Affects or Effects? In naming this blog, I wanted to use the verb–affects means to act on; to produce a change in; to move the feelings of–and this blog will be articles, videos, thoughts, information about love, about connection, about how our heart impacts, and is impacted by all the significant others in our lives. It will be about connection, disconnection, and repair. It will be about vulnerability, and loving risks and reaches, about misses and misunderstandings. It will be about healing heartbreak.

Affect also means a feeling or emotion; or in psychotherapy, we use it to describe an expression or observed emotional response. Which fits beautifully with the theme of this blog and also with what I do. I am an Emotionally Focused Couples Therapist (EFT), and what I know from working with couples, and what you know from life experience, is that our affect (how we look, how we sound, how we show up) doesn’t always reflect how we really feel inside. There are always good reasons for this, but even so, you can imagine how confusing it can be for our loved ones, and sometimes even for ourselves. So part of what we do in EFT Couples Therapy is try to sift out the buried emotion underneath our sometimes confusing behavior or affect. In other words, we try to get to the core of what our heart is really trying to say underneath what we actually are saying. Or, just as often, what our heart wishes it could say underneath our silence.