Couples Therapy (Showtime) #1 - Therapist Reacts

hey deserving listeners a lot of you have been asking for a long time for me to watch this show called couples therapy on showtime and so let's watch the show and see if anything of interest comes out of my face my name is dr kirk honda and i have been practicing and teaching couples therapy for over 20 years i'm guessing i'm gonna have a lot of things to say let's watch the show you're barking up the wrong tree and i wasn't listening and i wasn't getting it and i was like oh just just shh like i just i gotta i gotta just wait till the weekend just wait till the weekend and he said cancel everything i don't i'm not going with you i don't i don't i don't want anything i don't want this and by the way where's my passport and he went to italy okay so first reaction she's leaning in very heavily which i don't usually do nothing wrong with that and that really conveys that she's very much paying attention and that that's good you know body language for really paying attention and it's something that i try to get my trainees to be a little bit more flexible of when you're a trainee and you're nervous and you're terrified you tend to sit very rigidly and and kind of leaning back because you're afraid of your clients and so i try to get my trainees to loosen up and just just be themselves just to act you know if your friend was telling you a story how would you listen to them would you listen very rigidly and be taking notes and be thinking what is the best thing to say at the end of their sentence you wouldn't be doing that you would be going oh my god what's going you'd be authentic and real and in the moment so that therapist seemed very in the moment so let's continue watching have a seat okay i don't have complicated needs i am utterly transparent and completely communicative about what it is they want them also totally consistent so the first question i have is so these are not actors these are real people in real therapy which is great if that's the case because the one thing about training therapists to become therapists is you know like if you're training a plumber i always choose plumber as the the another profession to use analogies with and if you're a plumber and you're training another plumber you go to a pipe and you say this is how you do this or you know look at this or this is how this happens or look at this thing and you you actually get hands on you might even direct your apprentice to okay why don't you do that why don't you fix it and i'll watch you the thing about therapy is that clients usually don't want a bunch of people watching what's happening they usually just want their therapist to be there and clients deserve confidentiality and a lot of therapists aren't comfortable with cameras being in the room because a lot of therapists are terribly insecure i'm here to tell you so we don't have a lot of examples of actual couples therapy for trainees to watch and what we end up having to do is we end up either having to role play in the class so we'll get students to just role play clients which is very hard for students to do because they're not improv actors they might not know what a real client operates like they're in a fishbowl format where you know the whole classroom is watching so they're nervous or you get actors sometimes but again that's not really necessarily authentic or we will watch videos of actors acting like their clients and then the real therapist is trying to you know show their version of therapy the problem with that often is that the the people making the dvd or the video are usually trying to sell a book or trying to sell a model of therapy so they usually pick very easy clients to portray so a lot of trainees and if you're a therapist out there you can attest to this by the time you get to your internship and you're actually treating real real clients real patients you might have minimal experience actually seeing what therapy actually looks like so it's just part of the you got to just throw therapists in you're just like well i know you might not know what to do but you got to start somewhere so i'll be right around the corner if you got to bop out of your office and come to me and ask what you know what's up and there are a few principles that i tell trainees in their first session i'll say i always look them in the eye and i say do you know how to listen to somebody and they'll be like yeah i know how to listen then i say just just listen just listen don't worry about doing the right thing don't worry about trying to fix them don't worry about trying to come up with a brilliant intervention don't even theorize don't necessarily even assess them it's your first session of your entire career you'll have 40 more years of glorious sessions this is going to be potentially your worst session of all time because you have no idea what you're doing and you're very nervous so focus on one thing which is listen just hear them and just prove to your client that you're hearing them and usually that gets into their head kind of but anyway so if this if these are real clients this is this is great and i wonder why in my university we're not watching the show maybe other professors are i teach couples therapy so maybe i need to get a license to show this at my university anyway let's continue watching the things she was doing is the things that she could only imagine i would want if she never was paying attention for example for example it was going to be a costume calendar and then it was a dominatrix and then it was like she had like you know i was probably like a threesome it was like stuff sexual events yes you knew but you knew about it it wasn't a surprise no it wasn't a complete surprise yeah so the therapist is trying to clarify and that makes sense me watching we're kind of dropped right in the middle of a session i think and i don't know what number session this is but they're talking about something quite specific and me as a as a viewer i'm like what what are they talking about it seems all over the place um is that because the husband says things in very confusing ways or is it because i'm just not privy to the previous conversations the first thought i have is the husband is either playing it up for laughs like he's wanting to exaggerate certain things in a funny way or he actually believes he's entitled to everything in the world i i don't know which or if it's in something else that's going on but that i don't know or maybe it's a little both let's continue watching you're doing what you want to do for me instead of what i want you to do for me and so to get even more into the weeds so for example the sexual fantasies played out would be anti-sexual fantasies and not yours well not exactly is that what we're saying that they they were sort of like her description of what mine were if you never listened to me i mean they're absolutely some fantasy of what you want but it's not really hitting the mark to begin with they all sound like fun i i wish that they would have some kind