Solution Focused Brief Couple Therapy

BY JUDITH FRASER, MA, MFT

These simple ideas for solution focused brief couple therapy can make a significant difference in your life.

Wife: "He leaves Playboys around the house and constantly makes comments about women's attributes. That makes me feel insecure. I can't trust him and I don't even want him to touch me!"

Husband: "She's too suspicious. I don't want to feel like a trained dog!"

Therapist: "How would you know you could trust him?"

Wife: "He'd take time just for me and not leave those da___ books around."

Therapist: "What would change in you if this occurred?"

Wife: "I'd feel freer to move into the world, maybe go back to school and make a career change."

Therapist: "Can you do that anyway?"

This is a possible dialogue between a couple who are in trouble.

They want to feel better about themselves, but problems get in the way.

Therapy is about empowering, not fixing or solving the problem.

In relationships, we can't control what the other does. We can change ourselves.

As we make positive changes, reach out into new directions we feel better about ourselves. These new moves then become building blocks for a continual progression of expansion into the community and the world at large.

Change is an important word. When the relationship isn't working trying something new may be enough in itself.

Wife: "I want him to be more relaxed when I spend the night with him. He fidgets and it makes me nervous."

Therapist: "How would you be different if he was more relaxed?"

Wife: "I'd do a few more things on my own. I wouldn't feel guilty about leaving now and then."

Therapist:"Anything else?"

Wife: "We wouldn't just fight when a problem came up. We'd sit down and work it through logically."

Therapist:"How would you be different if you worked problems through logically?"

Wife: "I'd feel more centered, less scattered. I'd respect myself and him more."

Couple therapy can be done with couples or with individuals. One committed person can make positive changes in themselves that reflect back on the relationship. Small changes lead to larger changes. One step at a time is the goal.

Each therapy session is treated as a whole in itself. Human beings, like seeds of a tree, are filled with the potential for expansion. Don't force the tender shoots, water them. Let them feel the sunshine of your presence. Their spirit will find it's way.

Step one. What is the desired outcome or goal? Not what is wanted or not wanted in the other person, but in the self.

Step two. Build on the success of individual change. Become aware of the small things that shift. Acknowledge the good things, write them down, talk about them.

Step three. Do something different. Change means not standing still.

© Copyright 2002, Judith Fraser

Judith is a licensed family therapist in private practice and specializes in creative, holistic therapy with individuals and couples. You can reach her by email at phrasmus@earthlink.net or at (323) 656-9800.

Suggested reading: Becoming Solution-Focused In Brief Therapy by Jane Peller, LCSW and John Walter, LCSW, primarily for therapists but could be of interest to couples. Suggested listening: Relationships audiotape by Judith Fraser, MFT.

DIFFERENCE, NOT DISTANCE

BY JUDITH SHERVEN, PH.D., AND JAMES SNIECHOWSKI, PH.D., from The New Intimacy Newsletter

Sadly, and sometimes tragically, the differences between us are often translated into emotional and spiritual distance. We take that which is "other" to be, at the very least, something to suspect, and at the worst, to be eliminated either emotionally by rejection and exclusion, or morally by denunciation and segregation, or physically by punishment and even death. We condemn the idea of "being different" and sentence ourselves to lives lived in tightly controlled psychological and physical space, including that which is like us, and keep at bay that which is not.

"So?" you may be thinking. "What's the problem?"

Think of it this way.

Scientists tell us that the universe is fifteen billion years old. They project that our universe will last several billions of years into the future. And in all that time, past and future, there has never been another you. Never. Not once. You are the only you there will ever be. Even if cloning is allowed, your clone will still have to grow up in a time different from yours and will have distinctly different experiences from those you had, so your clone might look like you but that's all. To say it again, there has never been and there never will be another you.

It doesn't matter whether you believe that God created the universe and everything in it or that who and what we are is the product of a random evolutionary process. The fact is that the life we live is made, at its foundation, on the principle of differentness, to say nothing of its manifold expression. To deny the fact of differences, in other words, for anyone to insist that everything conform to what they believe is real is an insult to God's creative powers, an affront to the process we are evolving through, and, ultimately, a refusal to be alive in the universe as it is. And what does that leave? A universe of fantasy which then is imposed upon others under some idea of righteousness which is followed by a brutal array of means to coerce every and anyone into obedience.

Does this sound abstract, having nothing to do with your life? Well look again.

How many couples have you known where one person forces his or her will on another? That's the same thing on a small scale. But even more personal, have you ever had someone try to make you into what they thought you should be? Did you like it? Chances are you did not. And why? Because you were not only denied, you were effectively destroyed, because who you were was irrelevant and in the way, at least from the other person's point of view.

In reality we cannot disavow the fact that we are different from one another-person to person, group to group, society to society and the fact that we are is what constitutes the very ground, the deep weave of this life we live. In our illusion, however, we practice denial and it only leads to anguish, abuse, and victimization.

Difference . . . not distance.

© Copyright, May 3, 2002, Reprinted with permission