Sticking With It
Frequently in my consultation groups, I hear from therapists, “They just aren’t getting it.” They are referring to the couples they are treating who feel particularly frustrating to the therapist. “We’ve talked about the same things over and over again, and nothing is changing,” exclaims the exasperated therapist. I gently explain to the therapist that […]
Growth and Development as Byprod...
What is it that creates human psychological growth and development? To borrow from Winnicott, it takes “good enough” relationships, the type that all therapists strive to have with their clients. Children must feel sufficiently mentally and physically safe in the relationships with their caretakers for their brains to proceed with a natural flow towards useful […]
Dealing With The Right Pain
I recently attended a conference on what to do when psychotherapy feels stuck–when it feels like you are talking about the same material over and over again and partners keep presenting the same subjective distress. I was sitting in the audience thinking that therapy gets stuck when the therapist and clients are not dealing with the […]
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 […]