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Emotionally Focused Therapy Psychotherapy Relationships Self-improvement Stress • • • • • By Ann-Marie Codori, Ph.D. 0 Comments

Individual Emotionally-Focused Therapy

Emotionally-focused therapy (EFT) for couples is a highly effective method for resolving relationship distress and creating deeper connection.  EFT methods prioritize the innate need for a secure bond with another human.  An insecure bond compromises our physical and psychological welfare.  EFT zeros-in on the barriers to connection and carefully dismantles and replaces them with an open pathway to bonding.  First one partner, and then the other, each learns to walk the new path, both alone and then together.  On this new path, partners jointly create a bond by sharing emotions.

Anything that thwarts the honest and direct expression of emotional needs is a barrier to the bond that we depend on.  Cliched but true, the barriers to connection are forged in childhood.  Lessons learned so long ago feel instinctive; we remain oblivious to them and the effect they have on our relationships.  The clinician trained in emotionally-focused therapy creates opportunities to notice patterns of feeling and reacting that form these hidden barriers.  Our awareness offers the chance to break out of reflexive, default reactions.

Can I do it?

Virtually everyone has the capacity to re-shape default reactions.  In fact, we are born in with the innate ability to share emotions.  An infant’s survival hinges on alerting the parents that there is a need.  Infants cry when they’re hungry; they cry when in pain; they cry if frightened.  Ideally, parents get the signal and meet the infant’s need.  With parents who are responsive to the emotional signals, the infant learns to rely on the outside world as a source of comfort.  Moreover, the infant senses that emotional needs are legitimate, important, and worthy of attention.

Word of caution: responsiveness differs from indulging or spoiling a child.  Good parenting also involves teaching a child to be patient, to take turns with others, and to master a myriad of other skills for living successfully in our social world.  One of the surprising facts about parental responsiveness is that “good enough” gets the job done.  One study showed that the mothers of securely-bonded children are in-tune-with and responsive to their children about 30% of the time.

Emotional Styles.

Emotionally-Focused Therapy: Flee!
Shut-down needs, turn away from partner!
Emotionally-Focused Therapy: FIGHT!
Demand, accuse and scare partner away!

Denied adequate parental responsiveness, children learn that other people are a dubious source of comfort and bonding.  Simultaneously, they learn to doubt their emotional needs.  The doubt disguises emotional needs as weakness and things to be hidden, or deforms their expression into demands or accusations.  These become our emotional styles in our most intimate adult relationships.  In the moments when we need connection the most, we unwittingly cut ourselves off from the person we need.

If one of these descriptions sounds like you, individual emotionally-focused therapy may help you.  You can learn to “tune in” to your emotions and to express them in a way that pulls loved ones closer, rather than push them away. You don’t need to wait for couple therapy.

 


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Biological Perspectives on Emotions Couple Therapy Psychotherapy Relationships • • • • By Ann-Marie Codori, Ph.D. 1 Comment

At what age do humans develop emotional intelligence? The answer might surprise you.

Emotional pain typically drives the quest for psychotherapy.  Pain, after all, is nature’s signal that an organism’s welfare, and survival, are threatened.  Hence, taking action to identify the cause of the pain and to eliminate it are adaptive.  Any psychotherapist, and anyone who has undertaken psychotherapy, will tell you that it is not always easy to identify the cause of the pain and treat it — unlike how we diagnose and treat bacterial infections with antibiotics.  We have no clinically-available biological markers for emotional distress: no blood tests, brain scans, or urine assays.  The pain is no less real than that experienced elsewhere in the body, but explaining it is orders of magnitude trickier and requires more indirect methods of assessment.