of statement as to what the couple is there for this is a big complaint i have about therapy depicted on television and movies is we will frequently not either be privy to the conversation or sometimes they don't even have that part of the conversation which is why is the client there clients come to therapy to ask the therapist for something they want the therapist to do something for them they have an outcome they're looking for usually couples will say we want to work on our communication usually what that means is they want to reduce their conflict and they want to improve their relationship they they don't want to fight so much anymore they're usually by the time they end up in the therapy office they've usually had some pretty significant fights maybe for decades sometimes their sexual life has suffered sometimes not sometimes they're talking about divorce sometimes they feel like they don't love the person anymore or they don't feel loved by the other person and so they want to they want to you know reduce conflict and improve their relationship that's usually the the broad things and i'm assuming that's what is this couple's goal but i don't know so so as we're hearing this that the therapist would be thinking okay so the husband i'm assuming they are a heterosexual couple married but uh the husband is saying for my birthday i wanted a bunch of things but my wife my partner gave me a bunch of things without actually asking me if i wanted those things and and the implication is he's he's upset about that so the first thing i'd be thinking of as a therapist is not necessarily getting into the specifics of that because it's a temptation in couples therapy in particular to start getting into the specifics like okay well what was the sexual fantasy that you wanted and it usually you don't usually have enough couples therapy there's not usually enough time it you know my sessions are 50 minutes 55 minutes some people will go an hour and a half for couples therapists not usual but the the hour flies by in couples therapy that you don't have enough time to get to everything you need to usually and so i i would say okay i don't need to know the details and i would summarize i would say so it sounds to me like you had a a wish for therapy for for your birthday and wife it looks like it sounds like you were trying to give him what he wanted is that what i'm hearing from you yeah it sounds like there was a mismatch of communication there what happened there was it that he didn't communicate it effectively or at all was it that she didn't ask was it that there's some kind of passive you know what was the the cause and the foundation of the mismatch in terms of i have needs and someone is saying i'm trying to meet your needs and they and they missed each other that thera couples therapy almost always involves something along those lines so that would be my first critique of this therapist is like i don't know if i'd get into the specifics of it because it's not really important but you know sometimes it is and sometimes you want to know the specifics because the the details will help you to know what to do but anyway let's continue watching like waiting damn this was it then like no thanks i'm just not interested you became angry i don't think angry i think i'm disappointed uh i don't know what i'm doing wrong i don't know what i could do differently you don't know what you're doing wrong yes like if you so imagine that i want her to do something differently right i could get her to do whatever i want that's not what i want what i want is for her to do whatever i want without me having to make it happen okay so this is an extremely common problem in relationships and it's maybe even universal there's this notion that we all want our partners to read our minds and give us what we want without us having to ask now why is that well because it's sort of the the platonic ideal of getting your needs met by your partner meaning that it's it's perfect it's idealized your partner just knows what you want and gives you what you need without you having to ask because it by you having to ask it kind of negates a little bit of the intention from the other person because then you think well if i have to ask for it then they're only doing it because i asked for it they're not they're not just giving me love and attention and they're not just giving me what i need because it comes from their heart i don't know if they're maybe they're only giving me what what i asked for because i asked for it and they feel pressured into into giving so so it diminishes the the gift to some extent the other problem is that if i have to ask for what i want then i might not get what i want and that's a double hurt because one i'm not getting what i want and two i asked for it and i'm being rejected so it's it's much more preferable for us not have to ask because then you know if we don't get our needs met then at least we didn't put ourselves out there by asking and then getting rejected and all this has to do with our childhoods when we're little zero to age four we are asking our parents and people around us for things all the time i'm hungry i'm tired i want you to pick me up i want you to pay attention to me i want you to play with me i don't want to go down for a nap i want you to pick me up from my nap i want you to change my diaper out you know you're you constantly am asking and signaling to your caregivers i want this i need this i want you to look at me i want you to love me i want you to care about me i want you to hold me i want you you know there's just so many things that kids on a second by second basis are asking from their parents and when parents don't attune enough to their children and don't react well enough to their kids growing up for whatever reason then we graduate into later childhood and adulthood with a insecurity about asking for our getting our needs met so it's a sign of insecure attachment that he has he also noticed that she said so it sounds like you're angry and he says i'm not angry i'm just disappointed this is a very common thing that you that you hear people say in life and in therapy which now i don't know maybe he wasn't angry but i it wouldn't be strange if he was angry right at least a little bit and a lot of people particularly men will try to deny that they have emotions because they associate emotions with with weakness and early in life they might have learned that if i have an emotion i actually will get rejected so it's just better off if i just don't ever have emotions so uh there's that and there's a bit of an arrogance to him that i'm picking up on not because he's a jerk face but because he probably developed that persona as a way of protecting himself i don't know if we're going to learn anything about his family of origin but but that's something that i'll say i will say that i still don't know if these aren't actors i'm guessing that they're real people in cup in therapy but i i actually have no idea they if they are actors they're pretty good actors i'm