Couples on the Brink: When Is Enough Enough? – Terry Real

Salepage link: At HERE. Archive:

We’ve all encountered couples for whom therapy is a last-ditch attempt before calling it quits. But how do we, as therapists, decide whether to throw our weight behind the relationship or let it end? This session explores the impact our own values, childhood experiences, and old family roles have on how we help couples answer this momentous question. Through case histories and discussion, you’ll focus on:

• How to quickly get to the heart of the matter and articulate the couple’s stuckness, then reawaken warmth and closeness, helping them remember love and back off the ledge if possible
• What to do when one partner is ambivalent about the relationship and clearly disengaged from therapy
• What to do when your own deal breakers, such as physical or psychological abuse, are part of the couple’s history

How to proceed when addiction issues cloud the viability of the relationship’s future or when there’s been betrayal or infidelity

• Focus on how to quickly get to the heart of the matter and articulate the couple’s stuckness, then reawaken warmth and closeness, helping them remember love and back off the ledge if possible
• Focus on what to do when one partner is ambivalent about the relationship and clearly disengaged from therapy
• Focus on what to do when your own deal breakers, such as physical or psychological abuse, are part of the couple’s history
• Focus on how to proceed when addiction issues cloud the viability of the relationship’s future or when there’s been betrayal or infidelity

1. Course of Treatment
   1. Step One
      1. Join with the Most Distant Partner
      2. Partners’ Positions Translate into Their Unique Dance
      3. Dance as the System Needing Treatment

1. Join Through the Therapist’s “Truth”
   1. Confront the stable partner
   2. Preconditions for Intimacy
   3. Form alliances with each partner
   4. Step Two
      1. Negotiate a 3-4 Month Contract
      2. Base this on 180 degree Turnaround in Stable Partner
   5. Step Three
      1. Produce Palpable Change in the Stable Partner
2. Three Phases of Treatment
   1. Waking Up
   2. Inner Child Work
   3. Learned Connection
3. Using Therapeutic Intimacy
   1. Creating Alliance
   2. Appropriate Self Disclosure
   3. Working with Grandiosity
4. Intimacy as a Spiritual Practice
   1. First and Second Consciousness
   2. Adaptive Child vs Functional Adult
   3. How Couples Mutually Trigger Their Positions
5. Relational Recovery
   1. How to Bring the Functional Adult into Relationship
   2. Bottom Up and Top Down Healing
6. Five Losing Strategies of The Adaptive Child
   1. Process of Harmony, Disharmony, and Repair
   2. Being Right, Controlling the Partner, Unbridled Self-Expression
   3. Retaliation, and Withdrawal
7. The Relational Grid
   1. Self-esteem
   2. Grandiosity and Toxic Shame
   3. Full-Respect Living
   4. Boundaries
   5. Letter to the Adaptive Child
   6. How to Go After What You Want
   7. Improving Communication
8. The Feedback Wheel
   1. Acknowledgement
   2. Experience
   3. Imaginings
   4. Feelings
   5. Desires
   6. Listening and Responding
   7. Teach the Couple to Hold Reality Lightly
   8. Develop Curiosity
   9. Respond with Generosity
   10. Cherish What You Have