Building Your Child’s Confidence: Creative Determination
“It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.” – Babe Ruth My uncle Neil was born and raised to be a rancher. He spent his entire life ranching in Afton, Wyoming. Like all successful ranchers, he worked hard and he worked long hours and taught his six children how to do the same. […]
Choice Points in Disrupting Symbiosis in Conflict-Avoidant Couples: Moving These Couples Forward
When you are working with a conflict-avoiding couple, it is especially difficult to create positive forward moving momentum. These couples merge boundaries often and it can be a challenge to disrupt the status quo. If you search for openings in the issues they present, you will find choice points that enable you to disrupt their […]
Using Initiator-Inquirer to Support Growth in Couples
One of the reasons I find the Initiator-Inquirer process especially valuable in our work with couples is that it exposes so much about where they are developmentaly. It helps us see the cutting edge of their development and reveals ways we can challenge each of them to work at their growth edges. Now if you […]
Getting Started with an Enmeshed Couple Moving to Early Differentiation
Couples who marry young often establish enmeshed relationships that inhibit individual growth. They have not had the opportunity to mature and do much differentiation work prior to getting married. When partners organize their relationships in an enmeshed way, their own desires are usually obscured and are often presented in terms of: “We are alike in […]
Working with Partners Who Aren’t Equally Committed to Their Relationship
In a recent blog post I outlined some of the ways I work with couples who are caught in patterns of externalization and blame in their relationships. If you missed it, you can check it out here. In that blog post I presented some ideas for pushing the growth edge in these partners. I ended […]
Intimacy Avoidance Comes with Externalization and Blame
In spring of 2018 I wrote a blog post about the cycle of externalization and blame. This dynamic is a familiar one for couples therapists because so many of the couples who come to see us organize their relationship issues around external symptoms or problems.How many times have you heard complaints like these? “He drinks […]
A Powerful Exercise to Promote the Work of Differentiation in Couples
The differentiation stage is, by far, the most difficult for many couples. Helping each partner set self-focused autonomous goals is crucial to their growth as individuals and to push the development of the couple. In my last blog post, I gave you a glimpse into how I work with couples to tease apart individual goals […]
The Couples Conference 2019
This year’s Couples Conference explored 5 major models of couples therapy. These included PACT, Gottman, EFT, Relational Life and the Developmental Model. I had the honor of opening the conference, and I would like to share with you the poem I wrote to highlight five different approaches to couples therapy that have advanced our field. […]
Helping couples realize it takes two to manage long-standing pain
Anxiety, anger, and jealousy are emotions I see often in many of the couples I have worked with over the years, and I’m sure it’s no different in your practice. Untangling the roots of these feelings and helping couples adopt strategies to deal with them becomes a central challenge for you. Recently my therapists’ online […]
Working with The Brilliant Skeptic or Paranoid Adaptation
A while ago I was thinking about specific challenges that can come up in our work with couples – ones that may require us to go “off script” and take a more nuanced approach to therapy. In particular, I’ve been thinking about cases where at least one partner is entrenched in one personality adaptation. So […]
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