Licensed Marriage & Family Therapist ##2022045023

Almost everyone I sit with in couples therapy wants the same thing, even when they'd never use this word for it: covenant. Not a contract. Not an arrangement where both people get what they're owed and nobody asks for more. Something closer to what the Old Testament scholar Walter Brueggemann spent a career describing — a bond of real mutuality, where two people are actually given to each other, actually known, actually respond to each other rather than manage each other.

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Nobody has to convince couples this is what they want. They already want it. That's never the hard part.

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The hard part is the how.

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WHAT BRUEGGEMANN ACTUALLY NAMES

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Brueggemann's work on covenant, especially in The Covenanted Self, pushes past the idea that faithfulness is a matter of duty — showing up, keeping the rules, not breaking the arrangement. He redefines fidelity as participation in what he calls life-giving and life-receiving relationship: connection built on mutuality, not obligation. And he describes the shape of that relationship as a dialectic — two movements held together. One is bold, unguarded protest: bringing your real complaint, your real want, your real disappointment, and refusing to hide it. The other is a kind of self-abandonment in praise: letting yourself be moved, letting yourself need, letting go of the defended self that keeps score.

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Both movements require the same thing underneath them: real exposure to another person, and real trust that the exposure won't be the end of you.

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That's a beautiful description of what intimacy is. It is not, on its own, a way to get there.

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WHERE THE THEOLOGY RUNS OUT

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I've had couples read passages like this and nod along — yes, that's what we want, that's the marriage we meant to have. And then, within a week, they're back in the same fight they've had for eleven years, no closer to that mutuality than when they started. Naming the vision doesn't unlock it. If anything, naming it clearly can make couples feel worse — now they know exactly what they're missing, with no map for how to close the distance.

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This is where I think EFT earns its keep. Not as a competing account of what intimacy is — Brueggemann and Sue Johnson are describing the same reality from two directions — but as the actual roadmap for getting from wanting covenant to living inside one.

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THE PROTEST YOU'RE ALREADY MAKING — JUST NOT ON PURPOSE

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Here's the thing that took me a while to see clearly: most couples are already doing Brueggemann's "bold protest." They're just doing it sideways. The sharp comment, the withdrawal, the slammed door, the silent treatment — underneath almost all of it is an unspoken complaint that never gets said plainly: I don't feel like I matter to you right now. EFT doesn't invent the protest. It takes the protest a couple is already making blindly, through the fight, and helps them make it on purpose — out loud, without the disguise of anger, direct enough that a partner can actually hear it as the reach for connection it always was.

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That's step one of the roadmap: turning a hidden, defended protest into an honest one.

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THE PRAISE YOU'RE AFRAID TO RISK

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The second movement — self-abandonment, letting yourself be moved and need another person — is, in my experience, the harder one for most couples. It requires a kind of undefended trust that doesn't come from deciding to have it. EFT's later stages are built almost entirely around making that trust survivable: helping a partner risk a real, unguarded reach — I need you, I'm scared, I miss you — inside a structure specifically designed to keep that reach from landing on rejection. You don't get to self-abandonment by willing yourself into vulnerability. You get there by practicing it in small enough doses, with enough safety built around it, that your nervous system starts to believe it might actually be met.

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That practice — not the theology, not the desire — is the part almost nobody has a plan for. It's also the part therapy can actually offer.

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TWO LANGUAGES, ONE THING

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I don't think Brueggemann and Johnson would have had much trouble understanding each other. Covenant theology says: real relationship requires mutual exposure and interdependence, not self-protection. Attachment theory says almost exactly the same thing in clinical language: humans are wired for connection, and the nervous system's felt sense of safety with another person is what makes real closeness possible at all. One names the vision in the language of faith. The other hands you the steps.

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You don't have to choose between wanting covenant and doing the work of building it. If you already have the wanting — and most couples I meet do — EFT is where the how starts.