 We demystify what goes on behind the therapy room door. Join us on this voyage of discovery and co-creative conversations. This is The Therapy Show, behind closed doors podcast with Bob Cook and Jackie Jones. Welcome back to the next episode and following on from the last episode which was individual versus group therapy. We're going to be looking at couple therapy which is another form of therapy and not all therapists do couples, some just do individuals. I mainly did individuals in group therapy and I sometimes work with couples as well so I did all sorts of different styles, variations, modalities of therapy and couple therapy is one of them. Interestingly enough though, in the actual four-year training at our institute, so you could become a clinical, it was individuals. There was no training in our four-year training on couple therapy and if there was, it was asked for specifically, we might have fed it in, but in terms of the program, it's you know couples therapies in there so people weren't often did extra training in couple therapy. Yeah, actually dem be a couple therapists. I mean if you listen to the last podcast, I think you asked me do you have to do specific training in group therapy to be a group therapist and I answered back to you, well a lot of people in their own therapy have done group therapy and then you've already got a model for it. Yes. Well in this situation, not that many therapists have models of couple therapy and there are specific models like a Margo therapy which is very, very, very exclusively for couples so you can go and get trained and friend of mine does that and so there's different models for couple therapy that you can go and get trained in which is what I would suggest whether it only be a three-month training or a year's training but I would definitely suggest you do some specialist couples training after you're graduated from your individual training because I think it's a different art altogether. Yeah. It doesn't mean your individual experience and training won't be of great benefit but once you move into couples therapy, you could almost say it is a systemic therapy where you're dealing with a system rather than just one individual. So couples, so I'm an advocate of some aspect of couples training before you actually advertise as a couples therapist. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah because it is a completely different beast. Very, very different yeah and people come for couples therapy usually when communication is broken down between the two of them and before they actually call it a day their last chance in the saloon usually is couples therapy and if you think of organizations that you might know well, relate would be one of them. I think that's now called something else that the public would go to to specifically get counselling or therapy to do with their relationship. Yeah. Yeah and I think that's something that I was quite open with and still am I suppose with the couples that I see that it is communication that's the key to a lot of it and having couples therapy doesn't automatically mean that the relationship will suddenly be okay. It might be that they go through a separation and the couples therapy allows them to do that appropriately, let's say. Yeah I mean that's one thing I often usually say at the beginning if I see couples. One of my friends is one is a psychotherapy centre which is predominantly for couples and he's one of the few Amargo couples therapists in Manchester and when he talks about couples therapy and I really agree here from working with couples is even more than individual therapy you would give the couples homework to do. Yeah. So it's quite a lot of I say homework but I'll say exercises at home yeah between the two of you more than and more than homework through individual therapy. There's a lot of behavioural exercises often given to couples to help them to improve their communication away from the hour that they see the therapist. Yeah and I can see why that will be beneficial. Yeah because then they can they can kind of put it into practice and come back and feed back and see how it went and then you know move on type of thing yeah. The couples therapy the dynamics of it it's kind of like two's company and three's a crowd and the drama triangle playing out in the therapy room and you know me being seen to be unbiased and you know yeah I think sometimes they want you to be on their side against the other party and it's about being completely neutral a lot of the time. And did you find that hard? Yeah to start off with I did yeah I could see the game playing out in front of me yeah so the boundaries was really important I thought right from the get go that this is how it's going to work and you know unless it's contracted that one of you is going to talk more in the session then it's important that you know you allow each other time to speak in the session. Yeah and I think the more training on that the better. Yes yeah yeah it took me a while to get comfortable with it I think yeah and again following on from the last episode about you know whether we see individuals and then the couples come together or whether it is just every session both you know husband and wife that's what it is at the end. I think you're talking now about different trainings and different models so I could think of two particular models and one of them this is to do with couples counseling one of them would train you down the way you've just talked about is that you from the beginning he would see the couple exclusively and they wouldn't see it off at all yes so if you saw them you know the work would be with you and then I can think of another model particularly where I think of many therapists by the way where they might say at the beginning okay