Needing Conflicts
The concept of needing conflicts is central to understanding how Neurodynamic Couples Therapy heals. Some other forms of couples treatment characterize conflict as simply an important avenue for communication and negotiation between partners. A popular notion of marital health says that couples have to fight in order to work out their differences–i.e., partners who fight together stay […]
Transformation
Some form of transformation is the stated or at least implied promise of most types of psychotherapy, including Neurodynamic Couples Therapy. The term literally means “changing form”, although Google goes further and says that transformation is some type of extreme, radical change. What are we promising to transform in couples treatment–changing a bad relationship into a good […]
“Reading the Room”
Every good comedian knows that in order to be successful at their job they must be adept at reading the room. This means watching the body language of the patrons in the audience, looking for signs of inattention or boredom, and being able to feel whether there is a connection with their audience. An entertainer who […]
Mutual Empathy
The previous blog post ended with the question “What comes after wondering?” The answer is mutual empathy. Wondering and exploring about the meanings of intimate partners’ triggers and the feelings they expose must lead to empathy in order for metabolizing to occur. I have had occasions when a consultee will say about a couple, “They seem […]
The “Wondering” Spou...
The ability to wonder is an amazing capacity of the human mind. Wondering springs from genuine interest in knowing what happened, what was its meaning, who was involved, what did they feel and why. One school of psychological thought says that in order to be able to wonder we must be able to mentalize. This basically […]
What to Say That Fits the Frame
As I have written about before, the goal of Neurodynamic Couples Therapy is the metabolizing of emotions that leads to integration. We believe that this process is a naturally healing function of partner relationships. So, whatever the therapist says during treatment should be in service of fostering the metabolizing process. We want our clients to […]
Maintaining the Therapeutic Fram...
All types of therapies have a therapeutic frame that defines the boundary around what the therapy is and what it is not; what it does and what it does not do. Neurodynamic Couples Therapy is a right-brain therapy; many other forms of couples treatment are left-brain therapies. It is outside the frame of Neurodynamic Couples […]
The Roles of the Couples Therapi...
The roles that couples therapists perform with their clients depend on the approach to therapy that they prefer. They can be advisors, experts, coaches, educators, facilitators, provokers, observers, diagnosers and many other roles throughout the course of the treatment. Here I want to clarify which roles the neurodynamic couples therapist does and does not perform. […]
Regulating vs. Metabolizing
The goal of affect regulation came to the forefront of therapeutic wisdom in the mid-1990’s, primarily through the work of the neuroscientist, Allan Schore. In his writing, he advocated that any effective psychotherapy had to address the dysregulated emotions that are stored in the right hemisphere of the brain. Other researchers and experts (i.e., Daniel […]
Mutual Emotional Triggers
The emotional triggers that spark conflicts between intimate partners are well-known: he says he’s going out with friends from work, his husband feels rejected, his partner gets angry; she asks for more time to talk, her husband gets angry and defensive, she feels guilty; she tells her wife she’s disappointed in her, her wife bursts […]