guessing some of you watching probably know the answer that and maybe after i do this reaction i'll look it up but anyway so so yeah very frequent complaint you'll hear is i don't want to have to ask to get my needs met and i will instantly dispel that desire from people being in a good marriage means you one know what you want most of the time know what you need most the time and you ask for it you know what you want and you ask for it and then the person that hears it does their best to respond well to that bid now there are various different ways you can bid for attention or bid for love or bid for something you can ask outright this is what i want for my birthday or you could say so i'm really looking forward to my birthday and you know i'm i i know last time you had a hard time reading my mind so let me know if you need any ideas you know there's various different ways that you can ask for attention uh for your birthday more commonly we will bid for love like one way of bidding for love is to say hey i need you to love me right now demonstrate that you love me right now please or hey uh let's cuddle or hey let's let's have date night or hey um i was reading this book and there's this interesting thing that happened those are all bids for friendship bids for attention bids for connection and so there are usually we will ask in sort of indirect ways for love and attention but anyway let's continue watching to just you know i want to get glass water before i ask and it's there waiting and that can i ask you something of course did you ever have anybody take care of you like that no that sounds really maternal that sounds like you know a mother infant bond yes we have our moments with love right so uh that's what it sounds like to me as well and that's the fantasy of the child and sometimes the experience of a child when you're one year old two years old your parents are so attuned to your needs that they sometimes can predict what you need before you know you need it but usually kids will indicate they'll cry or something at least at the very least the parent is ready usually right away with trying to meet your needs in in good circumstances and so the wife is like uh you know it sounds like you want me to be your mom and i don't know if that's the kind of relationship i want now if the husband is saying i want this to be mutual because i'm i frequently will try to predict your needs so there's a lot of nuances here on one level it's possible that the husband is at is wanting selfishly for a one directional relationship probably if that is what he's asking for that's because he didn't get enough love and attention growing up the other possibility is that some every couple has its own uh vibe when it comes to this thing every couple has its own dial from zero to one with some couples who are on zero and they function with never really thinking about the other person's needs until it becomes clear what the other person needs and there's nothing wrong with that this this sort of couple you have to verbalize or communicate your needs to the other person now if you crank it all the way up to 10 these other couples on the other end of the spectrum they will spend a lot of time paying attention to their partner trying to figure out what their partner needs and they'll sort of catalog catalog and observe their partner and know their patterns and and they will spend some time not obsessively sometimes obsessively but in you know healthy terms they just generally get a sense of oh i bet you he's thirsty let me get him a glass of water maybe even ask hey do you want a glass of water or oh i bet you she's feeling kind of distressed from work maybe i should give her some space she doesn't have to ask me for space i just know from the past that that's kind of what she needs after work and so i'm going to give her some space so there's different styles of relationships and so maybe that's what he's asking for maybe he's saying look i pay attention a lot to your needs and i try to predict your needs before you express them and i try to meet your needs before you know you need them and i would just like you to do the same i'm not hearing him say that maybe we'll find out some more lovers where that can happen but i don't i don't know that's just what occurred to me when you were saying it that's a pretty profound thing to say really not a fairly obvious distracting insignificant i'll go with profound what is profound about that how is that profound okay interesting so what we have here i'm just totally taking a guess is that the couple is having a fight and at least what we're observing here is the husband is saying a lot of things that are coming across as arrogant self-centered and asking his wife to be a mother to him and he's not being very cooperative when the therapist throws things out he he you notice he kind of pushes back you know she's like sounds like you're angry he's like oh i wasn't angry i was disappointed and there's a there's a way that he comes across i'm guessing to the therapist this is total speculation that is causing the therapist to not really like him very much this is what we call counter transference and in couples therapy counter transference is extremely heightened me and all the supervisees and trainees i've ever worked with this is true about when i'm working with an individual if i was just working if she was just working with him individually in therapy let's say the counter transference would be at a two out of ten in couples therapy particularly by minute 45 your counter transference is going to be at an 8 out of 10 meaning you're going to start losing your your objectivity you're going to start feeling some anger towards one or both of these people frustration feeling inadequate as a as a therapist and so i would suspect that that was kind of mounting we'll rewind and watch that again but i'm guessing that the therapist was mounting their her trans her counter transference towards him because of the way he comes across and it's an inducement of rejection essentially the therapist starts feeling upset and then the therapist starts wanting to reject him and then the wife says something like well it sounds like you want me to be your mom and the therapist then says to her wow that sounds very profound now on the if you just take it verbatim the therapist is just supporting the wife in terms of what she's saying but then we notice what happened there was the husband then says no it wasn't it wasn't profound it was mildly interesting but it wasn't profound and the wife is saying i'll take profound the couple is perceiving it and i think it might be inside the therapist communicated to the couple that the therapist is now taking the wife's side now taking sides in couples therapy is a very complicated thing in general you're trying not to take sides but occasionally you might if you're trying to actually help something happen there are circumstances where you actually do want to take sides because you're trying to help the couple to reduce their conflict