Bob crosses his arms and pushes away from his wife, who fights tears and grits her teeth. “This is going to ruin our marriage,” she declares. By the end of session, she is curling into him, while he soothes her tears. There is a renewed sense of connection and safety between them. How does the couples therapist get such a dramatic and uplifting result in the course of just 100 minutes?
Our Department Head and PACT Ambassador, Debra Campbell, LMFT, was recently published in The PACT Institute Blog. Her article, titled “Techniques to Help Distressed Couples Slow Down and Reconnect,” deals with how she, and other PACT trained therapists, “granularize” or slow couples down during therapy sessions, forcing them to not experience the same old hurts and argument, but a different, new one.
The Psychobiological Approach to Couples Counseling uses physical proximity, facial expression, and body language to uncover true underlying emotions. Couples sit face to face, eye to eye in session and are in each other’s care. This draws the couple back from historical memories and into the present, allowing the couple to experience disagreements differently and achieve win-win solutions. .
These techniques create a space, or frankly no space, where the couple is “forced to address the reality in front of them,” not reliving an old fight, but instead tackling the one right in front of them in a unifying manner.
