Your Emotions Are Information.
Learn to Use Them.
Certified EFT Therapist
If you’re here, you’re probably hurting…
Perhaps you’re feeling overwhelmed or stuck in your life and your relationships. Maybe even hopeless that you’ll ever find your rhythm again. I hear you.
I believe your feelings make sense. You, like so many of us, were taught that your emotions were a sign of weakness that would only get in the way of reason. Though this was never the truth, the force and repetition of that message often causes us to discount and lose touch with our gut feelings. And, without them, it makes sense that we’d feel unmoored, rudderless and confused.
You, like all of us, came equipped with an emotional operating system to help you adapt to the most challenging experiences that we humans can face. Without it, we wouldn’t have survived as a species. Yet, even when we lose touch, our emotions are still alive in us and can come back online if we just begin to listen and respond to the messages they send us.
At Emotionalflow, I help people hear the messages their emotions are trying to send them so they can lead vibrant lives.
Call me for a free 20-minute consultation.
Emotion
Emotion is information that’s faster than thought
Protect a boundary
Anger
Flee a threat
Fear
Grieve a loss
Sadness
Expel a toxin
Disgust
Play, Engage, Recover
Happiness
A few emotion facts:
- The human brain’s response time to fear-based emotional stimuli has been measured in the the range of .02-.03 seconds.
- Experiencing emotion is not “weak”: our emotions evolved over millennia to ensure the survival of our species.
- Vulnerability is a strength: interpersonal bonds, trust and empathy are greatly enhanced by emotional transparency.
- Reason is not superior to emotion, it depends on it! Rigorous scientific studies have shown that reason and decision-making rely on neural connections between the cognitive and emotional regions of the brain.
- Instinct, “gut decisions” and intuition are the potentially life-saving capacities of heightened emotional awareness.
About Paul
Even when we are unaware of them, our emotions guide our actions. However, when the emotional origins of our actions are obscured, we become a mystery to ourselves and to each other. I believe that lost awareness of emotion is at the root of most of our problems. In my practice, I offer the safety and gentle guidance necessary for couples and individuals alike to feel, express and regulate their emotions. With these capacities on board, they are well on their way to addressing most any challenge that life can present.
My name is Paul Howard. I’m a licensed marriage and family therapist certified in EFT who works with couples and individuals across California. I gained my appreciation for emotion from my own experience and validated it in my studies of evolution and neuroscience. On this universal foundation I have built strong alliances with a wide variety of humans: women and men, gay and straight, old and young. I am deeply respectful of ethnic and cultural diversity.
How I can help you
Contact me for a free 20-minute consultation to learn more about how Emotionalflow can help you.
Couple Therapy
Regardless of whether you’re in a new relationship or have been together for years, the loss of connection with our most intimate partners is excruciatingly painful. And when we humans feel our most important connections threatened, we protest the disconnection in two fundamental and opposing ways: pursuit and withdrawal.
I use a form of couple therapy called Emotionally Focused Therapy (EFT). EFT is an exceptionally effective approach that examines how these two styles of protest fit together to create the couple’s negative cycle of disconnection.
As an EFT therapist, I help partners drop beneath the content of their disagreements so we can focus on the process. Together, as we discover the ways their protests mesh to create a unique, repeating pattern, conflict begins to deescalate and they start to feel the more vulnerable emotions that were hidden beneath their defenses. As they share what has been hidden, their empathy for one another increases and they regain a sense of safety and comfort in their connection. Once more on the same team, the partners can reach out for what they need and navigate the full range of life experiences, together.
Contact me for a free 20-minute consultation to learn more about how Emotionalflow can help you.
Contact me for a free 20-minute consultation to learn more about how Emotionalflow can help you.
Individuals
“The true opposite of depression is neither gaiety nor absence of pain, but vitality — the freedom to experience spontaneous feelings. It is part of the kaleidoscope of life that these feelings are not only happy, beautiful, or good but can reflect the entire range of human experience…”
Alice Miller- The Drama of the Gifted Child
Be it through familial and cultural conditioning, an emotional wound or overwhelming experience, most of us can’t get through life unscathed. No matter the cause, we all experience pain and we do our best to cope. And because our emotions are inherently intelligent, our means of coping are usually adaptive for the situations we face. However, if our emotions go unrecognized or fail to accomplish their intended action, they can get stuck and go underground. When this happens, our once adaptive emotions become slaves to the past and stuck emotional energy takes the form of what we call symptoms.
To get this stuck emotional energy flowing again, I use a research-validated approach called Emotionally Focused Individual Therapy (EFIT). Working collaboratively with my clients, I help them find where they are stuck and complete the emotion that was interrupted so they can move on. No longer caught in a cycle of actions unconsciously tied to the past, they recover a sense of self-compassion and an ability to feel the full range of their emotions in the present.
Contact me for a free 20-minute consultation to learn more about how Emotionalflow can help you.
Contact me for a free 20-minute consultation to learn more about how Emotionalflow can help you.
People in Tech
You work super hard and you’re totally committed to nailing the product, but something’s not quite right. Could it be that your business partner doesn’t hear you, your boss doesn’t see you or your team doesn’t follow you?
You’re feeling exhausted and this just isn’t fun anymore.
What’s wrong with this picture?
Emotion and relationships could have something to do with it.
As a former product design engineer with over 30 years experience in a wide variety of roles and workplace settings, I have a first-hand understanding of the issues faced by people in tech. I know that no matter how cerebral the job is or how hard the technical problems are, the pressure of working in an organization usually gets to us through our emotions and our relationships. You can only jam past them for so long.
Let Emotionalflow help you with that.