Understanding Emotional Connection in Relationships
The following videos help us begin to understand our emotional connection in relationships and how our emotions can either pull us closer to our loved ones or push us further apart. Do you turn up the emotional heat with anger to try to connect, or do you pull away, hoping to keep things calm? These different ways of managing emotions and can result in missed opportunities to share, process, and truly understand our own feelings, as well as those of the people we care about.
STAGE 1: ASSESSMENT AND CYCLE DE-ESCALATION
Emotional Connection in Relationships
Ongoing Assessment: Gather each partner’s relationship history and identify primary conflict issues that contribute to disconnection.
Identifying Interaction Patterns: Work with an EFT therapist to trace negative daily interaction patterns and their impact on the relationship.
Recognizing Emotional Connections: Understand the link between surface emotions and deeper feelings to foster mutual understanding.
Reframing Behaviors: Reframe behaviors within the negative cycle to recognize positive intentions behind emotional responses.
STAGE 2: CHANGING INTERACTIONAL POSITIONS AND CREATING NEW BONDING EVENTS
Emotional Connection in Relationships
- Sharing Deeper Emotions: Partners begin to safely share hidden emotions and attachment needs as negative cycles calm down.
- Empathic Listening: The listening partner becomes more attuned and compassionate toward the other’s core emotions, processing new feelings as they arise.
- Expressing Attachment Needs: With the therapist’s guidance, partners express attachment needs and fears while feeling supported, fostering deeper emotional connection and responsiveness.
STAGE 3: CONSOLIDATION/ INTEGRATION
Emotional Connection in Relationships
- The couple continues to build on ways to apply new yet, deeply held emotions with the ability to be ‘with’ each other emotionally and empathically in order to process old problems and new areas of concern.
- Consolidate new positions and cycles of emotional closeness and attachment by blending all the newly developing skills with the awareness of closeness and deeper bonds. The couple begins to work together by processing future plans and how connection can be different in the future. This is enhanced by celebrating each partners amazing efforts and the beautiful risks that have been taken.
Videos for Understanding Emotions
The mask we live in to try to manage emotions
Explore how we often wear emotional masks to manage our feelings. This protective behavior can help us avoid vulnerability but may also block emotional intimacy in relationships.
Attachment and how this affects emotions
This video delves into how attachment styles play a crucial role in shaping how we experience and express our emotions within relationships.
Adult attachment originates in childhood attachment and impacts our relationships.
Discover how adult attachment patterns originate from our childhood and how these early bonds continue to influence our romantic relationships.
The different types of childhood attachment
Learn about the various types of childhood attachment and how each type contributes to the way we connect emotionally with others as adults.
Acknowledgment vs. Empathy and Compassion
Understand the subtle yet powerful differences between acknowledgment, empathy, and compassion, and how recognizing these can transform your emotional connection.
Taming the Negative Cycle
Gain insights into how to break the negative cycle of disconnection in relationships and build more positive, supportive emotional interactions.
Empathy vs. Sympathy
This video explains the distinction between empathy and sympathy, and how showing genuine empathy strengthens emotional bonds.
Here at Creating Healthy Connections, we specialize in Emotional Connection in Relationships with an amazing process known as Emotionally Focused Therapy – one of the most well-researched attachment-based therapies on the planet.