed to relax, the clients spontaneously experience the qualities of confidence, openness, and compassion in “the Self.” In this environment, or space, a person can authentically access their more protective-based coping mechanisms/behaviours to better meet their pained and “exiled” (repressed) parts.  

For most of us, intimacy problems are driven by a background ache, sense of emptiness, or pool of shame. In couples work, we meet our own parts and take responsibility for them; in this way, a truer intimacy with self and with others becomes possible.