After five and a half decades of swallowing feelings of hurt, rejection, sadness, a break through moment into becoming the woman she has always known was missing was deeply felt as the wife of a couple I have been working with was able to tell her husband, “I don’t want you to fix this, I don’t need you to do anything, I just want you to listen to how I truly felt last night during our fight. I saw him look at me. In that moment I could see it in his eyes. He was really listening! In that moment I felt like a real person! He just listened. Our cycle broke. I felt so good. I felt like I could run down the trail and just jump over all those roots that I had been tripping on. I could feel the sun and wind on my face. It felt so freeing. The rest of the weekend we were so happy!”
Not only was it a breakthrough moment for the wife, it was a breakthrough moment for the husband, who like many men (and yes some women) feel like they must offer a fix, a solution, a remedy, to help their partner not feel so whatever they are feeling.
Emotion Focused Couples Therapy helps partners communicate in authentically vulnerable ways that reverses the “offensive-defensive,” “tit for tat”, he said – she said,” cycling arguments that ensnare many couples.
