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NP0038: Who’s Afraid of Couples Therapy?
Welcome to our “Who’s Afraid of Couples Therapy?” This exciting series, back by popular demand, is based on our November/December 2011 issue on this topic and will explore the challenges of couples work.
What are the most effective strategies in working with couples? How can therapists structure therapy—particularly in the early sessions—so that couples leave with a sense of hope, rather than frustration? Can working with individuals who have serious issues in their relationships actually be detrimental to them? Find out the answers to these questions and much more. In this first session with expert couples therapists Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson, the creators of the Developmental Model of Couples Therapy, you’ll find out why clinicians often avoid working with couples and how you can better prepare yourself for couples therapy work.
How can therapists most effectively work with emotion in the consulting room—particularly when it comes to couples therapy? Learn with internationally known couples therapist Hedy Schleifer how to help create a nourishing connection between partners, define a role as therapist-as-guide, and much more. Schleifer, who’s pioneered the training of Imago Relationship therapists internationally, will go into how to use this theory in practice and how to best work with emotions.
What happens when partners in couples therapy have two different agendas in mind? Hear from expert William Doherty on this little spoken about topic. Learn how Discernment Counseling, an approach that helps couples clarify their feelings about the next step in their relationship, can help both clients and therapists.
Is it possible to rebuild trust and intimacy in a couple’s relationship after a partner has had an affair? How can therapists help? Hear from Esther Perel, author of the international bestseller Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence, on how to help couples after an infidelity and the role that cultural perspectives have in this emotional situation.
Explore this classic dynamic of couples therapy—an angry woman and a withdrawn man—that’s often confusing for therapists, with couples therapist Jette Simon. Learn more about what’s behind the feelings of anger and the behavior of withdrawing, and how clinicians can more effectively work with shame and fear of disconnection.
Hear an unconventional perspective on couples therapy from David Schnarch, who believes that the best way to help couples is to challenge partners to change their individual behaviors and attitudes. Schnarch’s direct, upfront approach to helping clients will illustrate a different viewpoint on effective couples therapy.
Join Marty Klein, a marriage and family therapist and certified sex therapist, us for a candid discussion about the assumptions that both clients and therapists often share that can get in the way of improving couples’ sexual relationships.
Discover with Kathryn Rheem how to respond effectively when clients express strong feelings in session. Based on Emotionally Focused Therapy, you’ll explore attunement and how to use your own emotions to help clients move beyond attachment injuries.
After the session, please let us know what you think. If you ever have any technical questions or issues, please feel free to email support@psychotherapynetworker.org.
Whole Psychiatry: Alternatives to Conventional Psychopharmacology with Robert Hedaya
Meds: Myths and Realities: NP0035 – Session 4
Is psychopharmacology is a 'go-to' in your practice? Join Robert Hedaya as he discusses how to treat the bodily systems that underlay many mental health issues while avoiding medication. After the session, please let us know what you think. If you ever have any technical questions or issues, please feel free to email support@psychotherapynetworker.org.Tough Customers: Is It Them or Us?
By Rich Simon As therapists, many of us practice in two different worlds. In the first, we see polite, well-behaved, articulate clients with solid values. They engage fully in therapy, talk cogently about their problems, listen attentively to our responses, make reasonably good-faith efforts to follow our suggestions, and sooner or later get better. No wonder we genuinely like these people! Does This Kid Need Medication? with Ron Taffel
Meds: Myths and Realities: NP0035 – Session 3
Do you feel like you could be a more effective therapist with your younger clients? Do you find it hard to determine when interventions--psychological and pharmacological--might be needed? Join Ron Taffel and learn to identify key diagnostic signs that indicate medications could be helpful when dealing with depression, anxiety, AD/HD, and affective disorders. After the session, please let us know what you think. If you ever have any technical questions or issues, please feel free to email support@psychotherapynetworker.org.
 NP0008 The Great Attachment DebateThis blog focuses on discussion regarding the course NP0008 The Great Attachment Debate. NP0008, Attachment, Session 4, David SchnarchAre there any downsides to basing clinical treatment on Attachment Theory? In this session, discover why David Schnarch, a leading advocate of differentiation in the therapy process, believes that Attachment Theory keeps clients functioning as needy children. Schnarch will discuss how to use confrontation as an effective therapeutic approach. After this session with Schnarch, please take a few minutes to engage in the Comment Board and let us know what you think about using this strategy with clients. What was most relevant about this presentation? What questions did this bring up for you? We invite you to include your name and hometown along with your comment. If you ever have any technical questions, contact support@psychotherapynetworker.org.