so there might be a time where we would contract you know to see both of you individually for four sessions or three sessions whatever it is and then we'll come back again. Yeah okay and then there's another way of looking at this that you send the two people to other therapists. Yes so having individual therapy but not with you and not with you you keep yourself out of the picture completely yeah and you use two other therapists one for one person and one for the other person and then you come back say in four weeks and see what you've gleaned. Yes yeah because they are going to have individual things that maybe they want to talk about so that would make sense yeah. That's one way of looking for it I mean I'd particularly think I moved away from that so in other words in my later days doing couples I didn't have that model that I for me I wanted them to share whatever their sabotages or whatever it's about just with me. Yeah so it's it's they are different models yeah they are different trainings and I think that the advantages and disadvantages of both the one of the advantages of having yourself with the couple and not separating them out if you like is that you would see you would see them from the beginning in terms of interlocking scripts and how things are played out together once you start hiving them out in a way the field gets larger and then more challenging you know and it's much and I think it's much better in the end to see the system from the beginning yeah well as a therapist would say well some people you know need to talk like you've just said in fact talk individually or they feel you know the person talks over them all the time it's just no space they need some space and etc I think there's traps about that by the way and one of the when I first first started seeing couples I remember doing it the way we're talking now and I remember a classic mistake and that was that I didn't get a contract for shared confidentiality yeah because and so I ended up in a situation with the you know it was the woman in this case saying she'd had an affair and I please don't tell Bill but I'm going to see Bill in four weeks time so I ended up trapped so I learned very quickly that if you are going to do it that way you need to have shared confidentiality yeah yeah so there's things you need to learn in training I think to do in these particular styles or modalities yeah yeah because you know even I can remember I I move my chair when I'm seeing couples so I am literally in the middle I don't want to be even something as simple as that can be you know I don't know misconstrued in a session so whereas I always have my chair in a particular place which is kind of nearer to one person I literally move my chair so I'm directly in the middle of both of them and it's oh you don't have them sitting together opposite yeah well they sit together opposite me but whereas my chair is usually to one side I move it so I'm kind of directly facing both central as opposed to over to one side and and things like that I think there's so much to learn from a bit of training before you do copies and one of them is what I will call the mediating or parent transference in other words ostensibly the child in both partners wants to look to the parent to say that their sense of reality is the right one yeah and so I think the person is the therapist needs some training about some of these processes yeah like you said yeah and I can see why you know touching back on what you were saying about you know whether you call it homework or work outside the therapy room and things that that is really beneficial you know for them to then bring it back and use that as you know part of a discussion on how it felt and you know did it work did you do you feel any better with the benefits to it as it did you argue because a lot of it is is down to communication and you know being in a partnership is quite difficult because we've all got our own upbringing our own reality the way that we see the world and then you get married and it's like wow I didn't think it was going to be like this or you live together well one of the questions I would nearly always ask um on any and any nearly was asked this question to anybody come to me for couples therapy was if you know if your parents are alive and say their parents or significant other people were alive I used to say well they were in the same room now would you would they actually get on with each other yeah interesting question yeah because usually usually people have different instructions commands and junctions from from their parents in their heads which may disagree completely with their partners parenting in their heads yeah in other words in ta you would call it interlocking scripts so you would know it's a really important thing to think about the internalized parenting messages and junctions decisions that each of the partners have in their head that's one thing and again if you're a teratheapist another thing you would look for would be the transaction analysis style between the two people in other words which person took up the parent position more and which person took up the child position more yeah so you would think about it transactionally like that as well and I think it's quite a lot of educative therapy in couples work as well where as I said you might teach them things like that you know what happens to the adult relationship then if that's the major transactional style and how did that major transactional style um happen in the first place and all sorts of things like that yeah yeah definitely I de-educational you know educational things that's definitely one of the my flip chart was always out in the room when I was yeah and I think one of the things that that comes up a lot for me um when I'm seeing