Posted by: ellyn
on Nov 30, 2011
Many therapists are drawn to doing psychotherapy in order to be helpers and also because we enjoy the closeness with our clients. Individual therapy can be calming and comfortable. It feels good and we often like the experience of providing support and unconditional positive regard to our clients.
I don’t mean to imply that individual therapy is without its difficult confrontations. But in individual therapy, our clients can titrate how slowly or quickly they inform us about their “dark side”. In couples work, the other partner may dump the worst aspects of their spouse on us in the first session. And things escalate quickly because, after all, who is able to be openly, vulnerably accountable for their own behavior under these conditions?
In couples therapy you will likely witness partners being brutal or very self-centered with each other. You may have to face how vicious a client can actually be. You will be called upon to make difficult confrontations. And these can be scary!
Posted by: ellyn
on Nov 22, 2010
So, after several months of us working with a single session with Tom and Vicky, I am now posting the final section of this transcript. Before reading it you might want to review last month’s post and some of the insightful comments by your colleagues.
We begin this section with only about 10 minutes left in the session. Until this point, much of the focus has been on Tom. Now, I want to check in and work with Vicky before the session ends.
I step partially out of the Initiator-Inquirer framework. I don’t know Vicky very well yet and I want to understand her more completely.
• How does she respond to Tom’s attack?
• Is she afraid or angry?
• How rigid are her defenses?
Posted by: ellyn
on Oct 1, 2010
When you are doing Initiator-Inquirer sessions, be sure to watch how partners function in their assigned roles. The combination of the role and each partner's functioning will give you a clear insight into each partner's level of differentiation. You will see where each person breaks down and you will also be able to locate past trauma that is being re-enacted in the current relationship.
Today's blog post is a continuation of the session with Vicki and Tom.
This session originally began with a blaming initiation from Tom. "I am sick of being controlled by you. You want to control my whole life. You leave no area untouched." I started by helping Vicki ask Tom questions to uncover his feelings and perceptions that were unexpressed while he blamed her for being controlling.
She initially had difficulty not personalizing his issues, but she was able to take some of my developmental assists and use them to ask a few effective questions. At the very end of last month's post a lot happened very, very quickly. This is common when you are working simultaneously with core issues in each partner.
Tom began to regress as I commented on how much he disliked feeling helpless and especially how much he disliked it with his wife. Vicki also took a step backwards and again self-referenced. "I don't want you to feel that way. But can't you understand this isn't about what I am doing?"
As you'll see in the next part of the transcript, this resulted in Tom striking back with hostility, "I don't need an intellectualizing lecture from you right now." And now you have multiple choices, which is where the art and science of the Initiator-Inquirer process comes in. You could:
- Support Tom's regression
- Give more developmental assistance to Vicki in her role as Inquirer, so she personalizes less
- Confront the nastiness and hostility in Tom's response to her
- Try to do as much of all three of these as possible
Posted by: ellyn
on Jul 12, 2010
When I mentioned the Paper Exercise in last month’s newsletter, many of you wrote back and asked for more information about it.
The Paper Exercise is an exercise that Pete and I adapted from Susan Campbell’s book, The Couples Journey. The exercise sounds a bit contrived, but it is so revealing of couples’ dynamics that it is worthwhile learning to use it. It can be used either diagnostically or as an intervention into the couples’ system.
Setting up the exercise
