Couple Dynamics & Conflict
These articles explore the challenging dynamics and pain couples often bring to therapy. They follow clinicians as they work with couples facing repeating fights and stuck narratives over everything including intimacy, money, parenting, and sometimes deciding whether to stay together at all. You'll find honest, vulnerable reflections and cutting-edge insights from clinicians navigating these often-choppy waters alongside their clients. They offer practical guidance on slowing reactivity, questioning blame, and addressing contempt. Learn which interventions can best help your couple clients address conflict with honesty and respect, building a stronger and more resilient base for their future. Learn from Esther Perel, John and Julie Gottman, Sue Johnson, Ellyn Bader, and others.
The Couples' Work We Weren't Trained For
Grief, Resilience, and Intimacy in Long-Term Love
You don't need both partners to do couples therapy; working with individuals isn't impossible, it's just based on different premises. Read more
Highly distressed couples seek out help for immediate solutions for their pain and suffering. Why is tackling the issues head-on a big mistake for a therapist? Read more
How can a therapist cut through a couples’ intellectualizations, defensiveness, and ritualized use of language? The key is to bypass the language and explore... Read more
Part of the healing process is seeing and understanding how clients operate in their day-to-day existence, so a client who's being dishonest in their life... Read more
We frequently need to confront our clients, and putting aside a fear of confrontation—not to mention a fear of losing clients—means that we must risk the... Read more
Couples therapist David Schnarch shares how speed helps give relationships hope. Read more
A much-anticipated vacation demonstrates the rewards of not getting what you want. Read more
A new breed of therapist believes that it’s disrespectful not to say to clients displaying obnoxious, selfish, or self-defeating behaviors what... Read more
As neuroscience increasingly shows how wired we are to our intimate partners, an important question arises for therapists: Why do we primarily continue to see... Read more
Conventional therapeutic wisdom aside, people typically don’t hurt each other because they’re out of touch, unable to communicate, or can’t help... Read more
Do you want to be right or be married? Okay, now pause, think, breathe . . . and choose between First Consciousness and Second Consciousness. Read more
In these tough economic times, how do therapists distinguish between money troubles related to the recession and those that have psychological roots? Read more
While partners caught in the anger merry-go-round invariably blame the other, both typically pass the anger back and forth like a shared virus. Read more
This article first appeared in the March/April 2006 issue. Let’s face it: psychotherapy isn’t dramatic, and most therapists don’t rate high... Read more
It's one thing to make change happen in a couples session; it's quick another to make those changes tick over time. Read more
What do issues of fairness and relational justice have to do with psychotherapy? Read more
Given that most couples never manage to change each other very much, teaching them to forgive each other's imperfections is a vastly underutilized therapeutic... Read more
Too often couples make contrasts in temperament into negative stories about how their partner won't change. Could it just be that every couple is The Odd... Read more
Making "contact" with our partner means first recognizing a subtle inner substrate where we encounter everything from boredom to anxiety to sexual interest to... Read more
Esther Perel explains why new parents need to prioritize their sex lives instead of leaving them at the bottom of the to-do list. Read more
After studying 3,000 couples in the past three decades, researcher John Gottman and his wife Julie are combining his research and her clinical savvy in a... Read more
A Gottman Method therapist coaches couples to build marital friendships, rather than trying to engineer dramatic breakthroughs. Read more
Just because a couple is legally divorced doesn't mean that they're not emotionally still married. Read more
Here are the mistakes both beginning and experienced couples therapists commit, and how you can avoid them. Read more
After the publication of my book, 'I Don't Want to Talk about It,' I started getting calls from people around the United States who wanted help. Naming the... Read more
A jazz drummer tunes in to how a couple organizes time Read more
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