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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Explore this classic dynamic of couples therapy—an angry woman and a withdrawn man—that’s often confusing for therapists, with couples therapist Jette Simon.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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Not that any of these ideas were, strictly speaking, invented by Rogers—no psychotherapy is really thinkable without them. Still, Rogers was probably the first to put them all together in one comprehensive package, which during the '50s, '60s, and '70s became an almost universal therapeutic credo, even a brand identity that determines to this day what most people—lay people at any rate—think of when they imagine what a therapist is or does. Carl Rogers, you could say, was a kind of Mr. Rogers for grown-ups. In fact, Rogers could fairly claim to be the most American therapist. A small-d democrat down to his toes, he popularized the word client (which has since become almost ubiquitous in the field), suggesting an independent, self-directed customer seeking a perfectly ordinary service in the public marketplace, rather than a sick, helpless patient, the lowest rung of the medical hierarchy. He democratized psychotherapy itself, and did his best to deflate the delusions of grandeur held by some of its more august practitioners by purposely blurring the distinction between psychotherapist (usually applied only to psychiatrists and psychoanalysts) and counselor, a basket term enclosing just about anybody who gave people helpful advice—social worker, clergyperson, schoolworker, teacher, nurse, lay facilitator of self-help groups, even a good friend. Rogers rejected the determinism of both Freudian psychoanalysis and Skinnerian behaviorism. In his view, Freud's disenchanted take on human nature was "Calvinistic" in its emphasis on the "the evilness of the natural man," and he compared Skinner's behaviorist utopian fantasy, Walden II, to George Orwells's 1984, a dystopian allegory based on Stalin's totalitarian state. Rogers thought that the "self-actualized" or "fully functioning" person was by definition a subjectively free being. While not nearly as idealistic about human nature as his detractors insisted—he recognized our species' capacity for cruelty, destruction, immaturity, antisocial behavior, and all-round nastiness—he believed deeply that all human beings trend in "basically a positive direction," inherently "forward moving, constructive, realistic, trustworthy." Rogers also democratized the relationship between therapist-counselor and client. He believed that clients themselves—not their shrinks, however highly degreed—knew best what was hurting them and what needed fixing. Their own inner knowledge just had to be gently coaxed out, given an opportunity to emerge like a tender green shoot in the warmth of the spring sun. Clients didn't need to have their words "interpreted" back to them. What they needed was the undemanding presence of a compassionate, deeply attuned listener, who didn't diagnose them, explain their problems to them, ask many specific questions, lead them in particular directions, or tell them what they should do. |
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