and and come together more and sometimes taking sides will facilitate that um when in doubt you don't want to take sides but anyway so if i was to i'm hypothesizing about what's happening there the therapist was having mounting counter transforms towards him because he's actually transferring to her he's he's treating her like the way that uh he was treated growing up so okay so if i was to really back up here i would suspect if this is a real person uh this would be a hypothesis that i would build is that he was rejected growing up and neglected in some way and he had to adopt this arrogant self-centered very self-assured persona in order to survive and it's been his personality since he was very young but it's to cover up a lot of insecurity and a lot of worry about not getting his needs met now he's in therapy and he's able to express that and he's feeling a little vulnerable as he starts to express that a little bit but he's not expressing it in a super vulnerable way you notice and he is seeing the therapist as his mom or his dad or something and he is subtly rejecting her subtly pushing her away and she starts to feel that and it hurts her and she's not fully aware of how it's affecting her and so she starts to have feelings encounter to that counter to that transference transference is transferring your feelings and reactivity from your parents onto your therapist so that's what i'm guessing he did and then she has counter transference which is a reaction to his transference and that comes from her own issues in her background as well and her own training and her own ability to manage her counter transference and so she uses therapy words to you as a passive aggression against him the therapist says that's very profound very supportive of the wife's indictment of his behavior but this is pretty vulnerable to him you see because if he was neglected growing up then he very much is worried that no one is going to care now he's not doing himself any favors by saying things like i want you to predict all of my needs and give me everything that i need before i ask for it he's basically guaranteeing that he's going to get rejected in that way but that's how we repeat these behaviors we end up as in an attempt to solve the problem we use defenses developed early in life and it basically perpetuates the pain that we're going through this is you know people come to therapy because they have problems but anyway so so then uh so then the therapist then so it's a triangle right so there's a triangulation there's there's conflict between the couple she's being triangulated in she that the anxiety gets transferred between hus you know between husband and wife to husband and therapist and then the therapist is now aligning with the the wife and then the the the husband now feels thrown under the bus he doesn't deal with it in a vulnerable way like a vulnerable way to be like wow that kind of hurts it kind of feels like your kind of therapist it kind of feels like you're siding with my wife and i have to say like i don't know that kind of hurts my feelings that'd be a vulnerable way of saying it but because i'm guessing when he was young that didn't that never worked out for him to be vulnerable instead he just essentially attacks the therapist by arguing with the wife you notice he doesn't turn to the therapist say therapist no no no that wasn't profound he turns to his wife and says no no no that wasn't profound let's rewatch that again that sounds really maternal that sounds like you know a mother infant bond yes we have our moments with lovers where that can happen but i don't i don't know that's just what occurred to me when you were saying it that's a pretty profound thing to say really not a fairly obvious distracting insignificant i'll go with what is profound about that how is that profound the the drawing that parallel is it i mean that's like i can see if you open up one of these books it's on the first [ __ ] page wow okay this is getting good this is very accurate couples therapy by the way extremely accurate now i've worked with hundreds maybe thousands of couples and they're they run the gamut in terms of their presentation but the vibe of this is very accurate the examples that they will usually provide in graduate school are not accurate and i usually will say that in my classes i'll say well we're watching this clip because this is the clip that we have available to us but it's very tame compared to what actually happens right now you noticed that he got he got pretty mean there he's like and that's one of the phrases that you'll hear clients like this say so they'll they they'll want to push down the therapist they'll want to you know put her in her place you can even say maybe some sexism is in there it's hard to know but you know he says oh look at all these books you know probably chapter one that's you know they they talk about how that i don't even know what he's accusing the therapist of that in chapter one it's profound that she is maybe he's referring to like an oedipus complex thing or i don't know but anyway the the energy is clear that he is attacking the therapist and saying the therapist doesn't know what she's doing and that her that word she used profound was was very elementary was very novice therapist thing to do i want to rewatch this because this is a very common thing that i have seen in therapy with so many couples and if you're a couple's therapist you've seen this too let's let's and to be clear it's not our job as therapists to say like oh he needs to grow up or something like that what that indicates is like okay well that's what he's doing why does he do that and what wounds generate that impulse and how do those wounds that generate those impulses interact you know because both of these people both you know the husband and wife both have wounds that they have defenses around that cause behavior that shoots them in the foot he wants to be close he wants to reduce conflict but he's not helping but it's not because he wakes up in the morning and says i'm going to be a jerk face it's because of of elaborate defenses that were developed early in life now uh let's rewind a little bit and then we'll watch what the therapist does here i'm trying to think what i would do so right now we have a what i would call a relationship rupture and this is not what i call it's what the research calls it but what i would identify as a relationship rupture between the therapist and the husband i'm saying husband i don't even know how these people identify gender-wise but i hope you forgive me on that so she should attend at least at some point in the near future to that relationship rupture because the husband right now is uh that's probably you know that statement of like oh it's you know it's that's no profound that's a stupid thing it's probably in chapter one of a book on her shelf uh he that's probably the tip of the iceberg underneath that might be a lot of rage towards the therapist and almost like giving up like ah she doesn't know what she's doing