Overcoming Your Fears of Doing Couples Therapy

• Develop procedures and materials that prepare clients to engage in therapy more productively.
• Encourage differentiation in the very first session.
• Use structured exercises that give couples an opportunity to take more responsibility for change.
• Avoid common traps that reduce the chance of therapy succeeding.
• Develop styles of engagement that distinguish the needs of conflict-avoidant couples from highly conflicted couples.

Expanding Your Emotional Range as a Clinician

• Distinguishing between the therapist’s responsibility to manage therapy and getting caught up in the content that preoccupies clients.
• Helping partners to more clearly envision both their current survival dance and their dream of a better relationship.
• Learning how to help partners visit each other's experiential world, especially the “tough neighborhoods.”
• Developing your personal comfort with intense emotionality and your ability to help coach clients through their own intense feeling states.
• Understanding how to create a relational space in therapy that encourages risk taking and deep emotional learning.

In or Out? Helping Couples with Different Divorce Agendas

• Assess whether both partners are truly customers for couples therapy or if you are dealing with a mixed agenda couple.
• Avoid the three most common mistakes with ambivalent couples facing divorce.
• Present the goals of Discernment Counseling in contrast with Couples Therapy.
• Combine individual and joint sessions to highlight the most meaningful personal learning for each partner.
• Handle secrets that may emerge in individual sessions with each partner without feeling ethically compromised.

Confidentiality, Secrets, and How to Deal with Affairs

• Disputing the idea that there is a victim and perpetrator in every affair scenario.
• Recognizing that some affairs can actually transform, rather than traumatize, a relationship.
• Creating a stable container in the midst of crisis for exploring what the affair means for both partners.
• Making a distinction between being a detective and being an investigator in determining how much information needs to be revealed about the affair.
• Having patience in helping couples discover what repair means for them in the aftermath of an affair.

Angry Women, Withdrawn Men: Breaking Through in Couples Therapy

• Creating a welcoming atmosphere of safety in the initial session for both partners.
• Highlighting individual responsibility by focusing each partner on their own behaviors that cause the other person pain.
• Developing methods for setting boundaries with the angry partner while defining anger as a protest against feeling disconnected.
• Highlighting positive features of the couple’s relationship in the first session.
• Teaching couples a range of processes from Imago Relationship Therapy, including mirroring, validation and the Behavior Change Request.

Truth-Telling in Couples Work

• Understanding the limits of empathy and attachment-based psychotherapy.
• Avoiding collusive alliances based on manipulation in favor of collaborative alliances based on straight talk.
• Recognizing partners’ power to mind map and understand the impact of their own actions even when they don’t acknowledge it.
• Learning how to create an atmosphere of challenge and truth-telling as early as possible to avoid manipulation and time-wasting.
• Bringing out the best in clients, which often emerges when they are coming clean about what is the worst in them.