By Nick Duffell
relationship problems
I like working with couples. I like the immediacy, I like the intensity and I like the fact that, given the right amount of skill, willingness and grace, you can help change happen for the benefit of a whole family, sometimes in very few sessions. But I know not all counsellors and therapists feel comfortable seeing couples, because there is a way that with couples it is deadly serious. I still remember the feelings of total inadequacy I had when, several years ago, armed with my newly won counselling diploma, I started at a high street counselling centre in a suburban town and faced my first couple. Unknown to me, the majority of requests for therapy the clinic received were for couple counselling. Although I had been well trained to take on a person's internal conflict or their lack of meaning in life, I was sorely put to the test when faced with a real live couple's stuckness or heated conflict, in what I had hoped would be the ambience of reason of my consulting room.
Another illusion shattered! I had to learn on my feet - and fast.
I don't know how I achieved it, but I still remember my first success with a couple, when one day, as I was leaving work, a man in a white van hooted at me in the traffic and said "You saved my marriage, mate!" Of course I didn't, but I did do something. I had helped him and his wife not to feel utter failures, and I gave them some context for why things were going wrong between them. I had encouraged them to begin to think about what they were trying to achieve as men and women that was similar or different from their parents, and I gave them some basic tools to be able to handle their disagreements. They made the commitment to save their marriage, and together we made the first steps a reality. The fact that I myself was undergoing a painful divorce helped me to have empathy, but I also felt a bit of a fraud sitting on this side of the couch. Eventually, that shame lead me to deeply question what being a couple really entailed, to do lots of reading and attending workshops, and finally to get some more relevant training. I became a couple-therapist.
So what are the main differences in working with couples rather than individuals? There are many: the amount of bitterness and conflict presented, the presence of real-time ‘problems' rather than the wish to reflect, the tendency towards triangulation, the traps where the worker gets caught by one of the partners, the looming consequence of a relationship breaking up rather than transforming, to name but a few. But perhaps the outstanding difference, and the one that causes many therapists to avoid couple work, is very simply this: that a couple is such a powerful entity. Generally couples present for counselling full of disappointment, wracked with emotions, plagued by acting out, torn apart by conflict, or utterly stuck. It can be quite a handful to have in your nice peaceful therapy room.
However, as in many things, the nature of the problem contains the seeds of its own solution. The power of the couple means that couple-workers have to apply more powerful interventions than they may be used to in individual work. Some counsellors, particularly those from the person-centred end of the spectrum, struggle with this. Often it seems that they are being asked to be too penetrative, and, having developed a style that is mostly receptive, this goes against the grain. But in this I believe them to be mistaken. To illustrate my point, consider this very strong statement from master family therapist, Karl Whittaker:
With couples, one is usually being the patient and one the therapist and every once in a while they'll flip round and go the other way. I'll tell them, "This worked out fine during the first period of your marriage, but now you've gotten to an impasse, you're locked, just the way a therapist and his patient often get. And I'm taking over. You're just a couple of amateurs and you've failed."
Outrageous as such an intervention may seem at first, on closer scrutiny it reveals
itself to be deeply kindly and healing. By means of it, Whittaker employs the first powerful tool of couplework – normalising. He makes it known that he sees the task ahead. He normalises the couple's apparent failure at the difficult task of relationship, normalises that there is usually an imbalance, a distancer-pursuer dynamic, where one seems to be saddled with the ‘impossible other' and one takes the role of analysing the other. He normalises their good intentions for conflict and maintains that couples need and deserve help in this process. He normalises that when they were first in love the powerful forces of attraction meant that they were being their best and did not notice the human faults of the other, nor what they had projected onto their partner. It is a deeply human but very powerful intervention. It is precisely because of the power that couples bring, that the coupleworker has the potential to harness the power and to work with it creatively. This means in fact that couplework can actually go much deeper than individual work. Moreover, since relationships are generally replete with disowned and projected elements from each partner, the therapist, being just outside the system, is well placed to see, while the protagonists, presenting in their relationship rather than their individual selves, find it much harder to hide. Following these leads, the couple worker can encourage relevant and useful information to emerge at the right time to explain previously baffling disappointments, expectations and impasses. So it can also go much faster than individual work. In his recently published autobiography, ex-US president Bill Clinton claims both to have repaired his marriage, to have discovered the root conditions that motivated his catastrophic acting-out, and to have put his life on an entirely new footing - simply through several months of couple therapy.