and we'll just get through this session and i'll never see her again and underneath that is a tremendous wound that that the therapist just stepped on so what i would do as a client or as a therapist in a situation i'm trying to think what i would do i mean there's a lot of different things that i could do but i might turn to the husband okay this is what i do i don't know what number session this is either it looks like maybe it's the first session it's just a guess but as a therapist i might turn to the husband and say okay i get it you're saying that the word the word i use profound you don't agree with and and i respect that i'm still getting to know you as a couple and you know i'm giving him my best shot uh and i apologize for using that word i should i i'm hearing i shouldn't have used that word and i get that and then he might have a response to that and i i would i would try to repair the relationship because moving forward in the session without repairing that rupture isn't isn't doesn't bode well but then as i'm validating the husband the wife is starting to get upset because she's like well i don't know i kind of liked the word profound and are you saying that my point earlier was stupid the way he thinks my point was stupid and then i would turn back to the wife very quickly and i'd say so what i heard you say was that you felt as though he was asking you to be his mother now we don't know what he was exactly asking maybe that's not what he was asking but that's how it felt to you right so i would return to her and validate her while trying to manage his reactivity to us so you notice the way i did that is that i'm trying to validate her but if i validate her he could actually feel invalidated so how do i account for that well i valid i try to put it in words that i think he's gonna that both of them will be able to accept so i might say you know so it sounds like it felt like to you that you he's asking you to be maternal in a in a one-way relationship it sounds like that's how you what you heard and then i very quickly say that might not be what he meant to say or what he meant to have you here but that's how it that's how it it felt to you as he was talking about that so i'm i'm giving him an out by saying maybe he didn't mean it that way so because if i completely validate her now i've ruptured the relationship again with him and now i've got to repair that to get back on the rails now i will say that the couples that i work with i tend to work with for years and so relationship ruptures are much more easily detected and they're not as severe because we have so much relationship behind us and so much trust that any little thing that i might do that will disappoint the clients is not as problematic to the relationship because we have such a track record of things going well but anyway let's rewind it a little bit so what we're going to see is is she's going to use that profound word he's he's going to get upset he comes across as kind of jokey she she laughs you notice that the wife laughs right away uh because i'm guessing she learns that she has to handle him by by laughing because that helps to calm the situation but if you just look at the content of what's happening it's he's being aggressive he's saying no therapist you're not right it wasn't profound my wife's idea was simplistic and silly and i'm sure one of these books on on the wall uh would it's a simple idea now he's not he doesn't have that mirth in his language but it definitely is is coming across that way and then we'll see how the therapist reacts to that that's a pretty profound thing to say really not a fairly obvious distracting insignificant what is profound about that how is that profound the the drawing that parallel is it i mean that's like i can show you if you open up one of these books it's on the first [ __ ] page i'm just wondering if you're aware of how quickly you move to devaluation do you know that i i think that i don't care how quickly i moved so this is valid for the therapist to say and it's a good word and if we're taking a track of feminism and sexism awareness this is a good track to take depending on where it ends up to say that i as a woman am interacting with you as a man and i'm the professional here and i offered up an idea that wasn't uh contrary to what you were saying i was just supporting your wife and you're tearing me down as a female professional as a woman professional now she's not saying that that word but it's a essentially what we have here is there's a number of different levels to this so to put that to conclude a feminist approach will sometimes involve this kind of conversation essentially it's like look you just devalued me and you're using a power play to devalue me and i'm guessing you do that to your wife and that has to stop that's just not gonna help anyone there's no reason why you have to devalue people so so let's let's change that behavior there's some validity to that but we also have to think of outcomes and this is this is the thing that i talk with my training trainees about all the time because they'll come to me and they'll say so i have this husband and boy is he a piece of work he's always devaluing me he devalues his wife all the time and so i just want to let him have it i just want to i just want to tell him like look you can't devalue people anymore and there's a big difference between what is right or what is okay to say or appropriate to say and what is helpful sometimes those things overlap but they don't always overlap so it's the therapist's job to be helpful it's not the therapist's job to put him in his place if it's helpful to put him in his place then put him in his place if it's helpful to call out a sexist devaluing persona or activity then do that but if it's not going to help in the end then why would you do it maybe it's something you have to wait to do down the line so now what is how do we define what is helpful well the couple is trying to establish an ongoing relationship with the with the therapist and so if you get into a fight with him and he hates you and he never comes back to therapy then that isn't helpful right now there's a line there right in terms of sometimes if someone is being so sexist or so racist or something you just have to say look i don't care if it's helpful or not i'm just gonna say no to that that is something i don't care if i ruin this relationship i'm not going to allow him to devalue me as a as a woman therapist and there's some there's some professional validity to that as well but you have to be conscious of that in a moment you can't just convolute your treatment with your um your you know your you can't convolute your theory and your treatment modality and your efforts to help a client with just drawing a line with some people you know to exaggerate it if he if he stood up and was going to punch her in the face and she pulled out mace and sprayed him in the face you wouldn't necessarily say well is it is it helpful to mace him is that really what's going to help him stay in