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© 2013 Psychotherapy Networker
Something I like about your idea is that marriage isn't about being warm and fuzzy all the time. It sounds like, to you, a big part of real security in marriage is to have a couple acknowledge their baser impulses and conflict, and still be willing to stand with each other in the face of that, warts and all. "I see the parts of you I don't like and disagree with, and I still choose you in the face of that." Perhaps this is the heart of the differentiation you describe.
Yours, Walter Mehring
I very much like your take on my take on differentiation. If you're not describing the heart of differentiation, it's one of the vital organs. Or better said, you're describing the heart IN differentiation. And yes, it's part of real security in marriage.
Thanks for pulling out something I am indeed saying.
David Schnarch
This thread was recently started, coinciding with the re-showing of the Attachment Debate Webinars. The apparent goal is to promote new discussion with new participants, rather than adding them to the extensive discussion that arose from the original airing (available here: http://www.psychotherapynetworker.org/blog-communities/p004/viewpost/1294_P004_Attachment_Session_4_David_Schnarch.
I strongly recommend reading this prior thread for several reasons:
1. There are many thoughtful posts by other participants you might find interesting.
2. I've already responded at length to each of these posts, investing much time and energy in the process.
3. If you want to understand my responses to things you post here, realize you're coming in at the middle of an ongoing conversation. I hope you will appreciate why I don't plan to start over explaining things I've already covered in great detail previously. So what may sound like a cryptic or incomplete response by me, when taken by itself, may make more sense when viewed against the background of what I've already previously clarified. (This doesn't rule out the possibilty my responses are indeed cryptic or incomplete, but that hasn't characterized them so far.)
Thanks,
David Schnarch
It seems that Dr. Scharch is acutally supporting secure attachment when he is encouraging people to be in touch with themselves and to be true to themselves--in other words don't discount your sense of yourself (or betray yourself) to please your partner. To have a strong sense of self is attachment based. Dr. Siegel talks about mindfulness being one tool which can repair one's insecure attachment--and thus strengthen one's relationship with one's self.
Being attuned to another in relationship (to use attachment languate) is not about coddling, or interferring with differentiation. It's about knowing when to welcome and be close, and to encourage being on one's own.
In my humble opinion, it seems that Dr. Scharch misrepresents some of the basic assumptions of attachment based therapy.
Again, I appreciate the opportunity to hear Dr. Scharch's viewpoint, and I appreciate the Networker for providing the forum for this attachment debate.
Christine Walker, LCSW
Charlottesville, Va
434-923-8253
Denny McGihon
Sorry to hear that you had some technical issues with the video. Please contact support@psychotherapynetworker.org and they'll be able to help you figure out a way to resolve the issue and make sure you're able to access the session again.
Sincerely,
Psychotherapy Networker
Thereis an echo here of some of the classical work in the field of family therapy and communication, such as that of Paul Watzlawick. "We cannot not communicate," and focus on growth, not healing. . . Something old, something new!
I appreciate Christine Walker's comments, in terms of clarifying and correcting some of the assumptions about attachment-based therapy. Growth and transformation, I believe, require a skillful balancing of BOTH support and challenge, as is described in the work of Harvard developmental psychologist, Robert Kegan.
This is a rich and fascinating dialogue! Thank you.
Re your comment about "skillful balance of both support and challenge"--see my "Yoda comment" to Sam (above). I love Kegan's work too, and if you read my posts in the prior thread you'll see that I engage in "supportive" interactions too (although I strongly take issue with dichotomizing support and challenge because collaborative confrontation IS supportive). But this doesn't get around the fact that a "skillful balance" does not necessarily mean "equal balance," and even a brief review of other posts make it clear attachment-based therapists don't think a 50-50 blend is the way to go.
As I said to Sam, our field is going to have to look harder to find an optimal balance-point than simply saying we need a "balanced" point of view.
Thanks for taking the time to comment.
David Schnarch
Thanks for the positive comment. In case you can't see my facial expression at the moment, I'm grinning from ear to ear, trying to look as non-combative and collaborative as possible. Wish I could see your expression as you read this.
I've watched many therapists try to deal with the discussion as you have, that differentiation and attachment are different parts of the same elephant, two sides of the same coin, etc. The point is it's NOT the same elephant or coin:
The world of attachment keeps envisioning an ATTACHMENTdifferentiation animal, whereas differentiation based therapists envision of DIFFERENTIATIONattachment elephant. In other words, within the attachment world, attachment is the overriding process and differentiation is a sub-process that occurs within it. In the world of differentiation, differentiation is the over-arching process and subsumes attachment. Just read posts from other readers (e.g., Christine Walker among many others) and you'll find it shockingly evident. This is not a semantic issue, it’s a very practical clinical one that very much determines what a therapist will/should do. Christine is absolutely certain attachment takes precedent over differentiation, and no doubt she does therapy that way. She envisions attachment is “the big part” of the elephant.
