Working With Couples: Myths That Undermine Treatment

Working with couples can be an exciting and rich experience. That richness, however, often includes repetitive battling with clients; complaints that you favor or don't understand one or both of them; the sense of being watched and judged; and, ultimately, unnecessary treatment failures.

Using clinical examples that are usually considered difficult, this program identifies and challenges common therapists' beliefs that impede therapeutic effectiveness. Participants will learn the inaccurate assumptions behind many popular clinical models; understand what keeps them from productively using the experience of being triangulated; acquire tools to make couples therapy more robust; and identify the personal issues professionals must handle in order to let go of comfortable, self-defeating clinical beliefs.

Myths to be challenged include:

• Most couples in trouble communicate poorly
• Sex is primarily a function of love and intimacy
• Both partners need all their major wounds heard and addressed
• Therapy is sabotaged when both partners gang up on the therapist
• Male and female sexuality are more different than similar
• Our clinical models of relationship are free of gender stereotypes
• When one partner feels powerless, the other partner typically has too much power
• Typically, the therapist and client of the same gender feel more naturally aligned with each other.