The Couples Institute

When you are working with a conflict-avoiding couple, it is especially difficult to create positive forward moving momentum. These couples merge boundaries often and it can be a challenge to disrupt the status quo. If you search for openings in the issues they present, you will find choice points that enable you to disrupt their symbiosis. First, start by  supporting their interactions that are truly positive and that are part of a healthy relationship.  This is important because, once you start disrupting their symbiosis, it will be scary for them. So, the more they sense that you’re in their corner — with them as a couple and as individuals — the safer they’re going to feel, and the more able they will be able to risk new behavior. Look for openings to encourage an increase in differentiation.  When partners organize their relationships symbiotically, their own desires get obscured. When they disagree with one another, they don’t know how to express their desires...

Couples who marry young often establish enmeshed relationships that inhibit individual growth. They have not had the opportunity to mature and do much differentiation work prior to getting married. When partners organize their relationships in an enmeshed way, their own desires are usually obscured and are often presented in terms of: “We are alike in so many ways.” There’s very little self-definition or ability to articulate individual desires. Everything is framed in terms of “we” or “us.” When they arrive for therapy, they may have one partner still trying very hard to maintain symbiosis, and the other partner making tentative forays out of it. The relationship is unbalanced for the first time, and the symbiotic partner may feel as though the whole world is falling apart. And when a couple has been interacting in one predictable way for a very long time, the developmental tension of change can terrify them, signaling the potential for major rupture or even separation o...

Couples Therapy Training that Works! I can still remember how embarrassing it felt to present myself as a couples therapist when my training and skills were shaky. I worried about a couple’s marriage hanging by a thread when they were depending on me, not realizing how few couples I had successfully helped. And I felt like a fraud waiting for the next couple referral when I lacked confidence. If you’ve ever felt like that, you’re not alone. You might have experienced the following scenario: Your intuition guides you to make thoughtful, steady interventions. Everything looks great. Then unexpectedly, something you say makes the whole session fall apart. They end up blaming, you end up flooded. And you wonder what went wrong, or how you could prevent it from happening again. Or maybe you feel like you’re doing a great job being empathic with a couple. You’re right there with them in their pain. You think they feel really understood. It seems like things are going well. And ...

In a recent blog post I outlined some of the ways I work with couples who are caught in patternsof externalization and blame in their relationships. If you missed it, you can  check it out here . In that blog post I presented some ideas for pushing the growth edge in these partners. I ended with the question, “But what if you’re beginning to sense that one of the partners isn’t as invested in this process as the other?” If you’ve been working with couples for any length of time, you’ve likely seen instances where one partner doesn’t seem as invested in the relationship as the other. For example, let’s say that you’ve been working with a couple and given them an assignment to come up with a plan for spending more time together. When they come back to see you, perhaps the male partner says, “Well, I tried to check in with her, but she went right back to her email and spreadsheets.” He doesn’t acknowledge that he really made no effort to do the assignment. At this po...

In spring of 2018 I wrote a blog post about the cycle of externalization and blame. This dynamic is a familiar one for couples therapists because so many of the couples who come to see us organize their relationship issues around external symptoms or problems. How many times have you heard complaints like these? “He drinks too much.” “She spends too much money.” “He never makes time for me and the kids.” “She treats her parents like royalty and me like dirt.” For people in discomfort about their relationship, it’s much easier to deflect responsibility and attention from themselves and blame their partner than it is to self-reflect. In my original blog post on this topic, I introduced the importance of shifting that focus and I presented three different ones that might help disrupt the gridlock. You can  read that blog post here . One of the reader’s comments after the blog mentioned the loss of intimacy for these couples who are stuck in externalization and blam...

The differentiation stage is, by far, the most difficult for many couples. Helping each partner set self-focused autonomous goals is crucial to their growth as individuals and to push the development of the couple. In my last blog post, I gave you a glimpse into how I work with couples to tease apart individual goals when their issues are highly entangled and enmeshed. If you missed it,  you can find it here . But sometimes, you as the therapist will assess that a couple’s level of differentiation is so low that you’re going to have to start with them at a very basic, fundamental level. When a couple operates with each other almost totally out of reactivity, it takes a fair amount of psychoeducation to help them recognize emotions and pay attention to what’s going on in theirbody. You’ll need to support them beginning to articulate what they’re thinking and feeling. You’ll also want to help the partners understand that without setting autonomous goals their progress...

When working with couples within The Developmental Model, it’s crucial to help partners set self-focused, individual goals to support the process of differentiation. This presents more of a challenge with some couples than with others. I’m thinking in particular about conflict-avoidant couples. These are couples who likely have developed well-established patterns of shying away from conflict. They may have little or no recognition of their differences. A couple like this can merge and enmesh their issues very quickly and easily. It can be a challenge to tease out what might make a difference if each of them were to get focused on themselves. For example, let’s say you’re working with a couple where the husband says he feels like he’s been walking on eggshells when he tries to have a conversation with his wife. Your role would be to help him work toward identifying something about himself that he’d like to change within this dynamic. You might say something like, “So wha...