therapy and you'd say like no you deserve to as a professional to protect yourself and it applies to sexism as well i don't know if what if where that's coming from is sexist maybe he treats everyone this way it's hard to know at the very least it's unfair to just devalue the therapists and the therapists calling that out so let's let's watch what happens here and if this actually helps it there's two things that need to happen one is the relationship between the therapist and the client has to be preserved and two does it actually help the couple to reduce their conflict and to improve their intimacy the big risk here like i said is to go here which is valid statement but if but if you go there he might end up blowing out of therapy and never coming back and where are you then and and the wife isn't gonna want that the wife wants him to engage in therapy and so you're not doing anyone any favors by jumping the gun now what i will say to trainees is catalog that away write it in your psychotherapy notes and say at some point i need to address the fact that he devalues me and maybe women in general i don't know but today i'm going to forego that for to preserve the relationship and i will definitely get to that at some point because we have many sessions ahead of us that's what i always tell therapists is whatever mistake you make or whatever thing you didn't catch in the moment you have dozens of of sessions ahead of you usually so don't worry about missing something or not jumping on something right away you don't only you never or you very rarely only have one chance to work on something so let's rewind this again and then watch what happens i'm just wondering if you're aware of how quickly you move to devaluation do you know that i i think that i don't care how quickly i move whether you care about it or not i just might am i aware that sometimes i move quickly to devaluation yes but i'm also noticing um how difficult it is to actually meet you i notice even in the way i'm talking to you that it's very hard to get it right like when i try to say back to you what's going on what i just heard it's never right so this is very brave of this therapist it seems to be going over well which is great she's delivering it well and and i'll commend both of them the therapist is being brave she's taking a leap and she is opening herself up to criticism he could he could easily stand up and say you're a terrible therapist and i'm going to give you a bad yelp review or something that's the worry the therapist i've seen therapists have their careers ruined by a bad google review honestly so it it is a concern to therapists because when you're looking for a therapist a lot of times you'll google your therapist and there and clients don't usually leave google reviews so if you're googling five therapists that you're shopping around and one of the therapists only has one review and it's this screed of how terrible you are as a as a therapist no one's going to call you and then your business basically just goes belly up i actually had a supervisee where that happened so it's a real worry or just worry that word's going to get out that you're a terrible therapist and like i said a lot of therapists are insecure it's a problem and so uh i very much commend a therapist for really going for it in this moment and she's she's saying all the right things and i commend him for going with it he he's he's allowing it to happen and this is you know getting to the heart of the matter that you probably would really want to get to in in the early stages of therapy because his arrogant uh pushing back on the therapist that transference of of rejection of the therapist isn't going to help therapy now i'll say from my style as a therapist i tend not to do this i tend to take more time and allow people like him to push back on me i'm more i'm more of a judo person rather than a karate person judo meaning that i work with resistance like someone someone is saying well yeah you just read in that book that that you know you just said something really simplistic and i'll just be like oh okay yeah you know sometimes i say simple simplistic things i don't always know what's going on uh how would how would you define what just happened so i i don't push back on the resistance i just i just go with it it's like yeah you're right you know okay well how would you interpret what just happened and then i put him in the driver's seat and sometimes that'll really work at the very least it doesn't risk ruining the relationship between me and a client so so this is a very interesting moment and i cannot believe that it's it's taken me this long to watch this show a lot of you have been asking me to watch this show what are we're like uh we're like six minutes in and i've been talking for i don't know how long they're the now the question is is this interesting to you because this is getting into some weeds about uh what it is like to do couples therapy i'm guessing to you couples therapists you might be at least mildly interested in this hopefully but a lot of you watching aren't therapists so please let me know in the comments below if if this interests you at all because maybe it's too technical the other thing i'll say is i'm doing a lot of one-off episodes where i'm just watching different shows that y'all have asked me to react to and i'm gonna wait and see which ones get more traction and so if if this gets traction then i'll do more but maybe i'll just do more of this just because i uh i enjoy it so much and and maybe i can just use this as like lectures for my couple's therapy class that i teach but anyway let's continue watching and when you correct me i can see why you're correcting me i understand the nuance and where i miss the point that's very frustrating for me what i want to hear is why is the moment where someone is not just right not just right why is that so devastating that's devastating you did it just right right so this is a very common dynamic that happens in therapy and it is something that concerns therapists this therapist is dealing with it pretty well she's calling it out she's describing it we'll see how this works out the husband is seemingly going along with it which is great he's softening a little bit you hear him agree it's like it is frustrating when i have cat hair on my face it is frustrating when i feel like you don't really hear what i'm saying and and and so the this conversation i have had so many times this is really a brilliant show because i don't know if i've ever seen a show that really depicted these must be real couples because you can't you can't improv you can't have actors improv this but maybe they are let me look it up actually i gotta find out okay so according to vulture the couples are not considered patients they're called participants because they wanted to work around the ethics of confidentiality and other kinds of issues and the participants are actually paid to be on the show but they are real couples and they are in you know real conflicts so so that's