But you don't have to be an ex-president to be in a difficult jam in your relationship or to get tremendous benefit from couple counselling. Such stories are not exceptional in couplework, and it promises to be one of the most rapidly growing fields for counsellors, for three reasons. The first is that intimate relationships are - and always will be - incredibly challenging for anyone; but currently, couples have lost the fear of separating and are now more subject to the fear of staying together. This leads us to the second eason: that changes can happen faster in an intimate relationship brought to consciousness because it involves the ultimate field of creative energy – sexual energy, the one that brought us into life at the first place. Relationships are all about life. The third is the universality of so many of the problems that couples face. Although each story is individual, and cultural differences such as nationality, race and sexual orientation clearly have their effect, the unifying factors of problems in relationship are still astonishingly similar across the board. We suggest that, in terms of unconscious conflict as opposed to realtime difficulties such as step-parenting, there are three broad categories of conflict that couples experience. First is the dilemma between power and vulnerability; second is the baggage and styles of relating brought from families of origin; and third is the polarisation between the genders - which takes its toll even in same-sex couples.
It is no wonder then, that Malidoma & Subonfu Somé, psychological teachers from Africa and newcomers to the West, echo another oft quoted Clintonian remark: that it takes a village to support a couple, because "there is too much spirit in Relationships". Spirit, they say is mostly composed of feeling. Acknowledging this surfeit of ‘spirit', we are now in a position to understand one of the major differences between individual and couple therapy. This is that in the latter it is almost never necessary to try to evoke emotions. Indeed, I often advise students to avoid feeling questions altogether! I learned this when working as a divorce mediatior (at the time called Family Conciliator) when we had to get agreements, not process. Since I was training in psychotherapy at the same time, I was always seeing emotional process issues and wanting to get stuck into them. But getting process is child's play in couplework - managing sessions so that couples get an experience that conflict can be integrated is the real skill.The point is that generally there is already too much emotion in the couple – albeit often located in one partner more than the other. It may well be best to address the imbalance and to take time when genuine feelings – grief, regret, empathy, the ones that heal – emerge. But in general you do not need to evoke emotions in the way that as an individual worker may have become second nature, because you are liable to get caught in a trap and/or sabotage the session.
In addition, as we tell our coupleworker trainees, you have to remember who your client is. It is their Relationship, and it is not your responsibilty to maintain or repair this. It is theirs. The worker's responsibility is to manage the session and help bring unconscious dynamics into consciousness. What is more effective, for example, when process arises in the couple, is to point out the kind of Bonding Patterns you can see. Bonding Patterns are a dynamic of relating between the child part in one partner and the parent part in the other, marked by an escalating power struggle when disowned vulnerability demands protection. This dynamic, which was first named by Winkleman and Stein and further developed in our own book, causes untold damage in relationships and produces patterns that are incredibly resilient and, overtime, grow into a second skin of relating. Made conscious, they can be overcome by cultivating skillful awareness tempered by humour. One of the main reasons that my wife, Helena, and I developed the Dancing in the Dark workshops for couples is that when these patterns come to light in a group setting, people can laugh at themselves, because they see how many other couples have such similar and perverse misery-confirming behaviour patterns. Once they start identifying the patterns and stop taking themselves so seriously they are onto a winning streak.
A further important skill, which does not come up in individual work, is to learn how to stay neutral between two clients both competing for your sympathy and your confirmation that the other is wrong. The danger is losing your power by being coaxed into an alliance with the one with whom you feel the most sympathy. "She's absolutely right, he's not in touch with his feelings at all," you find yourself thinking. This is difficult stuff, and if you get caught you are lost, because you lose your power; the couple then can eat you alive. But allowing yourself to consciously bite the baited hook, daring to use the power of the trap itself, allows room for creative interventions which go very deep, for example, deliberately supporting one partner to effect a chang in the power balance. A master of this technique is the post-Jungian, Arnie Mindell.
