ABSTRACT
This chapter highlights how empathic exploration of partners’ experiences can pull a therapist to compassionately and curiously engage with the couple’s attachment drama of distress. The therapist engages with each partner to form a collaborative safe base alliance from which to explore and assess the degree to which partners share the goal of reshaping their attachment bond, and whether safety can be created in session between these two distressed individuals. Assessment and alliance building, both prerequisites to de-escalation, the first change event of EFT, are active processes, which continue throughout all of therapy. An attachment lens reveals an insecure bond of two individuals doing their best to be safe and secure with each other. It reveals partners with good intentions for the relationship inadvertently triggering one another’s attachment insecurities and becoming stuck in a negative feedback loop of unclear signals and fears of loss and rejection.
