A few years ago, the University of Denver administration conducted interviews with corporate CEO’s and upper level management within the government to determine what their students should be learning in order to be attractive in the current job market. The consistent answers were the ability to work in teams and good EQ. Interesting that the art of accompanying is valued in many settings!
Couples have already been accompanying each other along a path of nonconsciously cooperating to bring old unmetabolized losses, wounds and traumas to conscious awareness before we meet them in our offices. Coming to couple treatment is their way of inviting us to join them as part of their team–to increase to three people those who are accompanying each other through a naturally human journey of discovery and healing.
The mental and emotional stance that allows therapeutic accompanying to happen includes several aspects. Accompanying precludes being judgmental; both partners’ struggles are responded to as natural and normal responses to what they have experienced in life. Accompanying requires resistance to diagnosing, which usually implies that there is something pathological about a partner’s behavior and places the therapist in a position of power that subverts teamwork. An accompanying stance is highly respectful of the paths that both partners’ brains have taken to survive their pasts, which often includes an expressed sense of awe that both partners have survived as well as they have.
An asset that the therapist brings to the team is the ability to be openly curious and have some ideas about which questions the team should pursue to spark deeper understanding and acceptance of each partner’s behavior. The therapist also brings a set of knowledge about human losses, wounds and traumas that focuses the team’s journey of discovery in potentially helpful directions. The accompanying therapist uses the concept of following threads–utilizing the precise words that a partner has just spoken to encourage exploration of emotions that have been previously frozen in time.
The art of accompanying helps the therapist stay out of “doer-done to” perspectives and instead divert the flow of conversation to a meta-perspective of both partners’ experience of their conflicts. Using the statement “What you are doing makes perfectly good sense” to describe both partners’ participation in their conflicts shifts the discussion from how to solve a problem to focusing the team efforts toward helping both partners speak their own historical truths.
A major challenge with the art of accompanying is that it is indeed an art. It comes from the therapist’s innermost self and is therefore different in each therapist. Instead of the comfort of relying solely on a set of techniques, the accompanying therapist takes the risk to use personally and professionally informed “gut” responses in service of discovery that benefits the couple. As a third party in the team, the accompanying therapist is much more interested in being surprised than being right–more interested in facilitating than in fixing.
Next post: Exploring the fixing fantasy