The “Sameness” of In...
Some forms of couple therapy have emphasized the importance of helping couples differentiate–helping them see each other as two separate individuals, instead of succumbing to a type of “twinning” where only alikeness is tolerated. There are certainly benefits to helping couples resist the draw to substitute being alike for being close. However, ignoring the nonconscious “sameness” […]
Exploring Feelings
Many types of mental health treatment include some form of exploring feelings. In Neurodynamic Couples Therapy, exploring feelings is the pathway to metabolizing and integrating them into a cohesive sense of self and relationships and creating a bond of empathy and understanding between partners. The primary technique we use to explore feelings is what we call “following […]
Understanding vs. Succumbing to ...
Couples have a nonconscious, intersubjective system between the two partners that has been existent and developing in complexity since they first met each other. It has been well-established in recent years that this type of system gestates during childhood and becomes the template that dictates who we will be attracted to and commit to as […]
Couple Frame vs. Individual Fram...
I have written many times about the radical intersubjective stance that Neurodynamic Couples Therapy takes regarding the treatment of couple relationships. In essence, we are treating what happens between the partners–not individual psychologies. The theory holds that it takes two brains in each other’s presence to access the affective material that has been generating the couple’s conflicts […]
Accepting Derailing
Most of the time most of us therapists work as hard as we can to keep a treatment going, knowing that attempts to derail therapy have many meanings that can be explored and understood. I know that I have always been extremely reluctant to “give up.” However, in this post we will be looking at […]
Interrupting Derailing
Most therapists have had the experience of feeling that a treatment is being derailed and perhaps headed for failure. Even when we are able to see it coming and try to redirect the treatment, it can be like attempting to turn a battleship around (as the saying goes). Instead, it is best to know the […]
“There is Nothing Wrong Wi...
In previous blog posts, I have written about the importance of understanding a couple’s persistence in seeing one partner as the identified patient. Quite often, couples will enter treatment with both partners having decided that there is something wrong with the other, and that they themselves are in fact “normal” or “innocent.” Here, our curiosity […]
Curiosity
A major goal of Neurodynamic Couples Therapy is to help partners complete the metabolizing of troublesome emotions, which they have already been nonconsciously attempting to accomplish through their conflicts. Some forms of therapy purport that this metabolizing can be done nonverbally, but we believe that it takes the translation of right-brain experiences into words in […]
Simple–not easy
As I was growing up, I remember one of the mantras that I heard from some of the adults in my world. They would say one of the best approaches to difficult situations is encapsulated in the acronym KISS–Keep It Simple, (warning! pejorative word coming up) Stupid. I found this to be quite helpful as […]
Understanding Resistance
The New Oxford American Dictionary defines resistance as “the refusal to accept or comply with something”; and “the ability not to be affected by something, especially adversely.” Our training histories as therapists have unfortunately tended to focus more on the first definition. I would like to challenge us to think more about the second one. […]