When done well, creative couplework is definitely rooted in the psychotherapy end of the professional spectrum, but is best when it seems to be done with a very light touch, almost invisibly, so that it seems like basic counselling. This is really skillful relationship psychotherapy. Consequently, we teach our students how to do uncovering work subtly, when it is going to serve the couple by throwing light on their patterns, rather simply amassing information. Couple counsellors must stay true to the couple's presenting issues, whereas in individual work therapists frequently allow themselves the liberty to roam around many issues, sometimes patiently developing their relationship with the client, sometimes dealing with whatever is presented that day. Coupleworkers do not really have that luxury, because very often there is the possibility of separation or divorce if the clients cannot manage their relationship. This intensity can become a burden to the couple worker who ends up taking responsibility for making the relationship work again. Whilst the motivation is understandable, this is a very great trap, which under supervision often reveals itself to be the wish of the child in the worker to keep its parents happy together. But the coupleworker's job is manage the session, as Whittaker suggests, "I'm taking over now." This is a strong and crucial skill to learn.
As for the psychodynamics of couple work itself, there is again an important distinction to individual therapy. This is that transference is directed less to the worker simply because the couple are in deep and taxing transference to each other. This involves entirely different dynamics, and means that use of self –revealing what you yourself have learned both as a professional and as a private person - can be very potent. But it doesn't mean that the worker should have any less impeccable practice conditions, in fact even more thought through boundaries and management procedures are required. Contracting is one of those occasions, which is best accomplished swiftly and professionally at the end of the session but within session time, and couples, out of not wanting to be left alone again with their process, will readily attempt to scupper a smooth ending. I will frequently send couples away after a first session without another appointment. This is deliberate; they are not committing tome. They have to commit to their Relationship, and I want them to talk together first. It is better for them to discuss what the session achieved for them, then for them then to tell me they want more, rather than immediately attempting to bind them in a therapeutic alliance, because that can end up being about me.
Not to be left out, there is also a transpersonal dimension to couplework, which Contextual Couple Counsellors employ. One of the great allies we have is the ability to evoke a benign third: the Relationship itself, as separate entity that is more than the sum of two individual people and has its own meaning and purpose. It can be seen as that which contains the Soul of the couple, and focuses and reveals its emerging destiny. Sometimes the Third Being can become very mixed up with the actual children, which are what a couple creates on a physical level, and the couple may need to be reminded that there is another being around that both needs care and has joy to impart. It is often profoundly helpful for people to realise that they are actually creating something of value together, even if they have no children. If they can put their selfish aims aside they can imagine what this entity wants them to integrate, to co-create. When coupleworkers can help couples learn to listen to and follow this voice, ordinary miracles are commonplace.
References:
Clinton, WJ. My Life, Hutchinson, London, 2004.
Duffell, N & Løvendal, H, Sex, Love and the Dangers of Intimacy, Thorsons, London 2002.
Duffell, N & Løvendal, H, Professional, Personal and Private - the challenge of working creatively with couples, in Self & Society, Vol. 27, No 4, August-September 1999.
Duffell, N & Løvendal, H, Dancing in the Dark: from conflict to compassion in intimate relationships, in Human Potential, Winter 1996/7.
Haley, J & Hoffman, L, Techniques of Family Therapy (see Interview with Karl Whittaker) Basic Books, New York, 1967.
Mindell, A, The Dreambody in Relationships, Arkana, London, 1987.
Scarf, M, Intimate Partners, Century Hutchinson, London, 1987.
Somé, S, The Spirit of Intimacy, Berkley Hills Books, Berkley, CA, 1997.
Stone, H, & Winkleman, S, Embracing Each Other, New World Library, San Rafael, CA, 1989.
