Dear Partners,

For those of you living in nearly daily conflict or those experiencing emotional distance, taking responsibility for your own upset is a cornerstone for bringing healing into your relationship. In EFT we facilitate that largely by helping you interrupt the 'blame game'. Moving away from blaming allows empathy, acceptance, and forgiveness to permeate your relationship. These extraordinary qualities when developed and enhanced during our sessions together, allow connection and reconnection to happen. And connection is what EFT is all about! Connecting specifically through your warmth and your loving, not connecting through your negative reactivity: for example, anger, jealousy, resentment, criticism, frustration, avoiding and closing down. These negative agents create destructive cycles of couple interaction and interrupting these cycles becomes the first task in EFT, beginning with the first session.

Over two decades of research and further development of EFT has resulted in a state of the art model consisting of steps promoting emotional engagement, the primary change agent which EFT therapists use. For distressed couples, high conflict couples, and couples seeking to recover from infidelity and betrayal, EFT offers a highly focused and well organized approach. Each session is tailored to the step you are currently completing. This powerful model touches deeply into underlying and often unexpressed emotional needs, which all people have, regardless of your race, gender, or sexual or spiritual orientations. For couples affected by prior traumatic experiences, EFT helps you identify and process issues which have often gone unattended and have created internal pain and relationship havoc.

Sometimes a couple hears an inner calling to strengthen the overall quality of their relationship. Others choose to work with a therapist who specializes in couples at a time when the stress between them becomes too painful or the relationship appears threatened. Relationship stress can build over time or may erupt suddenly following a critical event such as loss of a job, a move, an affair, or the birth of a child.

Symptoms of a distressed relationship can be depression, emotional distance, increasing arguments, decreasing affection, a distressed sexual relationship, excessive and inappropriate expression of anger, or difficulty with children or other family members.

Through EFT you can:

• Re-establish your relationship as a partnership of mutual loving
• Learn to listen really well and to convey your understanding
• Learn to share yourselves openly and honestly
• Learn to respond to each other with respect and empathy
• Restore physical, sexual and emotional intimacy
• Resolve underlying personal and relationship issues from the past
• Develop greater capacity 'to be there' with your partner in times of need
• Repair major breaches in trust and loyalty

When couples finish their work with me, they most commonly say that they feel more joyful, more alive and connected to each other, that they have learned effective skills to use throughout their lives and that they have developed a trust in each other that is far deeper than they have known before.

As one of a handful of EFT Supervisors in San Diego, I am deeply indebted to the foundational work of EFT's prime mover, Dr. Sue Johnson at the University of Ottawa. Her life's work has culminated in bringing EFT to its pivotal position in the field of couples therapy. Her contribution to our understanding of couple bonding draws heavily from the research on human attachment needs. I recommend her book Hold Me Tight to all of the couples that I serve.

My office is located in Solana Beach. I contribute to the advancement of the profession of relationship counseling by providing individual and group consultation to EFT therapists in training as well as to experienced therapists throughout the U.S. and New Zealand who are seeking to better serve the couples with whom they work. Additionally, I support the EFT trainings in San Diego and in San Francisco.

Please call for more details. My philosophy of supervision paper is included here - Click to Read.

Warm regards,
Gordon Meredith, M.A., M.S.S.
Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist
Certified EFT Therapist and Supervisor

	Hold Me Tight	Sue Johnson (also available in audio and in video)
	Conscious Loving	Gay & Kathleen Hendricks
	Why Marriages Succeed or Fail	John Gottman
	Not Just Friends	Shirley Glass (healing from infidelity)
	An Emotionally Focused Workbook for Couples	Fitzgerald & Kallos-Lilly