Describing my Work with Couples

Recently, a client in couple’s therapy, who was obviously struggling with our work, asked me about the purpose of therapy and how it works. I thought it was a good question, and, surprisingly, one that I had been asked directly only a handful of times in my many years of working with couples. With his wife also in the therapy session, the three of us discussed his questions, but it was a brief conversation and left me wanting to give a more complete response. That led me to begin thinking more about how I would describe what actually happens in couples therapy and how I would capture that in writing. Below is my attempt to do so.

I think of this as a draft that will continue to be re-written and updated through time. Having articulated these ideas, having put them on paper, lets me step back and consider them from a little distance.

Metaphors - Part 1

Metaphors help us make vivid, colorful comparisons. They capture complexity in just one word, or a few. And the metaphors we carry around in our heads lead us down certain paths rather than others when we’re trying to think about our problems. They guide us toward certain ideas or beliefs about ourselves, and keep other ideas or beliefs hidden from view.

This article is about two metaphors we might use to understand ourselves when dealing with problems: the mining metaphor and the bookshelf metaphor.

Metaphors - Part 2

AN ILLUSTRATION: GRUMPINESS AND DAVE

In Parts 2 and 3 of this article I want to illustrate the mining and bookshelf metaphors by revisiting Dave and his dealings with grumpiness (from one my first entries in this blog). You may recall that Dave struggled with grumpiness in the evenings at home with his wife and two kids. He described grumpiness as a fog settling over his house and we identified the effects of the fog on Dave and his family (increased tension, distance, feeling “on edge,” a sense of heaviness and sadness).

Our conversation eventually helped Dave to name his preference: He preferred to be happy, upbeat, and pleasant rather than grumpy.

Metaphors - Part 3

THE BOOKSHELF METAPHOR: SIDE-BY-SIDE UNDERSTANDINGS OF GRUMPINESS


Instead of arranging the different ideas about Dave’s grumpiness in a hierarchy, with one key underlying cause, in the bookshelf metaphor the ideas or explanations are arranged side-by-side, like books. Below are the items from the layers of the mining metaphor, now shifted 90 degrees to become books on a bookshelf, with slight name changes to move from “causes” to book titles:

Agreeing to Stop - Part 2

The will and ability to stop, to pause, or to take a break, stands out for me as one of the best achievements made by the couples I work with in therapy. 

This is Part 2 of a two-part piece on a couple’s work to interrupt a destructive pattern and opt, instead, for a preferred story of their relationship. *** 

Part 1 of this two-part piece described how a married couple agreed to change a longstanding pattern by stopping a destructive, downward spiral of arguing and hostility before it took them down one more time. Instead, they developed the ability to pause or take a break and resume the discussion when they could be calm and compassionate with one another. Their ability to start taking these steps had begun to restore their hope in their relationship and allow the positive, loving, and caring qualities of their relationship to be more on display. In Part 1 I framed their agreement to stop as an act of standing up for their preferred story of their relationship. In Part 2 I want to return to this couple and describe in more detail the steps they took to get to the place where they were able to agree to stop, and stick with it.

Building Preferences – Being Less Grumpy

As promised in my last entry on Building Preferences, here’s an example of building a preference. The preference is for Dave, who has been struggling for several months with what he’s come to call his “grumpiness” at home. We’ll walk with Dave through the process of building a preference. Although Dave is fictitious, the dialogue that follows is based on many therapy conversations. 

1. Naming your preference. Dave is clear only about what he doesn’t want – the problem that is causing such a negative feeling for him and a disheartening spirit at home with his wife and two kids: grumpiness. At first he states his preference as:

• “I’d prefer to be less grumpy.”

Naming Preferences

It’s a basic tenet of narrative therapy that problems are tricky buggers. They take over our lives, drain our energy, and erase our imaginations. They can convince us that they are the truth, the whole truth, and that they are more real than any of the paltry solutions we might come up with. So they’re not only tricky, they’re greedy too. And the people I work with in therapy usually show up to my office with some serious suffering from these problems. They’ve often had the life, energy, and optimism sucked out of them by problems. 

But as daunting as these problems often feel for me and the people I work with, my spirits are usually buoyed by my confidence in people’s ability to identify and work toward their preferences, despite the efforts of problems to keep them down. So even in the midst of people’s considerable pain and suffering, I remain curious about what they prefer for their lives and why it matters to them. 

Anger Issues for a Single Father

“Anger issues” is how Ben explained why he was in my office looking for help. Ben’s wife had passed away four years earlier, leaving him to raise their two sons on his own. Lately, he said, he had become “very short” and “lacked patience” with his teenage sons. He connected his current difficulties to a much longer term “problem with anger” and was eager to get a better understanding of his anger and develop some strategies for dealing with it. 

In our first session he named his preference for how he’d like to handle difficult, frustrating situations with his sons: with “patience,” taking “time out” before responding, and seeking to “understand the situation better before judging.” Ben connected these preferences to skills he was already using at work – being calm, listening, asking for an explanation, and explaining his own perspective – and by identifying them, the skills seemed to become more accessible to him as a father.

Returning to Hot Conversations

How do you have a conversation that helps you better understand and address the complexities and difficult patterns of your relationship when those same complexities and patterns can jump up and derail the conversation at any time? Further, how do you have such a difficult conversation when life interrupts you every time you get started?

STOPPING

In an earlier piece I wrote about a couple who developed their ability to STOP when a difficult-but-familiar pattern was threatening to take their marriage down a painful, destructive path.

Narrating Intentions

How can couples break away from those familiar conversations that get stuck in point-and-counterpoint, accusation and defense? Conversations where the content is lost to a frustrating, confusing process? 

One answer might be found at the movies, in the voice of the narrator: that disembodied voice that speaks from outside the movie or on top of its action, that helps set the historical context, explains a key plot point, or conveys thoughts that would otherwise be only “in the head” of a character. 

The voice of the narrator came to mind recently when working with a married couple, Maria and George, who were frustrated by a regularly occurring conversation that would lead to nowhere but misunderstanding, defensiveness and distance.