Yoda-like attempts to say, “there’s no real conflict here, you silly people are just focusing on different sides of the same thing” are our field’s attempt to reduce its own anxiety that these really are two different views that give rise to very different therapies. I imagine that when the Catholic Church could no longer suppress the Copernican revolution, some “peacemaker” proposed that “the earth revolves around the sun” and “the sun resolves around earth” were just two sides of the same coin and the real idea is “everything revolves around everything.” This couldn’t be farther from the truth, and avoids the crucial struggles of science at that time. Sure, many centuries later, Ken Wilber’s brilliant “holon” theory sounds like “everything is connected,” but even this is a hierarchical model.
Hope you like what you read in my book. (I’m still smiling non-combatively.)
Thanks,
David Schnarch
It was refreshing to get a different perspective on this subject. My thanks to David Schnarch for this presentation.
My point is not just that attachment therapy is deleterious when incorrectly done, or that some attachments are not positive for people. It’s that the attachment paradigm applied to adult therapy encourages deleterious therapy, and the current hegemony it enjoys makes its pitfalls invisible to many therapists.
Glad you find my different perspective refreshing. Thanks for your comment.
David Schnarch
Thanks, once again, for all the important ideas and information, and for opening our eyes and minds--broadening our views!!
I think you have an excellent point!! I do much of my thinking out loud and last night I was having one of my "thinking-out-loud" sessions in which I found myself bouncing this same viewpoint off of an acquaintance of mine. In the history of psychotherapy the various theories and therapies have often demonstrated this very idea--that there can be more than one path to the same objective.
my own feeling of being fully seen without judgement, which is in itself transforming.
Thank you for sharing that experience!!! It sounds so inviting!!
Good to see and hear you talking again about mind-mapping,rewiring the brain through intense moments of meeting etc. I especially liked the part of the interview in which you talked about how to deal with the issue of lost of trust when people come in because of an affair. Furthermore I want to thank you for the very interesting link you also made in Berlin to the work of a.o.Norman Doidge about brain plasticity. I since then used it a lot in working with couples and clients really start to derive hope from it and work with it, through Hugging Till Relaxed for instance. It seems a great contribution in transformation and in working with the best in them. I look forward to next year's Berlin workshop, greetings to Ruth,
Vera Steenhart
Amsterdam
Another area is how do you define forgiveness? I have seen it handled badly and misapplied in religious circles- the reference to turning the cheek if struck on the right cheek has more to do with not accepting a backhand blow from someone's right hand but offering to be viewed as an equal by offering a cheek that would not be hit with a back hand. I assume your statement on forgivenss has more to do with not being slapped around and saying a behavior is ok than a rejection of keeping accounts current and forgiving debts of negative and hurtful action as a means of not falling into resentment. Will you enlighten me on what your aim at knocking forgiveness and trust was in this interview?
I appreciate the modle of reaching for the best as the means of healing and empowerment, wounds need to be healed but constantly poking them does not let someone meake much progress.
Stephen Woods, Raleigh NC
Very refreshing to have somebody challenge the hegemony of attachment-based therapy. The assumption that the (only?) way to heal "attachment wounds" is through corrective emotional experience of secure attachment recreated in the theraoeutic dyad and in the marital dyad is just a theory-driven assumption, not a scientific fact. In other words, why are we assuming that differentiation is only possible after secure attachment has been achieved and experienced? Just because somebody said, you can't skip develpmental steps? And even if that might be true in childhood, why are we assuming that the same rules apply to dealing with it in - somehow achieved - adulthood?
The idea that we can achieve security via trust in our significant others has an absurd angle to it, one which can hijack and destroy therapy (although I am not denying the validity of soothing, joy, and a ton of other benefits stemming from connection with others.) The famous question: "Will you be there for me when I need you, will you hold me tight?" can be only aswered, realistically and soberly, with "Are you out of your mind? How can I possibly promise such a thing? I don't know!"
My perspective as a therapist grounded in Buddhist philosophy, psychoanalytic thought as well as CBT (Third wave) allows me to see these perils quite clearly. But if we focus on differentiation, that will lead to connection in the intersubjective space of freedom and curiosity, rather than safety based on a fantasy about a perfect (or even semi-perfect) holding by another person. Yes there is security in interpersonal relationships - but it is security derived from developing a trusting relationship with oneself and respecting even enjoying other people's separateness. A lot (not only good sex) is possible in such space...