Coaching Your Family Relationships

How to Rebuild Emotional Connection in Marriage with EFT Attachment Questions

• Tina Gosney • Episode 186

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Episode 186 - How to Rebuild Emotional Connection in Marriage with EFT Attachment Questions 

Have you ever felt like you and your spouse are speaking different languages? Like no matter how hard you try, the two of you just keep missing each other? 

You’re not alone. Many couples struggle with emotional disconnection—not because they don’t love each other, but because they don’t know how to answer the real questions underneath the conflict. 

In this episode of the Coaching Your Family Relationships Podcast, I share: 

  • A personal story from my early marriage that shows how easy it is to miss each other emotionally.
  • The three powerful attachment questions from Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT) that can completely shift the way you relate to your partner.
  • Why “being there” for your spouse is about emotional presence—not just doing things for them.
  • How we actually keep choosing our partner every single day—not just when we said “I do.”
  • The truth about bids for connection—and why so many of us miss them.
  • Practical steps you can take this week to show up differently and begin rebuilding emotional connection in your marriage.


Whether you’ve been married for five years or thirty-five, learning to answer these three questions—Are you there for me? Do I matter to you? Will you turn toward me?—can help you rebuild trust, deepen intimacy, and create a more secure bond with your spouse.

If you’ve been feeling distant, disconnected, or like you’re living more like roommates than partners, this episode will give you both insight and actionable steps to start creating change.

Resources Mentioned in This Episode:
 

Tina Gosney is the Family Conflict Coach. She works with parents who have families in conflict to help them become the grounded, confident leaders their family needs.
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Tina is certified in family relationships and a trauma informed coach.
Visit tinagosney.com for more information on coaching services.

Tina Gosney:

What if I told you most of the fights that you're having with your partner are really not about the thing that you're fighting about. It wasn't about the tone that someone said something with, or the dishes in the sink that didn't get put away or done, or even someone else giving the other person the silent treatment. They're really about three deeper questions that your heart is asking, even if you're not aware of it, and even if your mouth never says that out loud, everyone is asking these three questions. I learned this the hard way. I'm Tina Gosney family conflict coach and the host of coaching your family relationships podcast. Let me take you back 35 years. So this was the first year of our marriage. My husband's brother and his wife had just been in a car accident. We got a call that they were an accident and we needed to be at the hospital. We did not know how serious it was. We ended up sitting in one of those, you know, the family waiting rooms, where you're just waiting to hear news, and everybody was tense, and it was super quiet, and we were all just waiting for someone to come in and tell us what had happened. And in that moment, I was a newlywed. All I wanted to be doing was be there for my husband and to help him. So I reached out, and I put my hand on his back, and I was like, saying without words. I was like, I'm here, I'm here to support you. And what happened next? He brushed it off. He actually scooted away from me in his chair. And I was stunned, and so hurt, not just because he pulled away physically, but it was an emotional blow. I felt like I did not belong in that room, like I was an intruder that was his real family. I didn't know what I was at that point, but whatever it was, I didn't matter that one moment so many years ago planted a belief that followed me and plagued me for many, many years, I had this thought of they're more important than me. I'm never going to come first. I'm always going to be second to his family. We never talked about that till many, many years later, decades, actually, but it shaped the way that I showed up. It shaped how close I let myself get to him, and it shaped what I expected from him, and what I stopped asking for. I had no idea that I was doing this at the time, but what I really needed was to know that I was important and that what I wanted mattered. I needed to have that emotional reassurance. Couple weeks ago, Episode 184 I had a discussion with Thomas Westonholtz, who is an EFT therapist, and we had a discussion about attachment styles and about tuning into your partner. So this episode is a continuation of that same topic. If you haven't listened to that episode yet, I would suggest pushing pause, going and listening to it, and then coming back to this one, although they are great companions to each other. Sue Johnson is the founder of Emotionally Focused Therapy, and this is called EFT. It says in almost every couple conflict, there are three unspoken questions at play. These are the questions, are you there for me? Do I matter to you? Will you turn toward me and respond? Today, we're going to unpack those questions. We're going to see what they really mean, why they're so important, and how you can start answering them in your relationship, even if it's been years and years of emotional resistance and distance. So let's dive into it. We're going to go to the first question, are you there for me? Now, the tricky part is that most of us think that we are there for our partner, even if you know, especially if we're doing things for them, like helping out with chores, running errands, helping them to fix problems. But what we're talking about is different. We're talking about emotional presence. Are you there emotionally for me, and I'm going to be totally honest with you, emotions can be very uncomfortable for almost everybody, when someone we love is crying or angry or overwhelmed or stressed out. It just feels really big to us. We think, you know, it would be I'm in charge of fixing their emotions. It's so easy for us to think that it's our job to fix those emotions and make it better for them, but it's not our job to fix their emotions. Emotions. Emotions aren't something that need to be fixed. It's our job to sit with them and to be with them in their emotions. But we can't do that if we are not in tune with our own emotions. It's actually, you know, almost impossible for us to sit with someone else in their emotions if we don't know how to sit in our own So instead, we do things like say, You're overreacting. Come on, it's not that big of a deal. Get over it already. Or we say something like, look on the bright side, it could be worse. You should be grateful that it's not worse. You know that family down the street, it's so much worse for them. Just be grateful that you're not them, or we might just change the subject and talk about something different, try to distract them. Maybe we make up an excuse to leave the room. Sometimes we stay there, but we just mentally check out, like their emotions feel too much for us and we can't handle it, and so we check out. This goes right back to nervous system management. It's something I talked about with Leah Davidson in Episode 180 if we don't know how to calm our own nervous system, then we cannot stay present when our partner is dysregulated. It is not possible for us to do that being with our partner in their emotional reactions does not mean that we have to carry that for them or fix it for them. It means sitting with them in the storm and being willing to say something like, Hey, I'm here with you. I don't know what to say right now, but I'm here. I see you, we tend to think that we are these thinking, rational, reasoning, human beings. The truth is that we are more emotional beings than we are thinking beings. We just haven't been taught that. And so when we confuse doing and fixing instead of being with someone, we're missing the very heart of what makes us human, and we're missing a big part of our partner. You might be thinking, you know, I'm always there. I do everything for them. How can they say that I'm not there? But being is different than doing. Your partner is not looking for someone to solve their problems. They're looking for someone to sit with them and stay with them through their emotional experience of having the problem. We're going to go to question number two, do I matter to you? This is the second unspoken question, sometimes even unconscious question. And this one really cuts deep, because it's not about romance, it's not about buying flowers or these big, grand gestures. It's about significance. And that are this that's just the small, simple, tiny, little things that say, you know, you're constantly asking this question, Am I important to you? Am I valued? Am I more than just your roommate or your co parent or your business partner in running this household? Are we living more than just a parallel life when we partner up in our lives? We are not just choosing somebody one time, you know, back when you got married, or you moved in together, and you said, Yes, I will be with you. I will marry you. I will live with you. That is not the one time we choose. We have to keep choosing people, our partner, over and over and over again. We do it every single day. We just don't realize that we're doing it. We either choose them, if we don't choose them every single day. This is the reality. Though. We choose when we decide how to spend our time. We choose when we set or we don't set boundaries with extended family. We choose when we pick up the phone at dinner or when we put it down, we choose when we look up from the TV or their computer, when they walk into the room. And there's a million other ways that we choose, but every day, we're sending messages to that person, whether or not they matter to us. And the kicker here is that sometimes we think we're choosing them, but they don't feel chosen. You might be, you know, working extra hours to provide a living and a standard of living for your spouse. You might be taking care of the house and the finances and the kids, and in your mind, all of that is saying, I'm choosing you. You matter. Why else would I be doing all this but your partner might feel like they're getting your leftovers for one person. The question, do I matter gets answered when their partner makes eye contact and listens to them for another person, it's you. Know, just giving them a pat on the arm or touching them on the shoulder when you pass by each other, for someone else that's hearing thank you that means so much to me, or I love you without having to ask for it. But this is where a lot of couples get stuck, because we give love in the way that we want to receive it. So we give it in the way that makes sense to us, but we're not them. We don't know what they want, unless we ask them what they want, and so we're give we might be giving them a lot of what we think is love, but it's not the way they want