There is an essential intervention in EFT that isn’t even a real word. You won’t find it in the dictionary or read it in the formal literature, but it has become common lingo in EFT and you will often hear EFT Trainers throw the word around with a smile and perhaps a set of air quotes.

Attachify.

First, an attempt at a definition: Attachify. v. To add attachment meaning and heighten primary emotion by adding a descriptive word or phrase about the partner’s significance into an intervention. 

In practice, on your couch, attachifying could mean simply adding the powerfully personal words—your wife, your husband, your partner, the mother of your children, the man that you love, this most important person, this man that you’ve been with for all these years, your best friend—to what you are handing back to the client in the moment. Or it could be folding a significant attachment phrase into your intervention, ie. “because you love her”, “because he is so important to you”, “because you mean so much to each other…”

Attachifying your interventions packs a lot of important things in one tiny move. It focuses the moment—and all three of you—on the relationship, and by doing so, it heightens the emotion exponentially. It feels a little like a doctor moving his hands around a sore spot, probing for the injury, aand then pushing on the spot that hurts. Attachifying encircles the couple, pulling the listening partner in and holding them while you are working with the other one. It helps validate and make sense of the deep emotions that are bubbling up (i.e. “Of course you feel sad! This is the woman that you love.”)  And it anchors all three of you in the attachment frame. Wow—this one small intervention focuses, heightens, validates, and makes the attachment frame expicit.

As you read the following three sentences, see if you can feel the difference inside yourself:

“Right now, on this couch, you are saying you feel like a failure in your wife’s eyes,” OR “Right now, on this couch, you feel like a failure with the one person who matters most to you.” VS. : “Right now, on this couch, you feel like a failure.”

Even reading that, can you feel that the first two are so much more alive? You are getting right to the heart of the matter with more focus and more power when you attachify. We all can feel the difference between feeling like a failure, and feeling like a failure in the eyes of the person we love. We need to be explicit in this, remind them of this, focus them on this truth.

One final point. With attachifying, we need to dip our toe in gently, i.e. sometimes couples aren’t ready for “the one who matters most” or will balk at “because you love him…” but there is always a way to attachify in a way that rings true to your couple. Start with a simple truth that still packs a punch, i.e. “your husband,” or “the mother of your children,” or even “this person that you’ve shared your life with.”

This week, play and practice with attachifying and see if you notice a difference.  🙂