interesting the dynamic of when you're talking to someone particularly in couples therapy maybe exclusively in couples therapy no definitely individual therapy too but couples therapy nine ninety nine times out of a hundred uh this will happen in couples therapy where i and my trainees or colleagues will be saying something to a client they'll you know as a therapist as therapists we wanna reflect we want to summarize we want to mirror we want to validate and we'll often listen to someone as they're saying and we'll try to summarize or we'll try to reframe what they're saying a little bit and there are certain clients that will almost universally reject you what you as a therapist have said they'll be like ah no that's not really quite right or literally like that what you just said is ridiculous and you know it's it's in the chapter one of some simplistic book on yourself and so why would someone do that well it's usually because of a variety of reasons usually mistreatment growing up that results in the person having to put up walls where in order to survive they basically had to just prejudge everything that was happening outside of their self sometimes we call this narcissism sometimes we call this avoidant attachment there's various other terms for it but and sometimes it's one and not the other sometimes it's all the above but the point is is that when you're young and you're being neglected or mistreated in some way you learn like look i need to depend on myself and other people can't be trusted and so everything gets filtered through that assumption and so everything that everyone says including therapists is like you're very you're just extremely skeptical like ah no that's not really quite right the other uh problem is that if someone sees me then that means my walls aren't there if someone if someone validates if a therapist actually reflects accurately what's going on for me and sees me for who i am then that means my walls are no longer up which that means danger that's a dangerous situation when i was younger and maybe throughout my life when my walls weren't up i would get hurt and so a really effective way to keep up my walls to say nah you don't really get me you're not over here you're not in the walls you're you're just you don't get it you don't understand and you know what you're kind of stupid so just stay away and some clients will definitely do that now how do you deal with that well this is one approach whereas you basically just steamroll the situation and try to try to break the client of the behavior and the client seems to be responding well to that to that style my style is again to work with resistance and to put the client into the into the role of the expert and i'll just be like okay i got it wrong uh i get things wrong all the time you tell me how i got it wrong and then okay well i'll tell you how how you got it wrong you got you got that wrong you got that wrong and then i would reflect upside okay so what i'm hearing is i got that wrong and then they might proceed to be like no no you're not quite getting it right and i'd be like okay tell me more so what does this do well what this does is it means i don't have to worry about a rupture in the relationship the other thing it does is i'm providing a corrective experience for him by saying i am so willing to listen that even when you put me down and you say that and you give me this message or even explicit messages that i'm stupid and i don't know what i'm doing as a therapist i'm still here and i still care and i can take it and it's okay and you're safe and you can pretty much do whatever you want as a client and i'm i'm okay after the session i might scream into a pillow but right now i'm okay so there's various other different approaches all of which have their pros and cons and every therapist has their own style i'm guessing that this therapist has this style and i think she's she's pulling it off this is this is a great show and when you correct me i can see why you're correcting me i understand the nuance and where i miss the point that's very frustrating for me what i want to hear is why is the moment where someone is not just right not just right why is that so devastating that's devastating i think you did it just there right devastating it's not quite the right word and you're going to correct you're devastating and you can't see that devastating that's what you might have like you know she's it is simply not devastating that is not a proper use of that word in any other word right so that would be something that if i was a little birdie in her ear i would say don't use devastating because one it didn't look like it was devastating to him and two he's gonna key in on that word so use a softer word like okay when i am not quite on the mark the way it comes across to me is you reject everything about it instead of saying well you're you got some of it right but you didn't really get you know that might be the way i would phrase it because that there's less debate there to use the word devastating now you're now you're back into the realm where he has every right to say like well it isn't devastating to me because it just frankly isn't devastating and now you're back at square one the other thing i would do differently even with her style is when he said it is very frustrating that's the first time we've heard in this session where he's actually been a little bit vulnerable when people are vulnerable particularly people that have all these walls you want to pounce on that and really nurture that so if he was to say yeah it is very frustrating when you miss the mark i would pause and i would say it's very frustrating to you i can i totally understand that you want your therapist to understand you so you notice i'm validating but i'm also kind of suggesting i get you i get that you want to be heard and i really want to hear you so you could do that very quickly and then you could proceed so i i don't know how this is going i don't know how the therapist is going to get this back onto the rails um let's see what happens i mean unless you're being hyperbolic and i don't know what the point of that would be if the point wasn't being i'm actually assuming that on some so i think that was a mistake he's he's saying unless you're being hyperbolic because and then she's like i wasn't being hyperbolic so now you're in a in a bickering match with your client she could have easily said okay yeah i guess i was being hyperbolic devastating yeah that was that was an exaggeration i was i guess i was using it for effect she could have easily said something like that to get into a bickering match with your client i don't know how helpful that's going to be now maybe this has it all depends on the outcome so if this works out then it was all a good choice that she made every step of the way or maybe she made most you know good enough choices through the meandering path that it was a good choice as a therapist myself if you filmed me doing therapy there would be multiple moments where you would say like well that or even myself i would cringe i wonder how this therapist feels about watch you know if she has to watch the show how if she cringes at all usually therapists cringe at their own work so anyway let's continue watching in some way deeply inconvenient no i don't think it's inconvenient i think there's a much more emotional um under lying structure okay so that's good so that's a good direction to go in that i would go you that's that was what i was saying earlier was that he said frustrating and i would really try to highlight that emotion and so she's trying to get to that which is great and hopefully he can that will be a bonding moment that he can feel heard and understood and he can soften it but she has to you know she she's in a mode right now where she's trying to make her case so a very useful thing to do when you're trying to figure out what to do in therapy or how to evaluate the usefulness of a particular moment therapy is like forget that this is therapy and just think about if if these three were just having lunch what is the the meta communication what's the what would you say is the style of communication right now the therapist is trying to convince a skeptical or she is trying to convince him who he's skeptical and she's trying to convince him she's trying to make her case and he is by you know his face he's like oh honey you don't know what you're talking about so as a therapist you want to pay attention to that and say like okay how did i get here how did i get to a position where i'm trying to make a case for him and i'm scrambling and he is judging everything i'm saying and shooting me down and being very very calm and condescending but he's kind of right because i am trying to interpret what is in his mind and he is the only person who really knows what's going on in his heart and mind so i'm trying to tell him what his heart and mind is doing that is not a good activity in therapy you know i i must have got off the rails i must have hurt him i must have not validated him enough i must have perturbed him enough or too soon or something and so that's what i'd be thinking i don't know what she's thinking in this moment maybe she is like nope this is the direction i want to go in i'm going to persevere and you know i'm not going to give up and in the end i'm going to get somewhere now you notice that the wife is starting to look potentially a little bored or maybe a little defeated because now i'm guessing the wife is thinking because they often do in situations like this great the therapy session is all about my husband and how stubborn he is and we're no longer talking about my needs and stuff and and so sometimes in these early phases of therapy you have to kind of go back and forth anyway this is just thoughts i have in my mind now i'm not criticizing her i'm just commenting on what i would be doing in that situation whenever i train therapists i i'm always i try to be clear about this i'm not usually very i'm not always good about this but i usually say well this is what i would do but i'm not saying it's the only way to do it i'm just saying as an experienced therapist and your supervisor i want to i don't know model for you like a different option and a lot of supervisees will appreciate that but in no way am i saying my way is the best way or the only way there's a lot of ways to get to where you want to go and we'll just have to see how this works out to this okay how can we quickly determine whether that that's true or not you can ask yourself if you want to take something of what i'm saying to see if it's useful to you or if you want to spar with me if you don't want to spar with me we don't have to discuss the accuracy we just have to see if it's useful what i'm saying whether it's accurate or not i don't know how to do that i don't know that i've ever been devastated in any prior event when that occurred including my birthday so he's still focusing on the word devastation now it's starting to look like his emotional wounds are so profound if you will that his defenses are so rigid that it it's going to be a hard nut to crack and so when i experience clients like this i say okay i'm not going to get anywhere in the first session regarding changing this aspect of his personality these defenses have been in place for 45 years i'm not gonna be able to change that overnight so i have to work with it and i have to set that as an agenda moving forward i will work with people like him for years before i get like you know 25 percent change in in those defenses takes a long time so that's what i would do i would just sort of okay well let's get away from the devastation word so again this is just my style he's still keying on on the devastation word and i as a therapist would say okay so what i i'm hearing from you is that when i use the word devastation that just wasn't true for you and i cannot define how you feel about things you're the only one who can tell me how you feel and i use the word devastation and you're telling me that that was wrong that word doesn't make any sense and i respect that because you are the only person who can tell me how you feel and thank you for telling me how you feel that it was not devastation um so i can scratch that off the list uh thank you for that so what i'm doing there is i am trying to put to bed the devastation word which it sounds like they're you know really gonna hammer on and two i'm giving the message that i really care or i'm trying to and three i have judoed him and now he's telling me how he feels so you notice that even though he hasn't really told me how he feels i have now said well by shooting me down you have told me that you did not feel devastation i you know this is a glass half full thing is this making sense to people i hope it is anyway let's continue watching i didn't feel devastated you said disappointed i was just okay so now go with that there a breakthrough so i would suspect that his distress level in that session was actually pretty high he looked very calm and cool and and you know but i'm i'm guessing that he was he was very distressed and when people are distressed they don't usually have functional things to do in therapy but anyway so it looks like we're going to watch another couple coming up so maybe i should just wrap it up there all right so we'll see how this episode is received on youtube if it's received well enough then maybe i'll do more of them um if no one likes this and it's and i'm talking to you technically and it's just a sort of an unwanted sort of service on youtube then then i won't do it but we'll find out man did i have a lot of things to say about that everyone out there please take care of yourself because you deserve it you really really do

Channel: Psychology In Seattle

Views: 50,015

Rating: 4.9796953 out of 5

Keywords: Couples Therapy, Showtime, therapist reacts, reaction video, commentary, analysis, couples counselor, psychology

Id: KUItaloRvoQ

Length: 61min 29sec (3689 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 18 2020