couples is kind of the psychological process and the psychological development you know individuation and separation and the honeymoon period and all those sorts of things dependent on the length of the relationship and psychologically whereabouts they are in it they can be in two totally different places to each other you know one's quite comfortable and settled in the relationship and okay to go out and be with their friends and come back whereas the other one doesn't want to be left because the fear of abandonment so you know I saw that an awful lot with with couples yes lots of things happen in couples but well I think I'm going to repeat myself again I think more than groups I think to have some specialist training on how to work with couples is important yeah it's very different from individual therapy yes yeah and it is quite intimate you know it's there's a lot of intimate things can be discussed in in couples therapy as well yeah I think I think it's a yeah and in individual therapy but you know it's a bit like if you asked me over the last 35 years which medium I enjoyed most individual therapy group therapy couples therapy my my favorites are my passion were more in group therapy and individual therapy even though I thought I was a good couples therapist I don't think I was as passionate in that area as I was in the other two areas hence I didn't do as much couples work as many of my peers did so I do think that therapists have their own you know investments in certain areas and some people might be you know more passionate saying running groups and working with couples my tip for all this is I think that if you haven't got a particular passion in one area and though you might be good at it and though you might have learned how to do it and all these things I would go with your your passion rather than say a sense of duty or money I completely agree 100% young yeah since people go to couples there because they I've heard people say well because there's more money there for example we can charge more money xxxx I think those sorts of things are the wrong reasons I think go where you're passionate I was far I think passionate about individual and group therapy particularly and long site and in fact psychotherapy what I call marathons which might go on for a week then I was with couples work yeah I'm not I don't want to diminish the fact that I was not you know I did a lot of good work in couples therapy but it wasn't my favorite style yeah and I think it's important for us to acknowledge as therapists you know that we do have a preference to one maybe then another and that's okay like you say rather than offering everything to everybody I think my favorite style talking to you was running groups yeah you when when I was at the institute that was what you were known for was the groups as opposed to the individual the groups and supervision yeah groups is probably looking back on my career and I still you know I still run some therapy groups I've got one coming up in three or four weeks and then their trainees to get hold of me and say you know would you run a group and things like that yeah and I still run these three-day marathons still and still so I haven't quite let go of the group of therapists in me but I do think the I do think I think the therapists aren't always generalists what I mean by that that they can they feel you know okay in every adulty group therapy individual therapy and you know how many generalists there are I don't know but I'm I think I'm more of a specialist yeah yeah and I was going to say that I think it's okay to to make the decision to be a specialist in a particular area if that's where your heart is and you're passionate about it it's it is yeah I'm a very good friend of mine who actually I know for a very long time a very good therapist and his passion is in couple therapy so what has he done he's gone off and started to couples how couples training he's got a centre that deals with not exclusively still does individual work but is I would say has a huge passion in training therapists to do couples work and does couples work himself and I have no doubt that that's he is one of his big specialisms yeah a passionate place yes yeah and I completely agree I think it's okay as therapists to to have specialist areas it doesn't mean you're not competent in any other areas I've just talked about passion really yeah yeah and we are human beings at the end of the day we are passionate about certain things and it's it's good to honour that in the therapy room so what we're going to be looking at on the next one I'm really looking forward to this one is imposter syndrome within the therapy process oh well this will be one of my favorite podcasts oh so it might be a long one the next one Bob I don't know about that but it's something I I think about a lot and it would I just think about it and I haven't got the time now but I'm looking forward to talking about that subject already I'm looking forward to being a participant and listening to everything that you've got to say about it it really interests me that as well personally and professionally as a tip to get people to come and listen to the ones particularly I think that major treatment working with somebody with a posture syndrome is first and foremost to get to know the imposter oh interesting so lots to talk about oh you need to be on the next episode we need to yeah you need to come back for the next episode all about your process syndrome in the therapy process thanks so much Bob I'll see you on the next episode hey great thank you take care bye bye you've been listening to the therapy show behind closed doors podcast we hope you enjoyed the show don't forget to subscribe and leave us a review we'll be back next week with another episode