to receive it. So we got to ask them. Now, a lot of times, when I talk about this with people, they'll say, but they know I love them, you know, I said I said it once in a while. I said it when I signed up for this life together. I say it all the time, by the things that I do. Why do I have to keep proving it? But Love isn't this contract that you sign once and then you file away. Love is like a campfire. It needs tending. It needs fresh wood to be thrown on it, or the fire burns out. And I want you to ask yourself, Am I keeping the fire going in a way that my partner can actually feel the fire, or am I just assuming that they can feel the fire? Or am I listening to what they are trying to tell me about what they want? Because I guarantee you, if they want something different than what you're giving them, they are telling you. They might not be saying it in those exact words, but they're telling you in a different way. At the heart of it, they want to know, do I matter to you? And this is not a question that your partner asks one time. It's a question that they ask 1000 times a day, every single day, the way you answer it through your presence or your choices or your attention, either builds that intimacy or it slowly erodes it. The third question we have here is, will you turn towards me and respond? Another way to describe this is bids for connection. You might have heard me talk about bids for connection before, and we all make bids all the time, and so are all the other people around us. The problem is, though, is that we're missing those bids. I recently saw this reel online with Simon Sinek, and he illustrated this perfectly. He told a story about having dinner with a close friend. She mentioned, she said, last week was a super rough, rough week. And he said, Why don't you tell me I would have been there for you. And she said, I did. I sent you a text. And so he pulls out his phone, and he starts scrolling through their messages, and he saw a text that said, Hey, what are you doing? Do you want to come over? And he said, he holds up his phone to her, and he said, Wait, these texts the ones that look like all your other texts. And she said, Yeah, that's the one. When we're struggling. Our bids for connection don't always come with a flashing neon sign. They don't often say, I'm struggling. They just sound or they look ordinary. So your partner's bid might be a hand on your shoulder, an invitation to watch a show together, sharing a casual story about their day, and wanting to tell you and share their day with you, maybe even an offer to help you do something. But if we're distracted or we're feeling defensive or we're disengaged, we can easily miss it, and every time we miss it, it just kind of chips away at the emotional bond. And you do not have to find and locate every single bid that would be, you'd be super human if you could do that. But you want to start being more aware of looking for those bids and interpreting how they're asking you for connection. And one thing that is common when I talk about this with my clients, it's they are saying to me when I turn towards them, it doesn't feel like they turn towards me. And that's really hard. I don't want to keep trying if it's not, if it's not going to be reciprocated, and that is totally valid. I really get it. It really hurts to reach out and not be met and but here's the reality, if both partners wait for the other one to go first, then nothing changes. Someone has to be the cycle breaker. Even one small moment of turning towards can start to reset a pattern. I want to be really practical and give you some things that you can try this week. So just so that you don't just leave this podcast understanding these intellectually, but I want you to start having a way to live them, because we really learned through lived experience. Here are some things that you can try in the next few days for that first question, are you there for me? Try practicing emotional presence. So the next time your partner shows big emotions, let's say it's anger or frustration or sadness or overwhelm, notice what your first gut instinct is, do you want to fix it? Do you want to brush it off. Are you trying to change the subject? Do you want to leave the room? Just notice what's my first instinct? And instead of doing that, try pausing, calm yourself down a little bit, if you need to, and then just say something like, Man, that sounds really hard. Even you can even say, I don't know what to say, but I just want you to know that I'm listening. You don't have to solve it. You just have to stay present. We just need someone to witness our life and our difficulties. For the second question, do I matter to you. Try choosing one gesture. Ask yourself, how can I show my spouse that they matter to me this week in a way that they want to receive, in a way that they will actually feel it? It could be as simple as looking up and listening when they're talking, writing a quick note or sending them a text, something like, I am so glad I get to do life with you sitting next to them on the couch instead of across the room. Maybe you turn down an invitation to go out with a friend or go do something else and you spend time together instead. This is not about grand, giant gestures. It's about just this consistent message that you matter to me. You matter to me. I choose you. You are more important to me than anything else. For the third question, will you turn toward me? Try to catch a bid for connection. So put on your connection goggles. Notice small bids that your partner makes. Do they reach out and touch your arm? Do they invite you to do something like watch a show with them, or go for a ride and run an errand with them? Do they mention something about their day? Do they offer to help you with something or ask for help with something. Those are all bits for connection, and they don't always come with a label. Fact, they rarely come with a label. Your job is to notice them and turn towards it could be as simple as pausing what you're doing, making eye contact and saying, Yeah, I do want to do that, or tell me more, or responding with warmth instead of distraction. You do not have to do this perfectly. You're going to make a lot of mistakes. I have made a lot of mistakes, but small moments do matter, and one intentional pause, one choosing a gesture, one bid that you turn towards instead of ignore or turn away. Every time you answer one of those three questions with presence and care and engagement, you're adding a log onto that fire of your relationship, and over time, those logs will build that warm and the trust and the connection that lasts yesterday, my husband and I celebrated 35 years of marriage, and that is a long time. Let me tell you, we have been through a lot in those 35 years. For a great number of years, we missed each other. We did not do a great job of answering these questions for each other. We struggled. We turned away from instead of towards. There were seasons when it felt like we were just surviving and we like we were co business partners that didn't even like each other very much. We were just in survival mode, and we were not connecting. What changed was not that we suddenly became different people. It's just that we started to learn to pay attention. We began noticing those moments that when what we really needed was to be validated or recognized or be responded to, and we chose often to turn towards instead of a way we didn't. Still don't get all the bids. We still try to notice them. We still miss them, but we have learned to choose each other over and over again and to apologize when we miss things, especially when it's hard, we turn towards. Each other. And I want to be really, really clear here is that we are very far from perfect. We are always going to be a work in progress, but we are facing a different direction now than we were for many years, and when we began to operate differently, when we started answering those questions for each other by being present and engaging, our relationship changed. So I'm not sharing this as someone who has it all figured out. I'm sharing this as someone who has been in the trenches and knows how hard this can feel, but also I know how worth it this work is, because those small choices really do add up. They don't just change the moment. They change the marriage. And if you're thinking, I want to do this and I have no idea where to start, that's okay. That's exactly what I help people with in coaching. You do not have to figure this out on your own. We can do this work together, step by step. So if this episode has resonated with you, then reach out and let's talk, because your relationship can change too it has to start with awareness. We can't change anything until we're aware of where we actually are. That's where it all starts. You can schedule a free 30 minute connection call with me, and we can get started. The link is in the show notes. I hope to see you there. You.