Therapy Duo

Psychotherapy & Counselling for Individuals & Couples

Category: Communication

Articles on communication.

  • Talking is Dangerous

    Talking Can be Dangerous

    The theme of this post comes from After the Honeymoon: How Conflict Can Improve Your Relationship, a book which, among other things, investigates how conflict can be transformed to improve relationships. Daniel Wile starts with some basic, important rules about talking in couple relationships, which we’ve summarised below.

    Rules for Good Communication

    • Make “I” statements rather than “you” statements. (For example, “I feel… “, rather than “You shouldn’t have…”)
    • Don’t use “always” and “never”. (“You’re always saying that!”)
    • Don’t interrupt the other
    • Use reflective listening. (“I hear you saying …. Is this right?”)
    • Don’t assume what the other’s doing. (“You’re just trying to annoy me.”)
    • Stay on one topic
    • Don’t rake over resentments from the past
    • Leave out the irrelevant details. (“No, it was Tuesday that happened, not Monday”)
    • Don’t name-call. (”You’re stupid”)
    • Don’t compound statements with old complaints. (“And while we’re talking about this, what about when you…”).

    Starting Points

    These are all great pointers to making talking in couple relationships less dangerous. They’re starting points.

    For Daniel Wile however, it’s important to remember that they’re just that – starting points. As we work with couples, we can get much further when we consider why these rules continually get broken. In so doing, we’re dropping down to the level of the feelings and truths below these behaviours.

    In other words, we’re asking: what do the hearts want, of these two individuals, locked in such hurtful and draining interactions? These are the kinds of inquiry we can conduct in the safe, supportive space of couples counselling.

  • Download Our Paper

    Our Paper Working with Couple Interactions

    We’ve been busy this Easter and are pleased to report that our paper Working with Couple Interactions is now available for download as a PDF document. The paper describes a model we successfully use with couples to examine and improve the quality of their interactions.

    To get the paper, sign up for emails on the home page on our web site Therapy Duo.

    Once you’ve signed up, we’ll send you occasional articles on our practice and on psychotherapy in general.

    (We’ll treat your email address as private and will never provide it to other parties.)

  • Sharing our Vulnerabilities

    Truths in Zen

    We don’t have to be Zen practitioners to hear truths from Zen – particularly when they come in the form of a lovely book like Nothing Special: Living Zen by Charlotte Joko Beck. Here’s a quote from this book that resonates with us and with the work we do with couples:

    I recently heard a quotation from a professional athlete: “Love is not shared pleasure. It is shared pain.” That’s a good insight. We can certainly enjoy going out with our partner, for example, and having dinner together. I’m not questioning the value of shared enjoyment. But if we want a relationship to be closer and more genuine, we need to share with our partner that which is most scary for us to share with anybody. When we do that, then the other person has freedom to do the same thing. Instead, we want to keep our image, particularly with somebody we’re trying to impress. Sharing our pain does not mean telling our partners how they irritate us. That’s a way of saying, “I’m angry with you.” It does not help us break down our false idol and open us to life as a butterfly. What does open us is sharing our vulnerabilities.

    Sharing Vulnerabilities

    Time and time again it’s our experience in couples therapy that when partners share their vulnerabilities the space inhabited by the relationship grows. We feel this experientially in the therapy room, when we (Amanda and Ron) sit with the couple – the four of us as a small group, inquiring into such vulnerabilities.

    Couples therapy can be the “safe experiment”, the place in which the couple can get a real taste of the rewards of vulnerability, can become committed to vulnerability.

    Joko Beck goes on:

    Sometimes we see a couple who has done this difficult work over a lifetime. In the process, they have grown old together. We can sense the enormous comfort, the shared quality of ease between these people. It’s beautiful, and very rare. Without this quality of openness and vulnerability, partners don’t really know each other; they are one image living with another image.

