Abstract
Couple therapy is too complex, and too important, to be undertaken under the sway of doctrinal orthodoxy. Integrating various schools of thought enlarges our toolkit and optimizes our efforts. In their excellent paper, “Couple Impasses: Three Therapeutic Approaches, Siegel, Goldman, and Fishbane provide three contemporary examples of such integration. In this commentary, I will note some commonalities in their work, highlight some singularly useful ideas from each author’s section, and conclude with some of my own thoughts about integrating and sequencing interventions in couple therapy.
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Notes
Fishbane and Siegel employ the term impasses to describe situations that commonly lead couples to enter therapy. By contrast, impasses in the individual psychotherapy literature more often refer to times when ongoing therapy is either stalled or in crisis. For our purposes here, the distinction makes little difference, though it allows me to note that impasses in the two-person group of individual therapy closely resemble the couple impasses described here.
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Nielsen, A.C. Couple Therapy Integrated: A Commentary on Couple Impasses—Three Therapeutic Approaches. Clin Soc Work J 48, 313–318 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10615-020-00767-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10615-020-00767-8