This document is designed to help you get the most benefit from our work together. It includes how to prepare for and maximize the value of our sessions. Your job is to create your own individual objectives for being in therapy; my job is to help you reach them.
Goals and tasks of Couples Therapy
The major aims of couples therapy is to increase your knowledge about yourself, your partner and the patterns of interaction between you, and then transform the ineffective patterns into effective ones. The key tasks of couples therapy are to increase your clarity about:
- The kind of life you want to build together and individually
- The kind of partner you aspire to be
- Your individual blocks to your visions
- The necessary skills and knowledge to reach your goals.
What’s Needed?
To create sustained improvement in your relationship you need: (Star your most challenging ones!)
- The appropriate attitudes and skills to work as a team
- The motivation to persist
- Time:
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To be together and with family.
- To play, coordinate, nurture, relax, and hang out.
- The willingness to balance relationship time with your personal and professional time.
- To review progress
- Listening and being curious instead of butting in, speaking up instead of becoming resentfully compliant or withdrawing
- Staying conscious, remembering to be more respectful, more giving, and more appreciative
- Improving your reaction to problems
- Hypersensitivity
- Considering short-term gratification with the long-term goal of creating a satisfying relationship.
Unproductive Patterns:
- Making the focus be whatever problem happens to be on your mind at the moment. This is a reactive and mostly ineffective approach to working things through
- “I don’t know what to talk about, do you?”
- Discussing whatever fight you are in at the moment or whatever fight you had since the last meeting. Discussing these fights/arguments without a larger context of what you wish to learn from the experience is often an exercise in spinning your wheels.
Productive Patterns:
Instead, before each session:
- Reflect on your objectives for being in therapy
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Think about your next step that supports or relates to your larger objectives for the kind of relationship you wish to create and who you aspire to become