5 Key Mistakes Therapists Make With Couples (And What To Do Instead!)
5 Key Mistakes Therapists Make With Couples (And What To Do Instead!)
5 Key Mistakes Therapists Make With Couples (And What To Do Instead!)
©2016
Your task is not to question their
love, even if they do. Rather it is to
find the barriers that block them
from sharing and counting on it.
WHAT YOU CAN DO: Assess their sexual relationship and the impact
their relational distress has on it. You’re the therapist, so lead the way in
discussing difficult things with confident, calm curiosity. Your openness
will help them learn how to share and be more responsive to each
other.
5. Using the no-approach approach. Many therapists have a “tool
box” of techniques or interventions they use. No theory, no plan, no map, just a
tool box. Research tells us this doesn’t work. It adds chaos to a chaotic and
unstable terrain. The majority of couples who are treated with the “no approach
approach” get worse.
WHAT YOU CAN DO: Use an evidenced based model specifically designed for
couple therapy that has solid outcome research on it’s effectiveness. Easy.
There’s only two. Many models claim they are “research based,” but don’t have
outcome-based evidence. A systematic, empirically validated theory provides
structure, has verified interventions, and lays out what to do, when, and why.
The most successful evidenced-based approach to couple therapy uses
attachment theory as a guide and provides a map for the treatment. You can
take couples from distress into happy stablility.
5 Key Mistakes Therapists Make with Couples
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Thank you for your interest in couple therapy and doing all you can to help the sweethearts
who come to you when they are distressed.
One thing I’ve been enjoying a lot recently, is how science is coming together across
disciplines in ways that really benefit us as mental health practitioners. Researchers are
learning more about our need for connection, the neuroscience of empathy, how cognition
and emotion work together, and what we need to do to empower our clients as they build
resilience and what we can do to find joy in our own relationships and practices. After all, we
are interconnected and contextually bound within society, and as healers we need to
experience community amongst ourselves so we’re fed as we supply care, kindness, love
and engagement in the world.
Because of these things, I’m excited to attend the conference Creating Connections 2016:
New Frontiers in Science and Psychotherapy. My favorite psychotherapy researchers will be
there joined by the leading neuroscientists to integrate the newest science of relationships
and psychology practice. Think Dan Siegel (Mindsight), Sue Johnson (Emotionally Focused
Therapy), Marco Iacoboni (The Science of Empathy) and Jim Coan (Why We Hold Hands),
among others. Check it out for yourself here and if you come, well I hope to meet you in
person.