WAYS OF RELATING TO THE COUPLE, PART 1

As part of a recent workshop, I tried to describe the tasks the couple therapist needs to accomplish and the decisions he or she needs to make. These tasks and decisions include:

• Management of the session
• Who talks to whom
• What roles to take
• What skills to teach
• What knowledge to impart

In the following, I describe the first three tasks and discuss the positions taken by a therapist with a Collaborative Couple Therapy perspective. I’ll deal with the remaining two tasks in the next newsletter.

Management Of The Session

Among the basic tasks of the couple therapist are to:

1. Establish rapport (a therapeutic alliance) with each partner.
2. Provide an atmosphere of safety (a holding environment) by the manner in which you relate to the partners and manage how they relate to each other.
3. Change the rhythm. Depending upon what’s needed at the moment, you (a) slow things down in order to interrupt an escalation, unpack what’s happening, and provide room for a more thoughtful response or you (b) speed things up in order to re-energize the situation, deepen the discussion, heighten the emotion, or create greater connection.
4. Create therapeutic leverage. You intervene with sufficient force to interrupt the partners’ problematic patterns and create positive change. You use methods such as active listening, directing traffic, making ground rules, confronting, inspiring, reframing, and using humor.

I use doubling—the signature method of Collaborative Couple Therapy—to accomplish all four tasks. Doubling—speaking as if I were one of the partners talking to the other—allows me to:

• Establish rapport: people feel heard when you speak on their behalf and check to make sure you have it right.
• Create an atmosphere of safety (a space of gentleness): people feel protected when they know you’ll recast potentially inflammatory comments—that you’ll look past their demanding, scornful, defensive, withdrawn, or other off-putting behavior to discover their inner struggle.
• Control the intensity of the exchange by amping down overly intense, out-of control exchanges and amping up wandering, affectless ones.
• Establish therapeutic leverage by developing rather than by countering what partners are saying, restating what they say in a less provocative and more heartfelt way, and bringing out the wishes and fears underlying their complaints.

Who Talks To Whom

You can:

1. Ask partners to talk to each other rather than to you since they’ll have to do that eventually.
2. Ask them to talk to you rather than to each other since the way they converse now doesn’t work.
3. Do individual therapy in a couple therapy setting: interview each with the other listening, bringing out their underlying thoughts and feelings and exploring the roots of their difficulties.
4. Go back and forth between the two acting as a kind of mediator, moderator, or translator.
5. Give partners words (wishes, fears) to say to the other.
6. See partners in individual as well as in couple sessions rather than seeing them only in couple sessions.

The Collaborative Couple Therapy task is to construct intimate conversations—to turn partners who are fighting or withdrawing (relating as enemies or strangers) into confidants (allies). It is possible to work toward this goal by listening to partners as they talk to each other (#1) or talking to each while the other listens (#2 & #3). The Collaborative Couple Therapy strategy, however, is to go back and forth between the partners, creating an intimate conversation right there in the moment by reshaping what each says: turning angry comments into confiding ones and distance-creating comments into closeness-promoting ones (#4).

The therapist might then go on to ask the partner s/he just spoke for, “Would you like to say to your partner in your own words the part of what I just said for you that’s most meaningful to you” (#5). Sue Johnson believes that giving partners words to say to each other—she calls it creating an enactment—is the crucial change-producing measure.

Since my focus is on constructing intimate conversations, I typically see partners together—which enables me directly to influence their conversation. On the other hand, Brent Atkinson and William Doherty report success intermixing individual and couple sessions (#6). Atkinson helps partners who are mired in the blaming-the-other state to reconsider their position without the complicating presence of their partner. Doherty helps partners on the verge of divorce reconsider whether that’s what they really want, again without the complicating presence of their partner.

The Role Of The Therapist

In our relationship with the partners, we function as a (an):

1. Advocate for each partner.
2. Mediator between them.
3. Guardian of the conversation, keeping the exchange from bogging down or turning into a fight.
4. Perspective-giver, enabling partners to step back from their interaction and talk collaboratively about it.
5. Model for partners to emulate and introject.
6. Provider of a secure attachment experience (a corrective emotional experience).
7. Mentor, teacher, coach, and skills trainer.
8. Fellow seeker in the task of working out a good relationship.
9. Co-investigator with the partners of what is happening in their relationship.
10. Co-manager of the therapy.

