Doubling in Couple Therapy

I updated an earlier post today with just a few extra words about doubling. They are important to me though.

The question of psych-education and the relationship with the therapist continues to be something I reflect on. After the Dan Wile workshop I went on I see how much could be achieved with virtually no psych-ed, no dialogue, all doubling.

I also updated this post. Also with more on doubling.

I’ll post up more on this.

Dialogues and mirroring – Psychodrama and Imago

In an earlier post I tried to capture a thought I had about dialogues. I was pleased to know someone read it and emailed me to say they were a bit confused. No wonder, I just pour out something I think about late at night — when I should be fast asleep!

I will describe more clearly how I work with couples by unpacking what I think are important ideas in a snippet from the earlier post.

I like to distinguish the words of the initiator of the dialogue, the protagonist, from the response by the person who is listening, the receiver, who I encourage to think of themselves as an auxiliary.

The problem is that I’m using language from two psychotherapeutic modalities. I imagine this makes no sense to anyone really, as there are very few psychodramatists who are also Imago Relationship Therapists. Even to someone who has that background it is still a muddled sentence.

Let me start again. First I’ll use Imago terms and then I’ll describe the same work using psychodrama language.

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