A Marriage Therapist's Blog

 

Thoughts on Marriage Counseling

 

Posts Tagged ‘collaborative couple therapy’


Dec 01

The Three Phases

By Jay Slupesky
1 Comment
About Marriage Therapy



Fishermen, St. John’s, Newfoundland

Wile’s “Collaborative Couple Therapy” does a great job of explaining the cycles that all couples go through. There are three phases in any relationship:

  • Collaborative phase, in which the partners are speaking what is on their minds. They are making “I statements” which are not blaming and which express deep feelings. For example, a wife says to her husband, “I get lonely when you work late.”
  • Withdrawn phase, in which partners are not speaking what is on their minds. To continue the above example, even though the wife is unhappy with her husband working late, she doesn’t say so. She may say nothing, but she probably feels resentful.
  • Adversarial phase, in which partners are blaming each other. In this phase, the wife might fire off a name-calling/blaming statement such as, “You are a workaholic and it’s destroying our marriage.”

Obviously, the collaborative phase is the best place to be. In this phase, spouses are allies and work things out together. When the husband hears that his wife his lonely, he is touched and may feel some guilt. He’s then in the mood to talk about it and to work together (collaboratively) towards a solution. Contrast this with the husband who is greeted with the “workaholic” accusation: he will be in no mood to respond positively. He may fire off his own salvo or he may just withdraw. Neither of those options does anything to improve the situation.

It can be a challenge to learn how to avoid blaming and to make the kind of statements necessary to stay in the collaborative phase. That’s a major goal of marriage therapy.