As the years go by, I find myself making increasing use of three types of questions in my effort to help partners find their voice and come up with the missing conversation. These three are the multiple-choice; how much, how much; and sentence-completion questions. This blog is devoted to the multiple-choice question, which expands an […]
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Creating a Mysterious Intimacy
When I double in couple therapy, I serve as each partner’s spokesperson, scriptwriter, and advocate—their Cyrano de Bergerac—finding words for what they had been struggling to say or recasting what they did say to make it more heartfelt. I show how it might sound were they to speak from a place of greater vulnerability and […]
Where Am I Right and Where Am I Wrong...
In the last several blog entries, I’ve presented various aspects of doubling, a technique originally devised by Jacob Moreno and the signature method of Collaborative Couple Therapy. In doubling, I speak as if I were one of the partners talking to the other. Since I make speculations about what that partner is thinking and feeling, […]
Creating a Conversation
The Collaborative Couple Therapy task in the case of partners in a fight is to turn the fight into a conversation, often by speaking for the partners, using an adaptation of Jacob Moreno’s doubling. I replace the partners’ blaming comments with conciliatory ones. Often, I go back and forth between the two partners, speaking for […]
When to Be Cautious in Doubling
As described in previous blog entries, doubling, originally devised by Jacob Moreno, is the featured method in Collaborative Couple Therapy. You speak as if you were one of the partners talking to the other. When doubling for partners in an adversarial cycle, you replace accusations with acknowledgments and outbursts of angry feelings with expressions of […]
Wheeling, Kneeling or Staying Where Y...
In the previous blog, I presented doubling, which was originated by Jacob Moreno, as the signature method of Collaborative Couple Therapy. When you double in couple therapy, you speak as if you were one of the partners talking to the other. In this newsletter, I discuss how my use of this method evolved over time […]
Doubling: Recasting What Each Partner...
The principal means for discovering the conversation needed to solve the moment—and the signature method of Collaborative Couple Therapy—is doubling, an intervention originated by Jacob Moreno. Doubling, speaking as if you were one of the partners talking to the other, allows you to go: Within to bring out thoughts and feelings partners might be experiencing […]
Creating a Platform
In Collaborative Couple Therapy, we try to turn what’s happening between the partners at the moment into an intimate exchange. We: Go within to elucidate each partner’s struggle—to find what each needs to get across in order to feel fulfilled in the moment, experience a sense of relief, and be able now to listen to […]
Solving the Moment
The Collaborative Couple Therapy goal is to get partners collaborating—that is, working together as a team. The focus is on how partners relate to each other about the concern at hand rather than on how concretely to resolve it. I call this approach solving the moment, by which I mean turning the immediate alienated exchange—the […]
Fallback Measures: An Alternative to ...
At any given moment, each of us has a leading-edge feeling—a thought or feeling that lies as the center of our attention and that motivates, intrigues, preoccupies, distracts, unnerves, or haunts us. The leading-edge feeling is what’s “alive” for us at that moment, as Marshall Rosenberg put it. It’s who we are at that instant. […]
