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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Explore this classic dynamic of couples therapy—an angry woman and a withdrawn man—that’s often confusing for therapists, with couples therapist Jette Simon.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! 
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Said Robert Aylmer, a Bowen student: "Bowen was the first to realize you can't translate the individual psychoanalytic concepts into the language of families, and the first to see the family as a structure in itself, which had its own wiring." The family wasn't, as previously believed, just a collection of mutually influential but separate psyches living together under the same roof. Rather, the submerged ebb and flow of family life, the simultaneous push and pull between family members, both for distance and togetherness, was the driving force underlying all human behavior. While Bowen didn't invent systems thinking, he was the first to conceptualize the family as a natural system, which could be fully understood only in terms of the fluid but predictable processes between family members. Unlike most family or individual therapists, Bowen conceived of personal growth and family interaction as part of an indivisible whole, and he created a therapy that involved both the self of the individual and the multiple relations in the family. He introduced a form of family therapy based on one family member's researching and coming to terms with his or her own family of origin. Finally, Bowen gave family therapists a new way to know themselves. Said Carl Whitaker: "He transformed the psychoanalytic process of finding yourself into something particularly appropriate for family therapy. He showed family therapists a way they could look at themselves and their own lives, analogous to Freud's self-analysis." Bowen, alone, made it a critical point that therapists differentiate themselves from their own families before trying to help others do the same. Bowen's ideas have been used to improve the functioning of businesses, religious congregations, and other organizations, applied to ethical, cultural, economic, and gender issues, and synthesized with object-relations and other psychodynamic models. But these variations from his orthodoxy gave him no pleasure. Toward the end of his life, he went so far as to dismiss family therapy as an "evolutionary misadventure," a mere grab bag of marketable new therapy techniques. For Bowen, therapy was of a single cloth with his entire theory; tear out this or that piece as a "technique" and the whole tapestry became a tattered rag. "He wasn't very happy with what most of us were doing," said Philip Guerin, a former student of Bowen's. Yet it was his very devotion to pure theory that made it possible for him to give so much to so many. In 1975, Bowen summarized the fundamental insight from which his theories evolved: "Far more human activity is governed by man's emotional system than he has been willing to admit, and there is far more similarity than dissimilarity between the ‘dance of life' in lower forms and the ‘dance of life' in human forms." Not a flattering idea, perhaps, but an idea that has proven tremendously fruitful. |
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