Most clinical conversations about couple relationship problems occur in individual therapy, not couples therapy. But individual therapy models offer little guidance for how to address relationship problems. The result is that therapists sometimes collude with their client’s view of the partner and offer one-sided narratives of complex relational problems. This doesn’t help the client and can undermine the relationship. Even couples therapists sometimes make the same mistakes when doing individual therapy. This workshop will provide specific tools and guidelines for helping individual clients in the context of their relationship, while avoiding common traps when we are seeing just one member of a couple.
The initial session may be even more important for couple therapy than individual therapy because the partners often have different levels of motivation and competing ideas about what problems to work on. They may also hijack the session when their reactivity is high, and then feel that nothing was accomplished. In this workshop, you will hear three experienced couple therapists describe how they take charge of the first session while communicating empathically with the couple, what key information they gather, and how they form a working alliance with two people who are at odds with each other.