The author:
Nick Duffell has trained as a phsychotherapist, divorce mediator and Sexual Grounding
Therapist. With his wife, Helena Løvendal-Sørensen, he co-founded the Centre for Gender Psychology where they specialize in training Contextual CoupleWorkers
He may be contacted at info@genderpsychology.com
Find out more about relationship problems
relationship problems
I like working with couples. I like the immediacy, I like the intensity and I like the fact that, given the right amount of skill, willingness and grace, you can help change happen for the benefit of a whole family, sometimes in very few sessions. But I know not all counsellors and therapists feel comfortable seeing couples, because there is a way that with couples it is deadly serious. I still remember the feelings of total inadequacy I had when, several years ago, armed with my newly won counselling diploma, I started at a high street counselling centre in a suburban town and faced my first couple. Unknown to me, the majority of requests for therapy the clinic received were for couple counselling. Although I had been well trained to take on a person's internal conflict or their lack of meaning in life, I was sorely put to the test when faced with a real live couple's stuckness or heated conflict, in what I had hoped would be the ambience of reason of my consulting room.
Another illusion shattered! I had to learn on my feet - and fast.
I don't know how I achieved it, but I still remember my first success with a couple, when one day, as I was leaving work, a man in a white van hooted at me in the traffic and said "You saved my marriage, mate!" Of course I didn't, but I did do something. I had helped him and his wife not to feel utter failures, and I gave them some context for why things were going wrong between them. I had encouraged them to begin to think about what they were trying to achieve as men and women that was similar or different from their parents, and I gave them some basic tools to be able to handle their disagreements. They made the commitment to save their marriage, and together we made the first steps a reality. The fact that I myself was undergoing a painful divorce helped me to have empathy, but I also felt a bit of a fraud sitting on this side of the couch. Eventually, that shame lead me to deeply question what being a couple really entailed, to do lots of reading and attending workshops, and finally to get some more relevant training. I became a couple-therapist.
So what are the main differences in working with couples rather than individuals? There are many: the amount of bitterness and conflict presented, the presence of real-time ‘problems' rather than the wish to reflect, the tendency towards triangulation, the traps where the worker gets caught by one of the partners, the looming consequence of a relationship breaking up rather than transforming, to name but a few. But perhaps the outstanding difference, and the one that causes many therapists to avoid couple work, is very simply this: that a couple is such a powerful entity. Generally couples present for counselling full of disappointment, wracked with emotions, plagued by acting out, torn apart by conflict, or utterly stuck. It can be quite a handful to have in your nice peaceful therapy room.
However, as in many things, the nature of the problem contains the seeds of its own solution. The power of the couple means that couple-workers have to apply more powerful interventions than they may be used to in individual work. Some counsellors, particularly those from the person-centred end of the spectrum, struggle with this. Often it seems that they are being asked to be too penetrative, and, having developed a style that is mostly receptive, this goes against the grain. But in this I believe them to be mistaken. To illustrate my point, consider this very strong statement from master family therapist, Karl Whittaker:
With couples, one is usually being the patient and one the therapist and every once in a while they'll flip round and go the other way. I'll tell them, "This worked out fine during the first period of your marriage, but now you've gotten to an impasse, you're locked, just the way a therapist and his patient often get. And I'm taking over. You're just a couple of amateurs and you've failed."
Outrageous as such an intervention may seem at first, on closer scrutiny it reveals
itself to be deeply kindly and healing. By means of it, Whittaker employs the first powerful tool of couplework – normalising. He makes it known that he sees the task ahead. He normalises the couple's apparent failure at the difficult task of relationship, normalises that there is usually an imbalance, a distancer-pursuer dynamic, where one seems to be saddled with the ‘impossible other' and one takes the role of analysing the other. He normalises their good intentions for conflict and maintains that couples need and deserve help in this process. He normalises that when they were first in love the powerful forces of attraction meant that they were being their best and did not notice the human faults of the other, nor what they had projected onto their partner. It is a deeply human but very powerful intervention. It is precisely because of the power that couples bring, that the coupleworker has the potential to harness the power and to work with it creatively. This means in fact that couplework can actually go much deeper than individual work. Moreover, since relationships are generally replete with disowned and projected elements from each partner, the therapist, being just outside the system, is well placed to see, while the protagonists, presenting in their relationship rather than their individual selves, find it much harder to hide. Following these leads, the couple worker can encourage relevant and useful information to emerge at the right time to explain previously baffling disappointments, expectations and impasses. So it can also go much faster than individual work. In his recently published autobiography, ex-US president Bill Clinton claims both to have repaired his marriage, to have discovered the root conditions that motivated his catastrophic acting-out, and to have put his life on an entirely new footing - simply through several months of couple therapy.