Collaborative couple therapists serve each of these roles. We function as a (an):

• Advocate (spokesperson) for each partner (#1) and mediator between them (#2). We accomplish this seemingly contradictory two-part task by reshaping what each partner says to make it both more satisfying to that person (the advocacy aspect) and less provocative for the other partner to hear (the mediating aspect).
• Guardian of the conversation by keeping the thread, recovering from tangents, and preventing fights (#3), When the conversation does turn into a fight, we create a vantage point above the fray (#4) from which partners can talk about it collaboratively.
• Model (#5). We relate to partners in the way we are trying to get them to relate to each other—with responsivity, attunement, and nondefensiveness. We provide them with a secure attachment experience (#6). The goal is to increase their ability to become secure attachment figures for each other.

We serve as mentors, teachers, coaches, and skills-trainers (#7), but ones who recognize that we:

• Have only indirect access to what is going on within each partner.
• Have the advantages and benefits but also the disadvantages and limitations of our particular theory, training, experience, knowledge, wisdom, personality, instincts, disposition, and mood.
• Are fellow seekers in the task of working out a good relationship (#8). Realizing how we can lose our wisdom, perspective, and generosity of spirit when we are upset with people in our own lives helps us empathize with partners when we see it happening to them.
• Are susceptible to slipping from listening to judging and from evenhandedness to taking sides.

We use our awareness of taking sides as a countertranference clue—as indicating that we’ve lost sight of the inner struggle of the partner whom we find ourselves siding against.

The therapist is co-investigator with the partners about what is going on in their relationship (#9). We make guesses about what they are feeling in an effort to prime the pump of their own thinking about the matter and to raise possibilities they might not have thought of. It’s our way of making interpretations. Since we are just guessing, we need to check it out with the partners. We hope they’ll put their own stamp on our guesses by:

• Restating what we just said in their own words.
• Pinpointing parts of what we said that seems to them the heart of the matter.
• Correcting elements.
• Adding elements, perhaps taking what we said a step further or to the next level.
• Rejecting what we said (telling us we’re wrong) but then going on to say what it is that they do think and feel.
• Rethinking what they originally said. Hearing our restatement may allow them to reconsider what they really believe.

The therapist is co-manager of the therapy (#10). Many of the decisions the therapist is called upon to make can best be dealt with by talking with the partners about them, at times appealing to them as consultants. The therapist might say:

• “Are we talking about what we need to talk about today or are there other things we should be getting to?”
• “At some point, I want to go to examples. Is this a good time to do that or are there things you want to say first?”
• “I just realized that I’ve been arguing with you, which means I haven’t been listening very well to what you’ve been trying to tell me. But if I were listening, I’d realize that what you’re trying to tell me is…”
• “Mark, I’m going to take Alice’s side for a moment and challenge what you just said.”
• “I’ve been sitting here trying to imagine what you’d be saying to each other if you were having a conversation rather than this argument, and here’s what I’ve come up with…”
• “This is quite a fight you’re having. Since I’m the therapist, I ought to be doing something about it. So I’ll come over and speak for you and see what I can come up with.”
• “I’ve just realized, Sally, that I’ve spent more time today developing Jane’s thinking. Are you feeling left out, neglected, or ganged up on?”
• “Peter, you mentioned last time that sometimes I don’t seem to appreciate your side of things. Is this one of those times?”
• “What are you taking away from this session that is useful, if anything, and what has been disappointing about it?”
• “How would you each summarize this session?”

Bringing partners in on our moment-to-moment questions, concerns, plans, and decisions is, from a Collaborative Couple Therapy point of view, the ideal way to conduct a therapist-couple relationship. In addition, it models the open, collaborative, egalitarian relating the therapist is trying to encourage between the partners.

I’ve described the first three of five sets of tasks or decisions a couple therapist makes. In the next blog, I’ll describe the other two: what skills to teach and what knowledge to impart.