Just try finding a word to describe the experience of an emotional ache.  The exercise renders most of us speechless for minutes.  Patient: “It feels bad.”  Therapist: “Yes, but which bad feeling is it?”  Patient: “I don’t know.”  And so the patient and therapist begin the excavation of the layers of his/her emotions and emotional learning history, down the layers of time as far as we can go — working to identify the feeling, its duration, its triggers in real time, and its roots in emotional history.  Read more


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Biological Perspectives on Emotions Couple Therapy Depression and Mood Disorders Psychotherapy Relationships • • • • • • • • • By Ann-Marie Codori, Ph.D. 0 Comments

Major Depression May Be Triggered by Teenage Stressors

A recent study using mice to mimic stress and depression in adolescents suggests that the teenage years are a particularly vulnerable time for the brain.  Working with mice who carried an introduced human gene mutation for depression, the researchers exposed some of the adolescent mice to social stress (isolation for three weeks) and kept a control group of mice stress-free.  There were two important findings.  First, the gene mutation for depression had no effect on mouse behavior except among the stressed mice.  Second, they found that the behavior change may be mediated by increases in cortisol (a stress hormone) and decreases in dopamine (a neurotransmitter in the brain).  Morever, after they returned the stressed mice to their preferred social environment, the behavioral abnormalities remained.  This study, and others like it, suggest that once activated during adolescence, the neuro-biological pathway active in depression does not turn off, even after the stressor has passed.
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Depression and Mood Disorders Health and Behavior Psychotherapy • • • • • • By Ann-Marie Codori, Ph.D. 0 Comments

Talk to Your Children about Their Family History

It is scary to be diagnosed with depression.  However, it’s a lot less scary to be diagnosed with depression when you know that your grandmother and your uncle on your mother’s side also had it.  We may live in the age of biological psychiatry, and the NIH may have just announced their plan to map the human brain http://www.neuroscienceblueprint.nih.gov/connectome/, but we are still haunted by a view of brain illnesses that led our forefathers to drill holes in the skulls of depressed persons to let out the evil spirits.  Stigma is alive and well.  But its impact is reduced by the realization that, “It’s not my fault.”  Moreover, people diagnosed with the illness may be more open to the proven treatments (talk therapy combined with medication) when shown evidence that the predisposition is inherited, not a function of personal failure.   Most of my new patients with the illness have no idea that they are suffering from depression; they just know that they are suffering — sometimes for 30 years.  Without treatment.  Blaming themselves.  Concluding that they are worthless and that their situation is hopeless.

If depression runs in your family, do your children a favor.  Save them potentially years of suffering.  Tell them about it.


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Health and Behavior • • • • • • • • By Ann-Marie Codori, Ph.D. 0 Comments

There may be hard-wired preferences for high-fat and high-calorie foods

Archeological evidence of our human ancestors, observations of eating behavior in modern hunter-gatherer tribes, the anatomy of our digestive system and current neuro-scientific research suggest that humans may have a hard-wired preference for high-fat and high-calorie foods.  The available data lead scientists to estimate that ancient humans consumed more than half of their calories as meat, preferably large game.  Before the development of agriculture, some 10,000 years ago, ancient hunter-gatherer tribes of 25 or so members moved to different geographic locations to follow their food sources.  As one area became depleted of food, they moved to a new area.  This, as well as seasonal variation in the availability of food, must have resulted in periods of food plenty and scarcity.  It was in this unstable food environment that our “survival of the fittest” eating behaviors evolved.  One theory suggests that there would have been greater survival advantage to humans who consumed as much animal fat and carbohydrates as possible whenever possible, regardless of how hungry they may have been at the moment.  Those who had fattened up in periods of plenty would have been more likely to survive the periods of scarcity.
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Individual Emotionally-Focused Therapy

Emotionally-focused therapy (EFT) for couples is a highly effective method for resolving relationship distress and creating …

At what age do humans develop emotional intelligence? The answer might surprise you.

Emotional pain typically drives the quest for psychotherapy.  Pain, after all, is nature’s signal that an organism’s …

Major Depression May Be Triggered by Teenage Stressors

A recent study using mice to mimic stress and depression in adolescents suggests that the teenage years are a particularly …