But you don't have to be an ex-president to be in a difficult jam in your relationship or to get tremendous benefit from couple counselling. Such stories are not exceptional in couplework, and it promises to be one of the most rapidly growing fields for counsellors, for three reasons. The first is that intimate relationships are - and always will be - incredibly challenging for anyone; but currently, couples have lost the fear of separating and are now more subject to the fear of staying together. This leads us to the second eason: that changes can happen faster in an intimate relationship brought to consciousness because it involves the ultimate field of creative energy – sexual energy, the one that brought us into life at the first place. Relationships are all about life. The third is the universality of so many of the problems that couples face. Although each story is individual, and cultural differences such as nationality, race and sexual orientation clearly have their effect, the unifying factors of problems in relationship are still astonishingly similar across the board. We suggest that, in terms of unconscious conflict as opposed to realtime difficulties such as step-parenting, there are three broad categories of conflict that couples experience. First is the dilemma between power and vulnerability; second is the baggage and styles of relating brought from families of origin; and third is the polarisation between the genders - which takes its toll even in same-sex couples.
It is no wonder then, that Malidoma & Subonfu Somé, psychological teachers from Africa and newcomers to the West, echo another oft quoted Clintonian remark: that it takes a village to support a couple, because "there is too much spirit in Relationships". Spirit, they say is mostly composed of feeling. Acknowledging this surfeit of ‘spirit', we are now in a position to understand one of the major differences between individual and couple therapy. This is that in the latter it is almost never necessary to try to evoke emotions. Indeed, I often advise students to avoid feeling questions altogether! I learned this when working as a divorce mediatior (at the time called Family Conciliator) when we had to get agreements, not process. Since I was training in psychotherapy at the same time, I was always seeing emotional process issues and wanting to get stuck into them. But getting process is child's play in couplework - managing sessions so that couples get an experience that conflict can be integrated is the real skill.The point is that generally there is already too much emotion in the couple – albeit often located in one partner more than the other. It may well be best to address the imbalance and to take time when genuine feelings – grief, regret, empathy, the ones that heal – emerge. But in general you do not need to evoke emotions in the way that as an individual worker may have become second nature, because you are liable to get caught in a trap and/or sabotage the session.
In addition, as we tell our coupleworker trainees, you have to remember who your client is. It is their Relationship, and it is not your responsibilty to maintain or repair this. It is theirs. The worker's responsibility is to manage the session and help bring unconscious dynamics into consciousness. What is more effective, for example, when process arises in the couple, is to point out the kind of Bonding Patterns you can see. Bonding Patterns are a dynamic of relating between the child part in one partner and the parent part in the other, marked by an escalating power struggle when disowned vulnerability demands protection. This dynamic, which was first named by Winkleman and Stein and further developed in our own book, causes untold damage in relationships and produces patterns that are incredibly resilient and, overtime, grow into a second skin of relating. Made conscious, they can be overcome by cultivating skillful awareness tempered by humour. One of the main reasons that my wife, Helena, and I developed the Dancing in the Dark workshops for couples is that when these patterns come to light in a group setting, people can laugh at themselves, because they see how many other couples have such similar and perverse misery-confirming behaviour patterns. Once they start identifying the patterns and stop taking themselves so seriously they are onto a winning streak.
A further important skill, which does not come up in individual work, is to learn how to stay neutral between two clients both competing for your sympathy and your confirmation that the other is wrong. The danger is losing your power by being coaxed into an alliance with the one with whom you feel the most sympathy. "She's absolutely right, he's not in touch with his feelings at all," you find yourself thinking. This is difficult stuff, and if you get caught you are lost, because you lose your power; the couple then can eat you alive. But allowing yourself to consciously bite the baited hook, daring to use the power of the trap itself, allows room for creative interventions which go very deep, for example, deliberately supporting one partner to effect a chang in the power balance. A master of this technique is the post-Jungian, Arnie Mindell.
