Who's Afraid of Couples Therapy? (AP1305) (Audio Only)

A thought-provoking, practical audio series explores the challenges of couples work, discusses whether individual therapy can be detrimental to clients with relationship issues, and illuminates exactly how clinicians can stretch their comfort zones to more effectively work with couples.

Session 1: Overcoming Our Fears: Why Therapists Avoid Doing Couples Therapy

Ellyn Bader and Peter Pearson

Move past your resistance to the volatility and intensity of doing couples therapy by learning how to:

• 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.

Session 2: The Choreography of Healing: Expanding Your Emotional Range

Hedy Schleifer 

Develop your capacity to establish a nourishing connection with couples and better handle their intense reactivity by:

• 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.

Session 3: In or Out?: Helping Couples with Different Divorce Agendas

William Doherty 

Clarify goals and improve your success rate with ambivalent couples considering the possibility of divorce by learning how to:

• 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.

Session 4: Confidentiality, Secrets, and How to Deal with Affairs

Esther Perel

Explore an approach that challenges conventional therapeutic wisdom about rebuilding trust and intimacy after an affair by:

• 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.

Session 5: Angry Women, Withdrawn Men: Breaking Through in Couples Therapy

Jette Simon 

Expand your repertoire about approaching the classic dynamic of couples therapy—an angry woman clashing with a withdrawn man—by:

• 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.

Session 6: Taking Off the Masks: Truth-Telling in Couples Work

David Schnarch

Explore a clinical method that challenges clients by focusing on their sense of adult responsibility rather than childish entitlement by:

• 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

Learning Objectives - Session 1 (Ellyn Bader & Peter Pearson):

1. Explain why clinicians are often resistant to doing couples therapy.
2. Name reasons why working solely with individuals may actually cause them harm.
3. Discuss how therapists can be better prepared for working with couples.

Learning Objectives - Session 2 (Hedy Schleifer):

1. Describe what therapists should be paying attention to when clients become intensely emotional in session.
2. Specify the therapist’s role in the midst of intense reactivity.
3. Define the “survival knot” that’s usually triggered when clients become emotional.

Learning Objectives - Session 3 (William Doherty):

1. Define a “mixed-agenda couple.”
2. Explain the concept behind Discernment Counseling.
3. Describe why it’s important to clarify each partner’s agenda before beginning therapy.

Learning Objectives - Session 4 (Esther Perel):

1. Discuss how therapists can help couples rebuild trust and intimacy after an affair.
2. Describe the differences between how people in the United States view affairs, in general, and how affairs are viewed internationally.
3. Explain how an affair can actually help improve and transform a relationship.

Learning Objectives - Session 5 (Jette Simon):

1. Describe the possible foundation of the emotions that an angry woman and a withdrawn man present in therapy.
2. Explain how gender roles and culture influence this common scenario.
3. Name ways therapists can help partners in this situation come out of these negative emotions and improve their relationship.

Learning Objectives - Session 6 (David Schnarch):

1. Explain why, in Schnarch’s viewpoint, partners hurt each other.
2. Discuss why Schnarch disagrees with attachment-based couples therapy methods.
3. Define the processes of mind-mapping and mind-masking.