At our Institute we approach couples treatment with a model for healthy relationships. This model assumes that people enter into intimate relationships to get their needs met, and that they are responsible for both their own needs and those of their partner. Each person’s responsibility in getting their own needs met is to keep those needs within realistic bounds and to communicate them clearly. Each person’s responsibility for their partner’s needs is to make a good faith effort to meet those needs when they are clear and realistic.
Our approach to individual treatment focuses on the impact that blocked emotions and cognitive distortions have on development of life problems, and we assess for these in couples treatment as well. While we deal with these as needed, our main focus in couples treatment is on the interpersonal stances that each partner adopts and the expectations that accompany them. Interpersonal stances, including nurturant, dependent, cooperative, dominant, and submissive stances, typically determine the expectations that partners bring to relationships, and most people develop strong preferences for some stances and aversions to others at an early age.
In couples counseling, whether in person or via teletherapy, we teach clients to recognize their own and their partner’s preferred stances and also the ones that each person has difficulty adopting. We teach the proper role and scope of each stance in a healthy relationship, and we also teach the expectations that accompany each stance.
For example, in many relationships, one partner feels that the other partner doesn’t contribute enough or is emotionally distant, while the other partner feels that the first partner is overly demanding. Such problems may indicate an imbalance of the nurturant and dependent stances. One partner may experience dependency needs that are activated too often or too strongly, while the other may be insufficiently nurturant-or both problems may occur at the same time. In these situations we teach both partners to monitor their own emotional needs and impulses, and to try to replace their tendencies towards demandingness or withdrawal with efforts towards communicating their needs more clearly and balancing their own needs with those of their partner.
