Emotionally Focused Therapy: Session 3

In this course, Dr. Shea Dunham, an expert in Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT), holds the third session with Danielle and Jay, an Afro-American couple who have come to session to work on trust in their marriage. Dr. Dunham's overall goal is to help repair attachment injuries, teach the couple to negotiate different attachment styles, and build security and trust. In this session, she works intensively with Danielle to help her express her experience from her primary emotions. Dunham works to ensure that Jay is able hear it as her experience, rather than information about him. In discussion after the session with series host Dr. Shannon Dermer, Dunham explains how they have arrived at EFT's Stage Two, Step Six, in which each partner must work to accept and validate the other's experience, while attempting to express their own experience through primary emotions. Dunham shares her plan for the remaining two sessions to help Danielle and Jay to move toward one another in a way that honours both of their experiences.