  • The Hendricks and the Essential Co-Commitments

    Conscious Loving

    In their impressive book Conscious Loving, Gay and Kathlyn Hendricks list the core commitments for transforming co-dependent relationships.

    What’s a co-dependant relationship? Well, that’s a subject for a whole other post, but at the moment let’s just summarise it as being one in which the partners have made unconscious agreements – to be less than whole, to limit each other’s potential, to end up with less than what they had before they were together.

    In contrast, in a co-committed relationship, the partners support each other in being whole, complete individuals. They each enable the other to express their potential and creativity; they are each more easily able to access their creativity as a result of loving, supportive interactions.

    So back to the Hendricks’ essential co-commitments. Here is just a summary of their recommendations. (We strongly recommend the Hendricks’ book Conscious Loving, for couples deciding to take this path of co-commitment.)

    The Commitments

    Co-Commitment 1: “I commit myself to being close, and I commit myself to clearing up anything in the way of my ability to do so.”

    To make this statement is empowering for many partners in a relationship. By making it we are already on the road to co-commitment, to clearing up unconscious tendencies to co-dependence as these tendencies arise.

    Co-Commitment 2: “I commit myself to my own development as an individual”.

    Possibly (and frequently), in our childhood and in previous relationships, we have learned that to be in relationship means to limit ourselves, to be less than what we can be. This is a lie. In this co-commitment we state that we will not, to the best on our abilities, engage in this strategy, but will work on being the best we can be in our own right.

    Co-Commitment 3: “I commit to revealing myself fully in my relationships, not in concealing myself”.

    The wounds from previous relationships can convince us to hide parts of ourselves from our partner. In this co-commitment we state that we will no longer do this. When both partners in a relationship are prepared to do this, the effects can be miraculous!

    Co-Commitment 4: “I commit myself to the full empowerment of people around me”.

    In co-dependent relationships there is a secret need for people to be less than who they should be. With this commitment we state that we support the full development of the people around us, including our partner. This is a valuable gift to them.

    Co-Commitment 5: “I commit to acting from the awareness that I am 100 percent the source of my reality”.

    This is a powerful commitment to seeing that relationships cannot grow when based on projections, on blaming our partner, on victimhood. It is a commitment we do well to return to each day!

    Co-Commitment 6:  “I commit myself to having a good time in my close relationships”.

    The Hendricks make the point that it is only in a last few hundred years ago that relationships have been considered “romantic” (in European culture, anyway), rather than merely of survival value. Survival relationships can be grim, painful and difficult. It is empowering to clearly state that this is not how we value our relationships: that instead we take a conscious stand for enjoyment in them.

  • Carl Rogers and The “Gloria” Films

    The “Gloria” Films

    There’s a whole complicated background to Everett Shostrom’s “Gloria” films of 1964, much of which is lost in the sands of time. The three films, as we understand it, were the first time that three well-known psychotherapists worked with a (same) real client, on film – these being Carl Rogers (human-centered), Fritz Perls (old-fashioned not-so-relational Gestalt) and Albert Ellis (rational emotive behaviour).

    Notwithstanding the ensuing controversy over the films, we think the Carl Rodgers piece still looks good. There’s also a book by Gloria’s daughter (Living with the Gloria films), which would make interesting reading, and which takes the story further. (You can pick up aspects of the story in the comments to the videos, links to which appear below.)

    The Carl Rogers Film

    Here’s the Carl Rogers film – an introduction to the half-hour therapy session with Gloria. Watching this we see the ease with which he lays out some of the core tenets of the humanistic approach to psychotherapy – in a way that’s still very current after more than 40 years.

    It’s the part where he talks of the “prizing of the person” that are particularly appealing – an attitude that maximises the chances of real work being done between therapist and client. His initial meeting with the client is genuine, understated, and facilitating of the process. And as the interview unfolds (parts 2 to 5) he appears to genuinely prize this person with whom he’s working.

    The other parts of the session are here: