Dear Friends, Clients and Anyone Else interested in Couples Counseling, Sex Therapy or Attachment:

I’ve been informally sharing psychology articles on my Facebook page for some time.  Today I’m going to start posting my musings and articles more formally as a therapist’s blog.  I hope these posts will be of interest to others, particularly to those who are also thinking about  the psychology of healthy relationships and elements of a life well lived.

Attachment

My years  as a therapist, husband and dad continue strengthening my belief in secure attachment as foundational to reducing stress and increasing happiness.  By securely attached, I mean relationships that have easy access, a sense of belonging and easy comfort–that’s secure attachment!  Really all my life experiences, the bad and ugly as well as the good, have led me in this attachment direction.  Even during hard and lonely stretches I felt that my internal compass pointed me here.  More recent years have confirmed this belief in the importance of secure attachment in my personal life.  More so as I’ve experienced the privileged position of being a confidant and guide in peoples’ relationship and personal worlds.  Doing couples counseling, individual therapy and even sex therapy has shown me how hard people strive for connection and how scary and fraught this can be.  It can be so triggering when disconnection happens, or even fear of disconnection.  Being a therapist these past 25 years has also shown me over and over how calming, grounding, and eventually even joyful can be the rewards of persisting in building such secure connections.

Einstein of Love

Today I saw what might be an imagined 1907 rejection letter to Albert Einstein (or perhaps it is translation of a real letter — anyone know?)  that was posted by a colleague on LinkedIn.  The University of Bern supposedly declined to issue Einstein a doctorate as it found his theory of space-time too “radical” and “more art that science.”  I think our understanding of human emotional attachment is at a similar turning point, in the sense that love still seems so mysterious to so many, that getting it right in relationships is more art, intuition, “chemistry,” or luck than anything else.  But actually we know so much more now.

I think that John Bowlby was the Einstein of love.  He was the first intellectual who really deeply understood and wrote about how children need and thrive on secure attachment.  Of course many parents have always understood this.  Human brains are hard-wired for this and instinctively we try to provide secure loving relationships to our children—unless something throws off this instinct.  In the century since Bowlby’s insights, much as in cosmology in the century since Einstein’s insights, there has been further refinement of theory and accumulation of research supporting the theory’s validity.  The theory and evidence have been extended from parent child relationship to adult attachment.

Emotionally Focused Therapy

Susan Johnson’s Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) is a theory and a technique that has laid out as clear map to secure loving connection as I have found.  It has been immensely helpful to me in my personal and professional life.  I love that the technique is straight forward, user-friendly, not mysterious woo woo stuff but a pathway that anyone, albeit with persistence, can follow and get somewhere good.

In subsequent posts I’ll share articles about EFT, theories of love and happiness and more of my musings on these and other topics.  I hope you will consider sharing, subscribing or bookmarking this blog (although being new to blogging, I’m not even sure how one does that yet.  So stand by for more and thanks for checking this out!

Warmly, Adam