Online Courses

Many couples appear in our offices to debate the causes of their unhappiness, appealing to us as would-be judges, mediators, or referees. We listen as they subtly or egregiously assign blame, each to the other, for the relationship’s struggles and its members’ unhappiness. We’d like to help them leave blame behind, but often we merely spread it around: They come in blaming each other, and they leave blaming the families who raised them, the neurobiology they were born with, their own alleged lack of relational skills, or the therapists who were unhelpful to them. And then, when it’s out turn to be unhelpful, we blame them in turn.

We are delighted to welcome Larry Zucker, LCSW, as course faculty. Larry has been practicing therapy and training therapists for over 30 years. His background in social work and community organizing led him to see people in context, and to focus on strength and resiliency. He is committed to escaping blaming frames of reference in a field that encourage therapists to see people and relationships as problematic. He prefers seeing people as embedded in normal problems of living, full of untapped skill and knowledge for creating the lives and relationships they want, despite difficulties encountered, and to seeing therapy as a relationship that helps bring forth that knowledge. To learn more about Larry, click here.

We begin by introducing Larry,  the course and course registrants. We explore how do our beliefs shape our job description: the irresistible invitations into the roles for therapists that are embedded in traditional models.  We then map how our prior training can invite us into educative, manipulative, or paternalistic positions, when as narrative therapists we’d prefer collaborative ones. We identify the beliefs and assumptions of narrative therapy that can help us maintain our preferred positions. Guided by: Larry Zucker, with additional focus on the work of  Michael White and David Epston.

We explore how couples themselves often invite us into judging, refereeing, evaluative or other “truth determining” positions when we would prefer to be hosting conversations that they find useful and generative. We develop practices that help us all move towards such conversation. How do we negotiate permission to interrupt? What can we do while waiting for therapy to begin? How might we talk about the relationship, and have conversations about conversation? Guided by Larry Zucker with additional focus on the work of David Marsten, David Epston, Laurie Markham and Sallyann Roth.

Couples come to us needing to make new sense of profoundly complicated or painful experiences. Blame is a thin account of causal responsibility, assigned by each person as an act of individual power. (As therapist we do this as much as more as our clients.) Account-ability, hyphen intended, is our emerging ability to develop a rich, shared account of complex, inter-subjective experience. We often lack easily accessible knowledge of the difference between the two, and we hunker down in defensive positions. We will focus on how to listen for and draw out the desire for a richer shared accounting that is seems absent, but is implicit in the rejection of blame. Guided by Larry Zucker

Once our conversations have moved past “the other as the problem,” we begin to discover just how knowledgeable our clients are about their relationship problems by focusing on their understanding—rather than ours—of how their problems emerge and operate, of what methods their problems use, and of what resources their problems depend upon to sustain themselves. Guided by Larry Zucker.

We learn to not be distracted by behavior, as it is a poor indicator of what people desire. Instead, we practice developing conversations that revolve around intention. We discover how, when asked the right questions, people are amazingly clear about their hopes and dreams for the relationship, about what they would want it to provide them at this point in their lives, about what it needs from them to do so, about how their relational needs have changed over the course of this or prior relationships, or even about how what is relationally possible has changed across generations and/or cultural contexts. Guided by Larry Zucker.

Previously, we focused on the couples’ expertise about how problems sustain themselves. Now we draw on their knowledge of preferred relationships found in the world around them, and on how to draw support from the people who surround them, preceded them, might follow them, and have inspired them. And we help them come to see themselves as a source of support for others with similar hopes and dreams. Guided by Larry Zucker.