When done well, creative couplework is definitely rooted in the psychotherapy end of the professional spectrum, but is best when it seems to be done with a very light touch, almost invisibly, so that it seems like basic counselling. This is really skillful relationship psychotherapy. Consequently, we teach our students how to do uncovering work subtly, when it is going to serve the couple by throwing light on their patterns, rather simply amassing information. Couple counsellors must stay true to the couple's presenting issues, whereas in individual work therapists frequently allow themselves the liberty to roam around many issues, sometimes patiently developing their relationship with the client, sometimes dealing with whatever is presented that day. Coupleworkers do not really have that luxury, because very often there is the possibility of separation or divorce if the clients cannot manage their relationship. This intensity can become a burden to the couple worker who ends up taking responsibility for making the relationship work again. Whilst the motivation is understandable, this is a very great trap, which under supervision often reveals itself to be the wish of the child in the worker to keep its parents happy together. But the coupleworker's job is manage the session, as Whittaker suggests, "I'm taking over now." This is a strong and crucial skill to learn.
As for the psychodynamics of couple work itself, there is again an important distinction to individual therapy. This is that transference is directed less to the worker simply because the couple are in deep and taxing transference to each other. This involves entirely different dynamics, and means that use of self –revealing what you yourself have learned both as a professional and as a private person - can be very potent. But it doesn't mean that the worker should have any less impeccable practice conditions, in fact even more thought through boundaries and management procedures are required. Contracting is one of those occasions, which is best accomplished swiftly and professionally at the end of the session but within session time, and couples, out of not wanting to be left alone again with their process, will readily attempt to scupper a smooth ending. I will frequently send couples away after a first session without another appointment. This is deliberate; they are not committing tome. They have to commit to their Relationship, and I want them to talk together first. It is better for them to discuss what the session achieved for them, then for them then to tell me they want more, rather than immediately attempting to bind them in a therapeutic alliance, because that can end up being about me.
Not to be left out, there is also a transpersonal dimension to couplework, which Contextual Couple Counsellors employ. One of the great allies we have is the ability to evoke a benign third: the Relationship itself, as separate entity that is more than the sum of two individual people and has its own meaning and purpose. It can be seen as that which contains the Soul of the couple, and focuses and reveals its emerging destiny. Sometimes the Third Being can become very mixed up with the actual children, which are what a couple creates on a physical level, and the couple may need to be reminded that there is another being around that both needs care and has joy to impart. It is often profoundly helpful for people to realise that they are actually creating something of value together, even if they have no children. If they can put their selfish aims aside they can imagine what this entity wants them to integrate, to co-create. When coupleworkers can help couples learn to listen to and follow this voice, ordinary miracles are commonplace.
References:
Clinton, WJ. My Life, Hutchinson, London, 2004.
Duffell, N & Løvendal, H, Sex, Love and the Dangers of Intimacy, Thorsons, London 2002.
Duffell, N & Løvendal, H, Professional, Personal and Private - the challenge of working creatively with couples, in Self & Society, Vol. 27, No 4, August-September 1999.
Duffell, N & Løvendal, H, Dancing in the Dark: from conflict to compassion in intimate relationships, in Human Potential, Winter 1996/7.
Haley, J & Hoffman, L, Techniques of Family Therapy (see Interview with Karl Whittaker) Basic Books, New York, 1967.
Mindell, A, The Dreambody in Relationships, Arkana, London, 1987.
Scarf, M, Intimate Partners, Century Hutchinson, London, 1987.
Somé, S, The Spirit of Intimacy, Berkley Hills Books, Berkley, CA, 1997.
Stone, H, & Winkleman, S, Embracing Each Other, New World Library, San Rafael, CA, 1989.
The author:
Nick Duffell has trained as a phsychotherapist, divorce mediator and Sexual Grounding
Therapist. With his wife, Helena Løvendal-Sørensen, he co-founded the Centre for Gender Psychology where they specialize in training Contextual CoupleWorkers
He may be contacted at info@genderpsychology.com
Find out more about relationship problems
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