About Me

Gudrun Widmann

A clinical psychologist specialized in emotionally focused couple therapy

So many couples live below their happiness potential. What I find so gratifying about my work as a couple therapist is that I can help couples achieve their true potential. Emotionally focused couple therapy provides me with the structure and the tools that help me effectively guide couples on this journey toward long-lasting changes and a new understanding of love and their relationship. 

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Having an area of expertise was a conscious decision for me. I always wanted to specialise in order to foster the most detailed and fine-tuned skill that I can. This is why I focus on relationships, emotions in relationships and intimacy in relationships instead of the wider range of psychotherapy.

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That couple therapy requires a high degree of emotional engagement is fitting for my personality - I always felt naturally drawn to human beings and emotions. If you are looking for a therapist that has a calm and soft base presence, is very receptive to where you are right now on your journey and with your emotions, and that has learned to gently take the lead and guide you into and through emotions, to re-choreograph those between you, develop plans and goals and guidance for you, someone who is comfortable with intense emotions and complex situations, then this might be a fit.

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Working in an area that is research-based was important to me. Not only the initial success rates from the first studies on emotionally focused couple therapy convinced me, but emotionally focused couple therapy is a highly researched form of therapy that includes an ever growing body of research that is still being fine-tuned through process research. This means that emotionally focused couple therapy gives me structure / road maps that inform my guidance in a detailed and clear way for my work with couples. I am still learning from this growing field (and able to contribute myself). For more information on the research basis of emotionally focused therapy see EFT Research Literature. If you want to inform yourself about how emotionally focused couple therapy informs therapists and couples, then reading Hold Me Tight by Dr. Sue Johnson is a good start. While process research is a lot more detailed, Hold Me Tight gives a good starting input to couples who are interested.

I also very much appreciated how the background theory and all the knowledge we have on attachment theory has genuinely helped understand my clients deeply in the real world - something that I find crucially important in therapy.

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I started my journey of becoming a psychologist specialising in relationships in 2013 as my Bachelor of Science thesis was on the impact of stress on emotional attachment styles in romantic relationships. I took my first course in emotionally focused couple therapy in 2014. I volunteered to help build the EFT community in Germany, translate numerous training materials and created subtitles for training videos of emotionally focused couple therapy, live-translated/interpreted trainings of emotionally focused couple therapy, helped create lovie.de. After contributing to the growth of the EFT community in Germany, I focused on my personal practice and was able to start doing it in Berlin full time from 2018 till now. In the future, I would like to contribute to the growth of couple therapy as an applied research field. Right now my focus is on perfecting my skills as a couple therapist by learning from my couples, taking trainings in different approaches to emotions and couples.